Lagos Serial Building Collapse, Ethnic Politics And The Igbo Outcry

The recent collapse of a seven-story building in Banana Island, Lagos, was one tragedy too many for a country that is now the worst rated in such incidents in Africa. Not surprisingly, instead of calling attention to the ugly spate of building tumbles in Lagos state, the collapse threw up the usual ethnic politics in Nigeria.

 

Following the volcanic building collapse, the Lagos State government, in what appeared a window dressing, marked some buildings for demolition. Emotions quickly ran out of the roof as Igbo traders and property owners called out the Lagos State government for what they saw as a one-sided victimization. They alleged that most of the buildings marked for demolition belonged to Igbo people, who were being punished for voting for the opposition during the presidential and gubernatorial elections earlier in the year.

 

Following the Igbo outcry, various Southeast leaders held meetings in Lagos to address the problem. Governor of Imo State, Hope Uzodimma, was mandated by some Igbo leaders after a meeting in Lagos to parley with Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. Earlier, Governor Charles Soludo of Anambra State had met with Anambra people in Lagos, urging them to return to the state to develop it instead of using it as a launch pad for departure to other states. Professor Soludo reminded Igbo traders that it was good to take their investments to Igboland, because their hosts would never respect them.

The shame of a government

The myriad cases of building collapse in Nigeria have been toyed with over the years, while the country continues to lose lives and property in clearly avoidable circumstances. Lagos has witnessed 60% of the more than 221 incidents of building collapse in Nigeria in forty years. That is according to Farouk Salim, Director General of the Standards Organization of Nigeria. Between 2007 and 2013, 135 cases of building collapse were recorded in Nigeria. In 2014, a high-rise guesthouse complex belonging to the Synagogue Church of All Nations collapsed in Lagos, killing 116 people, many of them foreigners. In 2021, a 21-story building under construction collapsed, killing the owner and 41 others. In 2022, the Building Collapse Prevention Guild counted 62 incidents, which claimed 84 lives and 113 injuries, with over ten trillion naira gone with the mangled materials, including evacuation and rescue efforts. In 2022 also, Kano & Anambra (five each) and Delta & Jigawa (four each), recorded building collapses.

 

As a result of the latest cases of collapse, about 350 buildings were on the demotion list in Lagos, with 17 of them at the Alaba International Market, where demolitions had started. Traders were however quick to point to some buildings, which they alleged posed no risk to life and property. Ordinarily, the Lagos state government made it clear that it was not targeting any ethnic group, but was attempting to arrest a rot in the building habits of some people in the state.

 

Whenever there is a case of building collapse, state governments take some strict-looking, but eventual ephemeral, steps in curbing the menace. The major causes of building collapse are fake building materials, ignorance and non-adherence to government rules and warnings, official corruption, unqualified building contractors and poor (soil) feasibility tests. Lagos is a coastal area, with very soft soil structure and vast waterlogged ground. The state government often complains that builders either violate or do not listen to the warnings of the State Materials Testing Standards. In some cases, state building control agencies are at fault, though government always takes action after the damage has been done.

The civil war effect: What Southeast leaders apparently ignored

The Southeast leaders who have appealed to Igbo traders to return home appear to be telling them the truth. The three-year civil war of 1967 to 1970, the aftermath of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential elections, the continual insurgency and religious violence in the North and many cases of post-election violence in Nigeria have been grim cases of ethnic and religious strife during which the Igbo were severely victimized.

 

After the war, some estimates put the total number of Igbo deaths to three million, 49% of which were children that mostly starved to death. The cost of war usually lasts much longer than the end of a war in terms of further subjugation of the vanquished. Many Igbo people say that the Igbo have not been integrated into the Nigerian society since the end of the war despite the ‘no victor no vanquished mantra’. Shehu Sani, former Kaduna Central senator in 2021 said that Igbo people have been systematically targeted for marginalization since the end of the war. The last eight years seems to bring the marginalization to a climax, where almost no Igbo person occupied a key position in the top echelon of the federal government, in the Defence Council and the Security Council. A historian at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, recalls that after the war, it became a shame to be called Igbo. Thus, many Igbo people changed their names, and denied their ethnicity, and this has continued unabated.

