Collapsed Synagogue Building has no Approval, is illegal – Commissioner

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Title: Collapsed Synagogue Building has no Approval, is illegal – Commissioner
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Tweet T he Lagos state Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Develpoment, Oluwatoyin Ayinde, on Thursday said the collapse...

The Lagos state Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Develpoment, Oluwatoyin Ayinde, on Thursday said the collapsed six-storey building of the Synagogue Church of All Nations has no government approval, and is illegal. He disclosed this while giving testimony before the coroner probing the cause of the building collapse. It would be recalled that the building on 12 September leading to the death of over 115 people while several others sustained varying degrees of injuries.

According to Ayinde, his ministry conducted investigations on the collapsed building and found out it had no approval, adding that only the church’s main auditorium had an approval for five floors but had now been raised to eight floors. 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,” he added.

It would also be recalled that after the building collapsed, the church blamed it on some aircrafts that had hovered over it shortly before the accident, but Ayinde disputed this theory, saying 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 also added that the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, had written a letter to his ministry informing them that the some aircrafts belonging to Nigeria Air Force were going to be having rehearsals at that time around that place. Ayinde, “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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