By Favour Nnabugwu

The President of the Nigerian Institute of Building NIB, Mr Chuks Omeife says the failure of the National Assembly to pass the Building Code into law has led to the collapse of buildings in which over 5,000 Nigerians have allegedly lost their lives.

Omeife who spoke to Vanguard Homes and Property posited that in the last five years, buildings collapse have claimed the lives of no fewer than 5,000 persons.

He said that the institute had made several presentations to the government on the issue of collapse of buildings without result, adding that the solution to collapsed building lies with the building code that had been at the National Assembly since 2008.

”The remedy to collapse building is the enactment of an enabling law to back up the building code which has been at the National Assembly since 2008″.

Building Code as punitive measure
”The building code would have been a great punitive measure for those involved in collapse buildings,” he said. According to him, the country will continue to grapple with the problems of collapsed building until the building code becomes a law.

”The way it is now, there is no law that says if a building collapses, the person responsible should be jailed or fined,” Omeife said.

He recalled that the National building code was passed by National executive council and the Council of States before being sent to the National Assembly for them to give it the legal teeth by passing the enabling law that would provide punitive measures for any person whose building collapses.

Outdated State Laws
“Some of the laws that are in existence at the state level are outdated in the sense that the laws are still talking about approvals. And what the approval is  all about the drawing by an architect and a design by structural engineer. And once you submit those two drawings to the town planning authority, they go ahead to approve. They don’t care to find out who did construction because the law does not capture that.

The law would have added that at a point of approval, a builder that would manage the project must be presented  in case a problem arises,  the builder would be held responsible. But all the laws  kept talking about approval and not the end product,” he lamented.
Mandate of NIOB

The mandate of Nigerian Institute of Building is to produce builders that can manage places of construction and if there is a problem we can track it down immediately. We know that people are involved in the collapsed buildings because nobody could have entrusted its building project to a faceless human being,  but they disappear at the point of building collapse.

So far, we have not seen a builder involved but we have our other colleagues involved and not a builder because we set out to visit the collapsed building site as soon as the message gets to us, and carry out our own investigations.

All the cases of collapsed building in the country have always been swept under the carpet.
”Have you ever seen an investigative report on collapse building before?  What you get is that a build has collapsed and government would make the most noise about it and it ends there.

Complicated building designs require experts to handle
”Buildings are becoming more complicated in design by the day hence it is not about someone who claims to have been in the building business for decades. You need an expert and a professional in that field. An engineer is not a builder; an architect is not a builder. We might have gone to the same school, studied under the  same faculty but we have different departments with different areas of specialisation”.