Imagine a state boasting over three million houses where a major safety meeting draws roughly 60,000 attendees. On paper, this sounds like a massive success in the fight against building collapses. But looking closely at the crowd shows a highly unbalanced picture. The seats are mostly filled with artisans in the built industry, while the landlords and house owners are largely underrepresented. The Lagos State Building Control Agency has spent vast resources hosting stakeholders’ engagements to stop the issue of collapse, structural failure, and other hazards in the state. Yet, the majority of the people present at these programmes are the artisans in the building sector, while the property owners who hold the purse strings and should be the first stakeholders are underrepresented at large.
On paper, LASBCA invites everybody. A former General Manager of LASBCA, Arc. Gbolahan Oki publicly announced plans to bring together a wide range of groups for these engagements, including professional bodies, regulatory agencies, property developers, local council chairmen, community leaders, market men and women, technocrats, and even students. But in reality, the artisans are the major people present. At recent LASBCA engagements, such as the one held in Oregun, the audience were majorly bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders, and painters. During these interactive sessions, the government appealed directly to these manual workers, with Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu telling artisans that they are positioned to checkmate site infractions. Adding to this, the former General Manager of LASBCA, Arc. Gbolahan Oki highlighted that property developers who want to cut corners typically use these artisans, arguing that bad business cannot happen unless the artisans agree to it. Consequently, the government has placed a massive burden on these tradespeople, urging them to reject shoddy construction and report on-site corruption. However, it is an undeniable fact that while artisans physically mix the cement and lay the blocks, it is the building owner who dictates the budget and makes the fatal decision to buy cheap, substandard materials.
