The Nigerian Institute of Architects has expressed concern over the outrageous building collapsed across the country, revealed that close to 5060 collapsed building recorded alone this year 2022.
NIA President, Arc Eyin Ben-Eboh who made this known at the Press Conference during the Archibuilt Exposition on Friday in Abuja, used the opportunity to seek collaboration between the Govt and professional associations to curb reoccurrence of building collapse.
He emphasized that the critical part of the story of building collapse comes during construction stage and this problem has been further compounded by Nigeria’s economy.
“Of course, you know that once there’s any law in the economy, the building industry is the first that softens people who would ordinarily want to engage in building a house of their own will naturally just take a backseat and attend to subsistence matters, food, shelter, clothes, fees, those are subsistence issues that a lot of households will be concerned about.
“But you discover that a lot of people who think they have the money and want to engage in building construction, would want to cut a lot of corners. And so the first aspect that suffers when people try to cut corners is that you don’t use the right people to build your house”, he said.
Regarding the regulations, Ben-Eboh said it is not so much a problem of lack of laws, but the capacity to implement and enforce those laws. “A lot of development issues are domiciled in the states and a lot of those of States don’t have the capacity in terms of manpower to be able to monitor construction sites.
“For instance when someone has not designed a Two-storey building but gets an approval for the design of ten-storey, of course, he doesn’t have the capacity and for a place like Lagos where you have several construction site going on and we have few staff who don’t have the necessary skill, so there is a capacity problem”, the President said.
Ben-Eboh noted that partnership is the best solution until the capacity of those involved in building process are built. “The best solution for us as an institute is to seek collaborations between government and the professional associations so that we can serve as another arm of checking these things using the private sector”.
The President who spoke about the Archibuilt Conference said basically the confab was initiated to look into the issues of infrastructure and the huge infrastructure deficit that exists within the country today. “As you’re well aware, a lot of you may think that architects only limited to the building’s design of the buildings but is actually a total package.
“Architects is the master of the built environment, and looks at everything from a holistic perspective. And so much as we’re looking at the building itself, we’re also looking at the environment around the building, and sometimes rather, this environment affects the way the end users enjoy the building.
“So in the last couple of days, that is principally what we’ve been doing, and we’ve had a very good turnout this year, a lot of exhibitors have come forward to exhibit their various building products.
“We’ve also had very educated lectures from architects and other practitioners within built environment base, who have come to give us new insights into not only good new building methodologies, but also new material the possibilities of adapting existing building materials to create wonderful buildings”, he said.