National Post (National Edition)
Scores missing in school collapse
At least 8 dead in illegal facility in Nigeria
L AG OS, N IGER I A • A threestorey building collapsed on Wednesday with scores of schoolchildren thought to be inside, setting off frantic rescue efforts in Nigeria’s crowded commercial capital.
A Nigerian emergency official said eight people were killed and 37 people had been rescued. Witnesses have said up to 100 children could have been in the primary school when the building collapsed.
Rescue efforts were expected to continue into the night as hundreds of anxious people watched an excavator work under floodlights.
Locals, some digging amid dusty concrete slabs with their bare hands, joined the emergency services.
Associated Press video showed rescuers carrying several dust-covered children from the rubble, to cheers from those who rushed to the scene. But the crowd quieted as others were pulled out and slung over people’s shoulders, unmoving.
Sunday Adeyemo and his family lived in the building that collapsed. He left early Wednesday and found out only hours later that his home was in rubble and his seven-year-old daughter, Taiwo Adeyemo, had died.
“I’m totally devastated,” Adeyemo told The New York Times. He was on the way to the hospital to collect the body of his second-grader.
Rescue efforts unfolded in the densely populated neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and a city of some 20 million. More equipment was brought in as nightfall approached.
As many as 100 children had been in the primary school on the building’s top floor, some witnesses said.
Government officials said the owners had no permit to run a school in what was a residential building.
“It is evident that Lagos state is not aware of such a school,” Akinwunmi Ambode, the Lagos state governor, told reporters at the scene. “It is illegal and the culprits will face the law,” he added.
It was not immediately clear why the building collapsed. Locals said the building had been marked for demolition more than once by the government, but had somehow managed to escape being bulldozed.
Such disasters are all too common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight and floors are added to already unstable buildings.
Lagos state Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode said buildings in the neighbourhood, Ita Faji, should have undergone integrity tests but landlords resisted.
Hundreds stood in narrow streets and on corrugated metal rooftops, watching rescue efforts. A yellow excavator scooped at the ruins of rebar and dust.
With emotions high, a number of shirtless men jumped in to offer assistance, hacksaws and mallets in hand. Some were barefoot.
The collapse came as President Muhammadu Buhari, newly elected to a second term, tries to improve old, inefficient infrastructure in Africa’s most populous nation.
“Nigeria’s infrastructure is generally less than half the size than in the average sub-saharan Africa country and only a fraction of that in emerging market economies,” the International Monetary Fund has noted.
“The perceived quality of the infrastructure is low.”
There was no immediate comment from Buhari’s office. Instead, as the rescue work continued, the president’s personal assistant posted on Twitter a photo of a gleaming new terminal at the airport in the capital, Abuja.