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In the conclusion of this two-part report by OLADIMEJI RAMON, building industry experts elaborate on factors militating against effective enforcement of industry regulations and how to solve the problems
The six-man panel set up by the Lagos State Government to probe the cause of the collapse of a 21-storey high-rise on Gerrard Road, Ikoyi on November 1, 2021, will submit its report any time from now. The panel, which was inaugurated on November 3, was given 30 days to carry out the task. The 30 days has elapsed.
While the report is being awaited, some facts have already been established. One is that the late developer of the high-rise, Femi Osibona, got approval for only 15 floors but raised the building to 21 floors. This was confirmed by the suspended General Manager of the Lagos State Building Control Agency, Gbolahan Oki, and the Nigerian Institution of Structural Engineers (NIStructE), in a preliminary report released on November 15.
Osibona, who sadly died in the building collapse, had also revealed that he had a track record of overshooting approval limit for his projects even in the United Kingdom, where his foray into real estate began.
But the question arises: Why did Osibona get away with the practice of ‘overshooting building approval’ in the UK but burnt his fingers in Nigeria?
The NIStructE’ report attempts to provide an answer.
A part of the report read, “Lack of proper quality control and quality assurance measures and processes during the construction was evident, becoming noticeable as seen in the poor quality of concrete materials and workmanship observed during the examination of the collapse debris.”
The finding by NIStructE is an indictment on the Lagos State’s regulatory agencies for the building industry, particularly LABSCA and the Lagos State Materials Testing Laboratory.
According to the information on its website, LABSCA’s roles include “inspection and certification of various stages of building construction.”
The agency’s vision, as stated on its website, is “to ensure that buildings in Lagos State are designed, constructed and maintained to high standards of safety so as to avoid loss of lives and properties. Through its building regulatory system, we aim to achieve zero per cent building collapse.”
As for the LSMTL, its mission is “to establish a system that will prevent distress on buildings and civil engineering infrastructure through quality control assurance mechanism.”
LSMTL’s brief history written on its website indicated that it was established in 2006 “to curb the incidence of incessant collapse of buildings and civil engineering infrastructures. The main objective of the law is to test the materials used for quality assurance.”
In an October 10, 2021 interview with Sunday PUNCH, the agency’s current General Manager, Mr Olufunsho Elulade, also explained that “the mandate is that we (LSMTL) should be involved from the inception of any project to the completion, meaning that we have to test the soil to determine the kind of foundation needed… At every phase of any building or civil engineering construction, we must test.”
Elulade said LSMTL had field officers that “go about looking for where construction is ongoing and they serve a test notice on the contractor or owner, telling them what they need to do.”
With LABSCA and LSMTL in place, it was curious that Osibona was able carry on with the 21-storey high-rise project for several months, despite using “poor quality concrete materials and workmanship” as later found by NIStructE.
On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, the Governor of Lagos State, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, admitted to the existence of “saboteurs” in the regulatory agencies.
Despite the shoddy job and sharp practices that went into the construction of the collapsed skyscraper, the governor noted that a month before the building crumbled, “certificate of fit for habitation and certificate of completion” had already been issued for the edifice, said to be 80 per cent ready before it crashed.
The governor, who spoke at the second Real Estate Market Place Conference and Exhibition held in the state, said he was awaiting the report of the probe panel and vowed that “saboteurs” in the regulatory agencies would be fished out and dealt with in a “ruthless” manner.
Sanwo-Olu said, “From a regulatory point of view, we had checked all of our boxes. We know that there may be people that want to cut corners, we know that for this size of this city, there might be officers that have taken actions that have reduced our names, we know. We are not saying that the government is perfect, but we are dealing with them.
“…I am using this opportunity to express my disappointment in government officials that want to sabotage the effort, I would not only be ruthless but I would look for you because this is an agency that must work.”
Challenges of enforcing regulations
Apparently, the ill-fated Ikoyi building did not escape the notice of the regulatory agencies. A viral video, circulating on the Internet, showed government officials sealing the site off sometime in 2020.
The video, however, gave a hint into some of the challenges that government officials often encounter in the enforcement of the law.
The video clip in question showed a rowdy session, with the late Osibona and his men struggling to resist efforts to seal off the site, amid gunshots by security men that accompanied the state officials.
The video captured one of Osibona’s men being eventually overpowered and bundled off, while Osibona himself was arrested.
The scene affirmed industry experts’ submission that it is common for influential developers to man their project sites with thugs and security agents for the purposes of intimidating or scaring off state officials on monitoring duty.
