Synagogue building has no approval, says commissioner

The Lagos State Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Development, Oluwatoyin Ayinde, has said that the collapsed six-storey building of the Synagogue Church of All Nations had no government approval.



Ayinde stated this on Thursday while giving testimony before the coroner probing the cause of the building collapse.

No fewer than 116 persons died while several others sustained varying degrees of injuries in the September 12, 2014 tragedy.

Ayinde, in his testimony, said investigations conducted by his ministry, following the accident, revealed that though the six-storey building had a record of survey, it however had no approval of the government.

He said the only thing found in the records was an approval for the church’s main auditorium, adding that though that auditorium has now been raised to eight floors, the approval given was only for five floors.

The commissioner who described all unapproved structures in the church’s premises as illegal, stated that there was need to investigate what he described as unusual practices going on within the church premises.

Ayinde wondered why, for instance, one of the columns supporting the additional three floors placed on the main auditorium had to take off from the top of a water tank.

He said, “The approval that we saw was in the name of the Syangogue Church of All Nations dated January 26, 2004 but that approval was just for the main auditorium and one of the things we discovered was that it was an approval for a five-floor development. But on our visit to the site, we discovered that the building had been taken to eight floors; we do not have the records of the additional floors, making those floors illegal construction.

“Did we see anything on the collapsed building? No. In our records the collapsed building has no approval.”

He added, “I’d like to say that with the additional structure we saw on site, we are inclined to express some fears. We have seen, for example, that one of the columns is not taking off from the ground floor, but it is resting on an existing water tank and I don’t know whether any engineer certified that construction. This needs to be investigated because it is an unusual practice to start a column middle way.”

While expressing doubts over the claim by the church that the collapse of the building was connected with some aircrafts that had hovered over it shortly before the accident, Ayinde stated that his investigations revealed that the distance between the said aircraft and the top of the building was one and a half the lenght of a football pitch.

He further stated that the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority had written a letter to his ministry showing a request by the Nigerian Airforce that some of their aircrafts were going to be having rehearsals at that time around that place.

He said, “What we wanted to know was that which aircrafts were flying at that particular time? Two, at what altitude were they flying? And three, what was the coordinate of their flight path?”

Ayinde added, “They sent us a response first, showing that there was a request by the Nigerian Airforce that there would be some rehearsals of some aircrafts.

“From that letter, we gathered that all of the aircrafts were flying at an altitude of 1,100 feet above the sea level; if you convert that into floors, you will be given about 109 or 110 floors from the sea level. Deduct six floors of the building from 109 floors, you will still have the aircraft flying at about 103 floors from above the building. That we were able to infer.

“Secondly, by the time we plotted the graph using the Flight Path Swath, we discovered that the minimum distance that the aircraft went down close to that area was 137 metres, that is almost one and a half the length of a football pitch from one goal post to the other. That was how far the minimum aircraft was and the maximum was about 288 metres away.”

Ayinde, who insisted that the cause of the collapse was lack of planning and structural defect, said Nigerians need to learn from the sad incident.

He said, “Because the objective of this coroner is to ensure that we prevent such occurrence in the future, it would be necessary to have Nigerians, not just Lagosians, know that construction is a science. Nobody becomes a contractor because his father was a contractor and you don’t become an expert in building because you were there when they were building it. It would be necessary for Nigerians to first recognise that construction is science.”