The Minister of Power, Works and
Housing, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, has warned building regulatory agencies
that the Federal Government will not condone collapse of buildings
under its mass housing project scheduled to commence soon.
Fashola said this on Thursday in Abuja
at the 6th Annual Building and Construction Economic Roundtable
organised by the Quantity Surveyors Registration Board of Nigeria with
the theme, “Professional issues and challenges in building collapse in
Nigeria.”
The minister who was represented by a
director in his ministry, Samah Mohammed, argued that some of the
tragedies of building collapse were self-inflicted arising from greed,
negligence and profiteering tendencies of one or all the parties
involved, noting that this phenomenon was seldom caused by seismic
forces of earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons or tremors.
He noted that the theme of BCERT 6
underscored the QSRBN’s responsiveness to address matters of genuine
concern to the government and people of Nigeria, stressing that
incidents of building collapse constituted a major setback in the aim to
ensure sustainable housing development projects in the country.
Fashola observed that building collapse
comes with attendant huge financial losses as well as loss of lives and
property including psychological and emotional traumas and physical
injuries to the victims.
He said, “The Federal Government is
undertaking the most ambitious housing programme ever witnessed in this
country and our desire is to provide housing for all economic segments
of the citizenry.
“As we embark on this programme of
providing housing for Nigerians, government insists on zero-tolerance
for building collapse. As such, agencies of government charged with
enforcement of standards, professionalism, regulations and discipline
must ensure that no single incident of building collapse is witnessed
anywhere in the country under the Federal Government Housing Programme,”
Fashola warned.
He stated that the FG had already
produced a National Housing Policy to guide the intervention of
government in the provision of housing in Nigeria, adding that a law to
enforce the National Building Code would soon be passed.
The QSRBN President, Mallam Hussaini
Dikko, in his welcome address to participants, stated that the
Roundtable was organised to find solutions to the incidents of building
collapse in the country.
He regretted that out of seven
professional regulatory bodies setting standards, controlling,
regulating and promoting disciplines in the practice of Architecture,
Building, Engineering, Quantity Surveying, Town Planning, Estate
Management and Surveying, five of them have no budget line funding to
carry out their statutory mandate which include curbing incidents of
building collapse in Nigeria.
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