Spate of building collapse in Rivers: Create Building Control Agency – NIoB

Following fresh spate of building collapse in Port Harcourt in the past one week, the Rivers State government has once again been advised to waste no further time to create a Building Control Agency to arrest the situation.

A rising building expected to contain lawyers in the state (NBA Building) being built by the state government crashed last week to the embarrassment of both parties. A building had once collapsed around there over 10 years ago and took lives, an indication that the soil there may be treacherous and required professional attention.

Another building crashed at the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) few days later, all lying along the shoreline of the coast where the soil is shifty.

Reacting to this, the Rivers State chapter of the Nigeria Institute of Building (NIoB) said the institute was not being carried along in the state to the extent that no professional builder (NIoB member) was included in the investigation panel.

The state executive council led by the chairman, Moses Ugheoke, and secretary, Adelaja Sikuru, told newsmen on Wednesday, that the faulty buildings in Rivers State could be as a result of non-domestication of the National Building Code and that the NIoB had been calling for this for years, just like it was in most other states such as Lagos and Anambara.

Ugheoke said: “That is why you see that people found culpable in collapsed building incidents there are prosecuted. We repeatedly drew the attention of the Rivers State government to these faults in 2005 and 2006 when buildings were falling like mud houses. We submitted a position paper demanding inclusion of a Builder in each building project, to no avail.”

He warned that what the government’s agencies give were mere building approvals but that the body wants an agency to monitor and supervise the building process to ensure that what other professionals and what the approving agency approved were being put inside the job as it progressed. “There is a difference between Building Control and Development Control.”

Regretting that some state governments love to swing into action after a building had collapsed by cordoning off the site and setting up panels instead of preventive actions, the NIoB officials insisted that prevention should be better than cure.

Ugheoke also assisted by the treasurer (Samuel Tobin), the public affair officer (Dominc) and former chairman now national assistant secretary (Emenike Belonwu, regretted that no single tertiary institution in Rivers State was offering building as a course of study, whereas other states had many institutions doing so.

“This shows the little or no regard for Building as an important matter. There is no single professional Builder employed by any of the regulatory agencies of state government from Housing, Urban, to Greater Port Harcourt City Development Authority. If each local council area of the state had produced at least 10 graduates of Building, there would have been awareness on the critical importance of that branch of knowledge especially in a state that sits and builds on soft and shift soil”.

It was gathered that a state like Borno has developed a policy of training Builders and Estate Surveying as new branches of knowledge to create instant jobs, knowing this is the future of the Built Industry.

The NIoB expert did not accept that notion that cost could be the cause, saying; “Bringing a Builder to site should not add to cost to any standard project because all of these were provided for before approval.”

The chairman said because there is no law in the state against irregularities, there may be no arrest in the recent collapses because it is happening in Rivers State.