The metaphor of collapsed buildings

While global leaders fuelled their jets for a conference convened in Glasgow to review how to fly less, our disaster-a-dozen nation continues to generate its own tragedies. It looks like southern Kaduna has been abandoned to its fate. The spate of attacks no longer even elicit the usual press statements expressing regrets and promising what would not happen.

Down South in Anambra where selections drop the first letter for the coronation of a winner, the dress rehearsal to the charade was as scary as ever marked with unprecedented violence resembling a modern-day Western. Everywhere you turn in Nigeria, there is a scandalous disaster either waiting to happen or unfolding. Nobody seems to care anymore; we are all victims waiting to be counted at our predestined venues.

However, when something happens in Lagos, Nigeria’s burgeoning commercial capital, trust the caravan of news and the cacophony of commentaries to occupy the discourse. Not much was written when Fourscore Homes turned the sod to a 21-storey building project in Ikoyi, a land remedied from the lagoon and primed for the near exclusive reserve of the nouveau riche. But on November 1, in the midst of the flurry of activities, the 21-storey building caved-in like a stack of cards burying scores in its ruble. The dream of making a mini taj-mahal in the centre of Lagos was flattened, along with it the precious lives of 42 human beings whose only sin, we hope, was eking out a living.

Lagosians are a tad different from the people of southern Kaduna. They like to see themselves as urbane; after all didn’t they inherit a ready-made town planned by British overlords as the headquarters of their island where the sun does not set? But viewing early colonial structures, Lagos  could have been a model city. Post-colonial administrations have paid no heed to the master plan. Buoyed by the greed and avarice of evil servants, successful regimes have distorted the master plan with the egunje culture of – saa ban mu, literally – just drop my share! 

How else does one excuse a second disaster of this proportion just seven years after 115 disposable Nigerians and foreigners were pulled from the headquarters of the late TB Joshua’s religious enterprise shoddily named the Synagogue Church for All Nations.

Since the Ikoyi Fourscore Homes accident happened; social media has been awashed with how our citizens employ religion not just as subterfuge to mask corruption and in instances of money laundering, but to mask avoidable disaster. If Femi Osibona, the young and upwardly mobile owner of the property had survived, he most likely would have pointed fingers at unseen enemies. Now, he has become the fall guy because he has died with his dream and our chances of knowing what really happened.

Nigeria has no success story of making a headway with forensic audits.

The story out there is that Osibona was one of those lucky few that broke the impregnable wall of entry clearance officers at first rate foreign embassies in Lagos to make it to ‘the abroad’. Without as much as record as salesman to Nike or Adidas, he made enough as a shoe merchant to graduate into property development. He is said to own two other burgeoning edifices in Lagos, the UK and the USA after a higher diploma at a non-existing polytechnic in London.

There is something about building on dreams by those who have seen skyscrapers from the Taj Mahal to the Burj Khalifa that those who could not secure a visa to London go holidaying in Dubai and regaling us with pictures of their travels.

There is a sad paradox between the United Arab Emirates and the so-called Federal Republic of Nigeria that goes beyond the discovery of oil in commercial quantity at about the same time. Before oil and OPEC cartelisation, it was said that wealthy sheikhs flew to Nigeria for the most basic of needs, including medical check-up. Oil and planning changed the deal for them and brought doom on us. It is said that if oil were to stop flowing today, the foundations of success built for the UAE would be sustained for the next 45 years. Buhari goes around begging wealthy nations for loans or handouts.

That Nigeria hosted the second World African Festival of Africa Arts and Culture, FESTAC, leaving a dilapidated estate in Lagos as a sad reminder of the blues for the prodigal.

Lagos, as the centre of commerce, has learnt little and benefitted little from its many years as the seat of government and passed on the baton to Abuja to become an urban ghetto. Not long ago, our capital city announced with panache, that it would be shutting off water taps for six weeks. The only way Africa’s prime delegate to the Glasgow summit could guarantee 24 hours supply to its chief delegate is by budgeting huge sums to feed the generating sets to keep power on. Even that fuel it needs, it does not produce locally.

Not only has Mr Osibona died with his dream of owning three giant buildings in Lagos, he is gone with the evidence that could have helped a serious government to take steps aimed at preventing the next multi-storey building from collapsing and killing people. With Osibona dead, Lagos has an excuse not to find out how his project was conceived; what environmental impact assessments were carried out for its execution; what sort of building materials were earmarked. Lagos would see no reason to do a post-mortem and inform the nation whether what was on paper is commensurate with what was eventually used and if no, who is to blame? We would never know at what point between conception and implementation things started going south.

Not to worry, we don’t need any of that ‘dogon turanci’ or long thing. Seven years ago when the Synagogue collapsed, our current minister of darkness called the shots from Ikeja. He instituted a panel to investigate the disaster just as Sanwo-olu has announced. Fashola locked away the findings in a vault of history.

Unlike Buhari who couldn’t be bothered; President Goodluck Jonathan, a beneficiary of TB Joshua’s form of spiritual idolatry, came to see the disaster for himself. He was apparently more worried about making spiritual kingmakers for his re-election bid than seeking retribution for the dead. Thus, his trip was a condolence visit than a fact-finding one.

In Nigeria, all it takes for criminals to get away with blue murder is to wear a dog collar, a turban or align with one that is ready to grease palms. Like the owners of collapsed buildings, Nigeria was a dream project whose initiators were forced to abandon projects before they could lay a solid foundation. Those who snatched the plan have lacked either the will or the wherewithal to build up a strong and enduring edifice. Their offsprings have no interest in repairing broken bridges as they are in mopping up what is left in the till.

This is why the nation is a substandard project collapsing on all our heads. But rather than take to the streets in protest, we are jubilating that the last disaster spared us; unaware that we have only been spared today’s disaster just to become unwilling casualties of tomorrow’s tragedy. There is no power in heaven or hell that can help a people who deliberately refuse to accept that they truly need help.