“People are not obeying laws. Impunity is a great problem in our building industry. Some of these people will employ street urchins to protect their sites. When the monitoring officers come to the site, they are harassed. Before you can bring enforcement that is centrally located, it will take many days. Before then, substandard development would have taken place,” a former President of the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, Kunle Awobodu, had told Sunday PUNCH,
This trend was also confirmed by a former Lagos State Solicitor General, Mr Lawal Pedro (SAN), who explained that, “even when they (officials) mark buildings for contravention, enforcing is usually tough due to lack of equipment like caterpillar, police backup, and also due to the fact that some owners of contravening buildings are rich men who would harass them with security officers or touts.”
However, in spite of the successful sealing off of the 21-storey building site, it was later reopened under circumstances known to higher authorities, as indicated by the Deputy Governor of Lagos State, Dr Obafemi Hamzat, who explained that the reopening was for “corrective works.”
But the NIStructE, in its preliminary report, stated that “the method of implementation of the remedial work was not in accordance with sound structural engineering practices.”
This is a pointer to regulatory failure occasioned by compromise in enforcement involving influential developers.
Shortage of manpower hampers monitoring
Awobodu noted that shortage of manpower is another factor hampering effective monitoring by the regulatory agencies.
He said, “The government employees, who are monitoring construction sites, are not sufficient to do the job. When they get to a site and seal it off, before they get back to site, it will take them another couple of days. Meanwhile, those who are developing have already broken the seal and continued with their work.”
Awobodu called for a change of approach, whereby monitoring officials will go after professionals on site rather than the developer.
He said, “The government cannot employ workers to sit perpetually on another person’s site, except that person is going to pay the government staff members.
“On every site, there should be a professional trained in building construction, who would be held accountable. It is that person that the monitoring officers will follow up with. Until we understand this process, we will unnecessarily burden the monitoring officers.”
Pedro suggested that monitoring should be done at the level of the local government with community members involved as ‘whistleblowers’.
The SAN said, “We should start holding the engineers responsible, and the government should monitor buildings through residents because they would know better. There should be a connection between the local government and the state government to make it effective.”
The President, BCPG, George Akinola, said the Ikoyi experience had strengthened the argument that the government needed to partner the BCPG, a non-government organisation comprising industry experts across seven fields, in monitoring.
“We’ve been telling the Lagos State Government to involve us in two ways. Number one, this cell supervision, checking and all the whistle-blowing that we keep doing, they should, more or less, make it an official thing. Involve us, the professionals; we are in thousands in the state and all the other states of the federation.
“Number two, the building procurement process, they should involve the professional architects, engineers, etc to do an oversight function on the process,” Akinola said in an interview with Channels TV.
Among his recommendations after the inquest into the 2014 Synagogue Church of All Nations’ building collapse, a Lagos chief magistrate and coroner, Mr Komolafe Oyetade, urged that regulatory agencies in the building construction sector must “be alive to their responsibility and be vigilant otherwise the function should be outsourced to competent professional body that will detect a violation of building laws and regulations early before failure.”
Komolafe added that the agencies needed to be rid of corruption, manifesting as “issuance of fake receipts and ‘greasing of palms’ during inspection on construction works on site.”
Awobodu also told Sunday PUNCH that this is one area government must address to ensure effective regulation.
He said, “In some cases, people who are supposed to enforce the standard are more or less like tax collectors. Some are looking for developers that have committed infractions and once you ‘settle them’, that is the end. It is a sad situation and misplaced priority. The building control agency should not be a money-generating agency.”
‘Officials collect kick-backs, overlook distressed buildings’
A community leader on Lagos Island, who spoke on condition of anonymity with Sunday PUNCH, alleged that state officials often visited the ancient community to mark old and distressed buildings for demolition, but looked away after their palms had been greased by owners of such dangerous buildings.
“They are just marking houses for demolition, collecting money from the owners and that’s where it ends. That’s what they do. They go around, marking houses all over the places, but if you pay them, they won’t do anything. It is a common scenario on Lagos Island,” the community leader said.
LABSCA had in July this year announced that it had marked 70 distressed houses, 20 of them on Lagos Island, for demolition.
The announcement came as the agency demolished a partially-collapsed building at No. 19, Church Street, Lagos Island.
When contacted on Thursday to respond to the allegation that state officials collect kick-backs to spare distressed buildings marked for demolition, the Deputy Director, Public Affairs in the Lagos State Ministry of Physical Planning, Mr Mukaila Sanusi, simply responded that “the onus of proof is on those making the allegation.”
“I believe the burden of proof is on the person alleging. They can write formally and then we can investigate their claims,” Sanusi said.
Training, competence of Nigerian professionals
The late Osibona, in his August 6, 2021 interview with TVC, expressed his doubts in the competence of Nigeria-trained building sector professionals.
