A catastrophic event that takes the life of innocent people, old and young. Parents kissed their little children off to school never to see them alive again. People were running helter-skelter. Very few knew what to do. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. This is a stuff for a tragic Nollywood movie. This is a setting of nightmare, but this is not fiction. But wait, what does it have to do with construction or engineering?

A three storey building on 13 Massey Street, Itafaji, Lagos Island on the 13th of March 2019. Tragically, a private primary school is situated at the upper floor of the building. 20 people including innocent young lives were lost.






On the 25th of March, that is less than two weeks after, another building collapsed a few kilometers away in Kakawa Street, on the same Lagos Island.

The storey of building collapse is not peculiar to Lagos Island. There had been equally tragic collapse in Lekki, Abuja, Ibadan and Port Harcourt and many other cities and towns in Nigeria.



So why are buildings collapsing all over the country in the absence of natural disasters like earthquake, landslide and the likes? Nigeria Construction Journal attempts to look at the possible reasons for these tragic failures of engineering.

Arguably, this is not a failure of engineering, but a failure of a people who have collectively failed to harness the beautiful powers of engineering. Hilary I. Okagbue et al in their research titled “Systematic review of buildings failure and collapse in Nigeria” published in International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET) Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2018 stated that The causes of building collapse in Nigeria can be grouped into seven broad areas.

The use of poor building materials.

Geophysical and geotechnical.

Structural defects.

Lack of effective management of construction processes.

Construction defects

Corruption.

Legal and regulatory failure.

F.C.Omenihu, L.O. Onundi and M.A. Alkali Department of Civil and Water Resources Engineering University of Maiduguri went further to quantify the specific causes of building collapse in their 2016 work titled ” An Analysis of Building Collapse in Nigeria (1971-2016): Challenges for Stakeholders “. They stated that some of the leading causes of building collapses in Nigeria include

Structural failures 24.9%, substandard materials 13.2%, poor workmanship 12.2%, faulty design 8.8%, use of Quacks 7.3% and inappropriate foundation 6.8%.

A random visit to construction sites can give one a lot of examples to buttress the outcome of the above mentioned research.

Examples include:

- Project supervision by unqualified personnel

- Use of wrong concrete mix. Most of the time to cut corners by using less proportions of cement and substandard aggregates.

- Use of poor quality water. Muddy or salty water adversely affect the strength of concrete

- Manual mixing of concrete resulting in inconsistent strength

- Many site “engineers” cannot read the structural drawings resulting in misplacement of steel reinforcement. I have heard reports of where top reinforcements are put at the bottom and vice-versa for raft foundations!

- Use of reinforcement steel that are of considerably lower strength than the design steel strength.

It is very clear that concerted effort is needed by all stakeholders in order to eliminate these unnecessary destruction of life and properties.

Source : http://www.nigeriaconstructionjournal.com/2019/04/01/rampant-building-collapse-in-nigeria-why/