After the Ikoyi Fourscore 21 storey building collapse in Nov 2021, I made a mental note that if I am to buy a house in Naija, the house has to be a minimum of 40 years old i.e most likely build by reputable qualified structural engineers of old an not by these fly by night unqualified quack builders cum criminally minded developers.

My late Dad was a civil engineer and in any house he builds, to knock nail inside any of the walls is hard to do because of the strength of the walls.

ednut1:
High cost of cement and materials. Making people cut corners

maybe , but what is really going on is some nonsense called direct labour that has become very popular

rather than get a contractor, you go and engage the artisans directly.

this can work on small builds, but it as with everything in Nigeria, it has been abused to the point of insanity.


on average most artisans think drawings and construction documents are suggestions - so where you as an engineer have calculated and added margin for , they will remove and remove. at some point, LASG will have to come up with a law against direct labout because it has become a scourge.

HenryWilliams:


LASBCA is under Physical Planning Ministry not Lands Bureau.
Corruption is everywhere so stop being specific.
Most building collapse is as a result of shoddy builders work. The professional architect, structural engineer will design a building to specs but the quack builder contracted will use substandard materials to build.
You'll see concrete more sand than cement.
Iron rods for reinforcement as thin as your pinkie finger for casting.
LASBCA is going all they can but we can't be everywhere at once.
Most times even when they check a building and serve notices . Builders flagrantly ignore it and keep working. With few officers covering vast areas with high density building population.. a few bad buildings will slip thru the cracks.
We should all help in fighting this.
Owners. Please just don't pay money to developers and go to sleep .. monitor the work or better still employ qualified structural Engineers to supervise your site.

Speaking like a staff. So can you tell us a rough estimate of the total cost in getting approval for bungalow in a typical residential area and the earliest duration to get the approval?
Will the cost not be neck breaking and the time so long that might open a leeway for corrupt tendency?
Sometimes, bottlenecks might appear like it's to affirm the authenticity of a product, but in reality, it affects the product as people find a way out of the process by creating a new process which in this case is corruption.