|
And The Building Came Down! By Ifedigbo Nze Sylva Award winning writer Chimamanda Adichie- some one I have great admiration for- once wrote in the Guardian that Buildings fall down, pensions aren't paid, politicians are murdered, riots are in the air ... and yet I love Nigeria. While I very much respect her personal opinion which she is entitled to, I doubt if she would still hold that opinion after visiting the site of the recent collapsed business plaza in the Jabi area of Abuja. The date was Tuesday 29th July 2008. I was at the Zankli Medical Center, Utako Abuja when a noisy siren blaring police van (not an Ambulance) rushed in with the first set of rescued victims of the building collapse. Naturally, the sight caused a frenzy in the hospital premises with nurses jumping in and out-like in the movies- to give attention to the patients. It wasn’t long before words went round that a building had just come down. The patients looked like people who just had a swim in the mud with their entire bodies covered with brown dust. Their clothing which seemed more like rags- the normal Nigerian labourer’s look- clung miserably to their bodies barely covering up their nakedness. Their faces were expressionless and my, they were a pitiful sight. At that point, no one could-except perhaps the police officers who brought them in- tell the magnitude of the disaster. The victims though bearing many visible injuries were still able to walk in to the hospital themselves. When later in that evening I got to see the footage of the site on television, it became obvious that those victims I saw were those who were lucky to have been only slightly harmed. Over fifty other not too lucky ones were buried under the rubble. Collapsed buildings have always seemed the exclusive reserve of Lagos. Now that Abuja seems to be joining in at a mind burgling magnitude, there are enough reasons to be concerned especially as Abuja is currently one huge construction site. As usual, each time there is a building collapse, we begin to hear talks of the poor quality of building materials, the use of substandard products and the activity of half -baked site engineers. Top government officials and representatives of the Nigerian Society of Engineers take up space in the newspapers and the broadcast media to hype and hype on the problem and conveniently apportion blames in such a way that they exonerate themselves. One or two people get to be suspended like the FCT administration just did and before long, we forget it all. The dead mourn their dead and soon it is business as usual. Since we seem quite aware that there are so many sharp practices in the building industry, and that when these sharp practices go unchecked and result in a disaster, so many Nigerian lives would be lost, why then do we appear perpetually unable to check them? Why do we wait until there is a disaster before we wake up from our trance and begin to apportion blames? I am not a building engineer and do not lay claims to having the competence to talk on such technical issues as the right measurement of rods to be used in making a pillar and all that. But even to the most illiterate mind, it will be obvious that all is not well in Nigeria’s building spheres. This piece is however not intended to dwell on the many questions arising as a result of the collapse-I would let the experts handle that- I will rather concern myself with our very pitifully slow and I dare say annoying response to emergency in Nigeria. Many hours after the collapse, most of the victims were still helplessly buried under the rubble. People were just gathered around the site looking on like spectators. The police and the members of the Civil Defense corps on ground could do very little. Even when the Honourable Minister of FCT visited the site, not a single significant rescue activity had begun. Some of the trapped victims were reported to have made phone calls to their family members, a while later, they couldn’t be reached again. First their credits finished, then their batteries died and then most likely, they too died. As usual, every one was waiting for Julius Berger (a German construction company) to come and help. Graciously, Julius Berger and another company Dantata and Sawoe turned up and to them were left the responsibility of saving whatever lives there was left to save. There was no sight of officers of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) for up to four hours after the incident. On several occasions in the past, NEMA, this bogus agency of Government, which was created to give prompt help to victims of disasters and emergencies, has been caught flat footed. The agency in my opinion is yet to neither fulfill the need for its creation nor justify its allocations in the annual budget. If NEMA cannot be at the site to mobilize and coordinate rescue operations four hours after a major incident as the one under discourse, in no less a place as the federal capital territory, Abuja, then it is practically unnecessary having the agency existing in the first instance. Some time ago the nation was treated to a national drama when we could not locate the crash site of a passenger plane (Bellview Airline) which suddenly went out of the skies. When we finally did-through the help of AIT(a TV station)- after so many hours of running from pillar to post, not a single person could be rescued. Shortly after, when the ill-fated Sosoliso belly landed in Portharcout, the airport fire service station had no water to quench the inferno. So many lives that could have been saved were lost. More recently, a Beech Aircraft went missing and is shamefully, still missing. Such summarizes our level of response to emergencies in this country and sincerely if you were a relation of any one that was trapped in the collapsed plaza, and watched helplessly as precious time was lost before help could come to save that relation of your, you will definitely not agree with Chimamanda Adichie. You will curse the day you were born a Nigerian. We all appreciate the fact that in human societies there must be accidents and disasters and it behoves on us to prepare for them. That I believe is the idea behind the establishment of Agencies like NEMA which shouldn’t-in my thinking-be just another government office with civil servants who report to work by 10am every working day, sit around doing nothing for hours and then go back home at 4.00pm and a Director General who moves around in a chauffer driven car, but a mobile, perpetually at alert body, able and ready to respond promptly to any situation wherever, whenever. Until we learn to take emergencies seriously and respond to them with the speed and seriousness they deserve, we shall not be able to move forward as a people. Human life is extremely precious and any society-like ours- that treats human life with such an I don’t care attitude is surely not a sane society. My heart goes out to all the victims of the Jabi collapsed building disaster as well as their friends and family. In this confused nation of ours, I feel so strongly about the fact that we stoically await the same fate. Ifedigbo Nze Sylva
|