Nigeria: 'Lagos Govt Has Technically Taken Over Synagogue'

By Olasunkanmi Akoni

General Manager, Lagos State Building Control Agency, LASBCA, Mrs. Abimbola Animashaun-Odunayo, in this interview, speaks on the recent collapsed building belonging to the Synagogue Church of All Nations, SCOAN, the intricacies surrounding it, the next line of action by the state government, among others. Excerpts:
What actually went wrong with the SCOAN collapsed building?
We need support from stakeholders and everyone. Before now, we have been trying to curtail incidence of collapse building until we had the latest one. I think the problem of Synagogue Church of All Nations, SCOAN, brought the issue to the fore again. A lot of institutions are too secretive they will not allow government officials do
their job properly. They believed that if you are not a member, you cannot have access to their premises.
Perhaps, what happened in Synagogue would not have happened if they had allowed government officials do their job. What Synagogue needs to know is that the place is no more in their purview, everything now belongs to government because that's what the law stipulates. Anytime our officials went there they were prevented.
We could not gain access. I believe we need to sensitize public institutions more, so that when an incident happens they give way to rescue team and government officials otherwise there will be issues like this in future. We will not allow this anymore because the law has given us the power to carry out our work effectively and efficiently.
We have a task force, but on that fateful Friday, church staff did not allow us to in to have access to the collapsed site until then Rapid Response Squad, RRS, came to our aid. People should allow us access to do our job without fear. We have had issues where we were beaten, harassed and molested in the course of doing our duties, it should stop.
They fail to realize that the function of our agency is to save lives, reduce incidence of building collapse to zero. If people are not allowing us to do our job we cannot save lives. I think we need to increase the number of our taskforce men to enhance our work.
In the Synagogue incident, was your agency not carried along in the building process and do they have necessary approval?
We are still investigating. As I said earlier, we asked them about the approval papers, but the representatives of the church said the approval papers had been burie4d in the rubble. So we are still waiting for them to present the papers.
Yet, the fact is that the building in question was initially a two-storey building before they added four raising it to six. They could not have done that without having competent people overseeing the building. If a raft foundation was done to carry out two-storey building, what did they do to fortify the strength of that foundation to carry out six-storey building.? This is the question we are asking them. Investigation is on-going; until we finish the investigation, we won't be able to do much. We are just waiting for the result.
Lagos State Material Testing, current registered institutions, NIA and other professionals are all involved in the investigation. We will do the test to unravel the cause of the collapse. Even though, they said it was due to aircraft, we have a lot of houses that planes fly over. everyday and they are not collapsing, so why this particular one, we have to conduct a thorough investigation.