Education Is Key To Curb Building Collapse In Nigeria

The president of the Nigerian Institution of structural Engineers, Oreoluwa Fadayomi has said that Education is key in order to curb building collapse in the country.

In an interview with Maureen Ihua-Maduenyi of punchng, he said the citizens need to be educated on the consequences of patronising non-professionals in building construction.

Read excerpts below:

A lot has been said and a lot has been done concerning building collapse, where do you think individuals, and not just groups and government agencies, should come in?

First and foremost, we need public awareness. Before you commence any building project, you must know where to go to but this is what most people lack; I am talking about members of the general public who have been building over the years and think that it is a piece of cake. You find bricklayers and even technicians calling themselves engineers; as a result, you don’t even know the difference between the fake engineer and an authentic engineer. Education is very key.

When you know where to go, the rest is done because the professional will start from the scratch, inspect your site and identify the various problems that are inherent in the site that you have. Whether it is poor site or a good one, or whether there are obstacles. He will write a report and advise you on what to do in terms of foundation. Of course, it is taken for granted that you would have done the architectural drawing or design of what you want to do because that is what the engineer works with.

After all these, he will come up with an appropriate foundation type for your building, and it is this foundation that the whole structure rests upon. Once you are with the right professionals, the issue of design and building proper follow straight away. But when you have passed the design stage and you want to construct, there lies the problem, especially when we talk about developers. They do a lot of harm, many of them either out of greed or anxiety to want to recoup as much investment as possible, they don’t allow the process to flow. They think they know it all. Even when they want to follow Lagos State law, for instance, which says you must have a soil investigation, they don’t call soil experts.

They call those who drill boreholes. When you drill a borehole, you remove materials as you go down and these materials have properties, some of which are suitable for construction, and they think that is the soil report and those people will write a report and give it to them.

There are various stages, even the approval authority ought to know when they have a good soil report or not and at that point, they ought to reject so many things. These are some of the things that people should be educated about. When it comes to construction, they believe they know it all and they want to do it by themselves. We are talking about buildings sinking; the report says go to a certain depth and something was recommended and you think you know better and maybe call in your cousin, who is a driller, and fill in the reinforcement of your choice and claim that your building is ready. What happens? The building will sink.

Read full interview here