The estate developer said when he returned to Nigeria in 2008 and began his foray in the real estate development business, he consulted professionals but “we made a lot of mistakes.”
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He said, “For example, I believed so much in consultants. I did whatever my architect and structural engineer asked me to do, not knowing that most of them are good only in the theoretical part of their jobs, no practical knowledge.”
The President, Architects Registration Council of Nigeria, Dipo Ajayi, on his visit to the site of Osibona’s collapsed high-rise, fumed at the “rumour that the designer of this project is from Italy.”
Ajayi said it was ridiculous that a developer would go abroad to hire an architect when Nigeria has an army of “more qualified but jobless architects with 40-50 years experience.”
“You don’t come to this country and start designing! You can’t just come to do things with impunity because you have money. You’ve got to follow the due process when you have architects in Nigeria that are jobless and who are more qualified… or do you even identify those foreigners that are coming in? Do they show their certificates to regulatory bodies before they come to the country?
“This is part of the problem but unfortunately in Nigeria, we believe less in our people than foreigners. The so-called foreigners are not the best that will come to this country; there are those ones that are mediocre,” Ajayi said.
However, a professor of Civil Engineering at the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Olugbenga Amu, while defending the quality of training received by Nigerians professionals, noted that what Osibona’s observed might be due to limited practice opportunities for Nigerian professionals.
Amu said, “If somebody is good in theory, definitely, he will be good in practical. You cannot say our engineers are not competent practically; although when you are doing something over and over, you tend to know more about it. But in a situation where we don’t use our own engineers, we don’t give them the opportunity to practise, dealing with what you are not familiar with can still cause problem. May be that is why people are thinking they are not competent in the practical.”
The don said the only way forward was for the Nigerian professionals to be given more opportunities, to enable them to hone their skills and gain field experience.
A professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Ilorin, Adedeji Abdullah, also maintained that Nigerian building industry professionals were well trained.
Abdullah argued that the artisans, without formal training, employed to work with professionals, could be the weak link in the chain.
Abdullah said, “The way they train engineers is not the same way they train bricklayers and some other workers within the system. I don’t know how much training a bricklayer has been taken through before he starts working. They hardly go through any training; all they do is just come in and say they have experience. And as we all know, Nigeria is porous and people do anything they like.”
Tackling quackery
Industry experts say quacks parading themselves as engineers in the industry but not registered with the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria are also a major challenge.
COREN’s Public Relations Officer, Ojonugwa Omale, said the council was in a perennial battle with quacks.
Omale said, “COREN is fighting quacks through the Engineering Regulatory Monitoring, national and state offices. Most of the engineers (in ERM) are engineers within the locality, managed by the governor of each state to go round because most of the recent cases of building collapses are not happening where we are really based.”
However, Omale said COREN has no power to prosecute quacks.
“According to our laws, we only have the power to prosecute those that register with us. We don’t really have the power to go round and arrest those who are not engineers. We only have the power to prosecute engineers that default in any area but for those not registered with us, we have to get the police to arrest them and take them to court,” Omale said.
“In the Synagogue case, we had a lot of issues because ICPC worked with us, a lot of people were arrested, but COREN cannot go to the ICPC and ask them what they are doing, since they have told us to leave the suspects with them, because they have a mandate on how to deal with such cases.
“COREN has a tribunal that try professionals that break the law and there are punishments meted out to those that are found wanting,” she added.
But the civil engineer professor, Amu, told our correspondent that cases of erring professionals being sanctioned by COREN were not frequent.
In August, the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, called on COREN to ensure regular sanction of erring engineers.
Fashola, who spoke at COREN’s 29th Engineering Assembly in Abuja, said, “I learnt that some engineers were recently de-registered for professional misconduct to serve as a deterrent to others. I believe these sanctions need to be carried out regularly and it is necessary to avoid infrastructure failures.”
Combating substandard building materials
Abdullah maintained that use of substandard building materials, rather than perceived incompetence of the Nigerian-trained professionals, is the biggest challenge that must be tackled to end the spate of building collapses in the country.
The civil engineering professor said, “To bring a structure out involves so many hands and even if you train everybody, the problem now is the material people are using and those involved in that are the contractors. We know the system; we know that when a contractor is taking a job, the first thing he is concerned about is how to pay 10 or 20 per cent (of the contract sum) to those who facilitated the job. Then the contractors will go and buy fake materials.
“We know that; it is going on and until that is stopped, until the contractors begin to follow the normal regulation, I am sorry, we will continue to see cases of building collapse.”
