The Lagos State Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban
Develpoment, Oluwatoyin Ayinde, has said that the collapsed six-storey
building of the Synagogue Church of All Nations has no government
approval.
According
to a new reports, 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 said investigations conducted by his ministry after 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 had
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 the 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 Synagogue 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.
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 length of a football pitch.
He
added that the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority had written a letter to
his ministry showing a request by the Nigeria Air Force 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
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?”
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