Following the war, only about 34,000 Igbo people, out of over one million, were re-absorbed into the Nigerian civil service. Laws and policies have been targeted at the Igbo such as the Public Officers (Special Provisions Decree no. 46 of 1970, which saw the retirement and disengagement of Igbo military officials after the war. The Banking Obligation (Eastern States Decree) mandated banks to pay Igbo investors just 20 pounds irrespective of how much money they had for exchange with the then new currency. There was the abandoned property rule in the south-south, which dispossessed the Igbo of their landed property. The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree (aka Indigenization Decree) of 1972 came just after the civil war when many Igbo people lacked the financial capacity to invest in shares and ownership of companies. The admission policies in public universities in Nigeria brought the quota system, which made many Igbo youth to take up non-Igbo names, and to claim to come from northern Nigeria in order to secure admission into tertiary institutions. The southeast is the only region with the least number of States, despite being a major ethnic group. Sadly, the Igbo, in at least six other states in Nigeria, where they account for over 25% of the population, are systematically estranged from their ethnic roots.

Business is not as attractive in the Southeast

Prior to the war, the coal industry in Enugu was functioning, alongside a burgeoning railway service. At least three auto manufacturing and assembling plants were in operation. Agriculture was in a healthy swing, with the attendant raw materials and production hubs in Aba, Nnewi, Umuahia, Enugu and Onitsha. A steel company in Onitsha, and a cement factory in Nkalagu (now in Ebonyi State) have all closed shop. Road networks, railways, industries, airports, seaports and resource exploration are all comatose.

The Abia State government has tried without success and federal support to develop a seaport at Obeaku, Ukwa East Local Government Area. It recently began a process to allow a private investor to develop the port, which lies 22 nautical miles to the Atlantic Ocean, making it one of the deepest shorelines in Nigeria. The Onitsha Seaport has also been toyed with, despite the federal government’s attempt to utilize the seaport in 2021. Instead of seaports, the federal government continues to pursue its programme of establishing seven dry ports in the country, with the latest being the commissioning of the Kakuri Inland Dry Port in Kaduna (2018) and Dala Inland Dry port, Kano (2022). Despite having six seaports in Nigeria, it is only the Apapa and Tin-Can Island ports all in Lagos that are operational, thus attracting people and businesses there, and severely congesting the ports.

 

Oil exploration in the Chad Basin in northern Nigeria consumed over $340 million as of 1995 when it paused, while the commercial quantities in the southeast are barely mined. Since 2016, the federal government has continued to prospect for oil in the Chad Basin, estimating to pour in $2.5 billion in the controversial venture.

 

Lagos and Ogun States are the headquarters of over 65% of the over 2000 manufacturing industries in Nigeria. Lagos alone has over 50%, and, according to the Nigeria Investment Promotion Council, Lagos holds between 400 and 500 manufacturing enterprises in Nigeria. Lagos also holds 90% of the headquarters of the corporations in Nigeria, with 60% of industrial investments coming into the state.  As the fifth largest economy in Africa (in terms of states), Lagos has an annual GDP of about $140 billion. The Office of Overseas Affairs and Investment put the Lagos GDP in 2017 at $136.6 billion.

Understandably, they keep going back to the trouble spots

The Igbo still make up as many as 15% of the population in some states, even taking up elective positions in local governments in Lagos. Many Igbo people believe that it is the marginalization of the southeast region that fuels the itinerant tendency of the average Igbo person, who is often tempted to move out of the region in search of greener pastures.

So, the Igbo people get attracted to Lagos as well as to Kano, Rivers, Oyo, Ogun, Kaduna, Jos, and even Maiduguri, some of which have been listed by investment experts as prime business domains in Nigeria. Igboland only has pockets of petty and small scale businesses and manufacturing that heavily depend on the prime areas for raw material, financing and sales. The communal and entrepreneurial spirit of the Igbo induce them to go ashore for bread. Thereafter, they promptly take along their kith and kin when they begin to make hay. Even agriculture in Igboland is in threat, because of insecurity and destruction of farmlands by suspected Fulani herdsmen, who also operate almost across Nigeria.

 

So much has been the loss of the Igbo that some writers have won global acclaim for documenting the fate of the southeast in writings such as Emefiena Ezeanis “In Biafra Africa Died”, and Chimamanda Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”. These are the situations that southeast leaders should first seek to redress. It is this situation that results in the serial quest for secession among the Igbo. For the Igbo, the advice from many quarters has been to remain the best example of unity in diversity and oneness in nationhood. It is hard to justify any call for southeast business men and women to return home to develop their land, after making money from other lands. Yet, with the system of systematic dispossession experience since the end of the war, the advice is only expedient and situational. It should be heeded. It is however, a great shame that those who are always accused of trying to divide the country are those who flock to other regions to contribute mammoth development.

 

Our federal and state leaders, like in the case of Rwanda, need to use the civil war as a turning point for progress instead of using it as a point of ethnic hatred. To blur the serial cases of building collapse in Lagos with ethnic politics is still a case of pursing rats while the house is on fire.

 

Dr Mbamalu is a veteran Journalist and Publisher of www.primebusiness.africa

Twitter:@marcelmbamalu