Amu, on his part, said substandard building materials festered in the industry partly due to insufficiency of testing equipment and dishonesty of stakeholders.
He said, “What we have is that people are not honest enough and that is what is causing problems for us. Some of the materials that are being used, the specifications are not correct. They will give you a particular specification and in Nigeria we have the problem of instrumentation; we don’t have enough equipment to test whether that material’s specification is actually correct or not. That is the area where we are lacking.”
Amu, who said it took field experience to identify fake building materials, advocated more work opportunities for Nigerian-trained professionals.
The don added, “If you buy a particular material today and you discover that the specification is not okay, you will not buy the same thing tomorrow. But when they don’t practise regularly that may also lead to a problem, leading to selection of substandard materials or materials that cause problem. It is not that our engineers are not competent in practical.”
SON must do more to stop fake materials
The Chairman of the Nigerian Institute of Architecture, Lagos State Chapter, David Majekodunmi, expressed disappointed that the Standards Organisation of Nigeria has been unable to stop fake building materials from finding their way into the market.
“We have the Standards Organisation of Nigeria; it’s such a shame. I was at the site (of the collapsed Ikoyi high-rise) for almost about four hours, the SON was just coming in to take samples, samples for what? It’s too late to cry when the head is off.
“We have various manufacturers in Nigeria. The cement manufacturers, iron rod, what standards are they using?
“The government needs to do more. If you go abroad and buy certain materials, even ordinary plug you will see the identification number of the standard. But in Nigeria, where are we?”
The Chairman, SON Task Force, Enebi Onucheyo, admitted that the market was saturated with fake and substandard materials, but blamed the situation on the removal of SON from the seaports.
“The story of having substandard materials in the country is no longer new. It is something we know it’s happening but the major challenge that we have is that we are not at the port, so we cannot see the fake materials at the point of entry. We have to do our monitoring through market surveillance, which is more cumbersome and more expensive.
“If anybody says the SON should be blamed for the substandard building materials that find their way into the market, resulting in building collapse, that is their personal opinion. We are not at the port. It was these same professionals that ganged up and said SON should be thrown out of the seaport. If they are feeling the problem now, they should go back and push for the SON to be allowed to go back to the port,” Onucheyo told Sunday PUNCH.
However, he added that the problem was beyond importation as “many local manufacturers are also involved in the illegal packaging of substandard materials are original.”
Onucheyo added, “We have substandard building materials in the market, which is a known fact. The truth is that when you say people are bringing in substandard building materials, some people who call themselves responsible organisations are also part of this. Recently, we went to a company which is a local manufacturer and we saw some substandard roofing sheet coils in the factory. We had to confiscate them and obtain a court order for the confiscation of those coils. But it is a bona fide local manufacturer.
“Some of these people play pranks, hiding under the name of local manufacturers to import substandard products and sell. That is the game.”
Onucheyo said numerous court cases initiated by SON are indications that the problem is huge and that the agency is not relenting.
“We have a lot of cases in court; a lot of prosecution is going on as we speak. Recently we went to a plastic factory and we made arrests; the case is in court right now. Some people are even in jail already. So, it is a fight that is ongoing.”
He, however, called on Nigerians to partner the SON in the fight against substandard materials.
He said, “Again, we expect journalists too to help us tell Nigerians that when they see any suspicious manufacturing activities going on anywhere, they should give us information anonymously and we will act. We are not spirits, we can’t be everywhere.
“Anytime we are going to these manufacturing companies on formal inspection, we have to write to them that we are coming and before we get them, everything would be taken away. But when go to the market and buy, you can then trace it back to the manufacturer or the importer of that product. It’s a whole lot of challenges.”
Why incessant building collapses must stop
The Managing Director, Propertygate Development and Investment Plc, Adetokunbo Ajayi, urged concerned stakeholders to put a stop to incessant building collapses in the country as it could discourage investors in the real estate sector.
Ajayi said, “Cases of incessant building collapse across the country will naturally be a major concern for potential local as well as foreign investors in the Nigerian real estate sector.
“These reoccurring incidents raise questions of capacity, regulatory environment, quality of material inputs and business ethics amongst others. In view of the huge capital outlay required for investment in real estate, investors are likely to be apprehensive of investing where threat to assets emanating from poor production is not a rare occurrence.”
Ajayi added that the current experience in the country should make investors “recognise the need for more caution.”
“These unfortunate events may also be seen as an opportunity for some investors to engage in real estate production with special emphasis on products quality as a significant market differentiation,” he noted.
The Secretary, Construction Projects and Infrastructure Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association Section on Business Law, Mrs Aderemi Fagbemi, said only assurance of effective regulation and quality control would restore investor’s confidence.
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