Senate Promises Speedy National Building Code Passage

The Upper Legislative Chamber of the National Assembly has promised to speedily pass all necessary legal frameworks on the revised National Building Code to forestall incessant building collapse in the country.
Senate President, Bukola Saraki, gave the assurance, while declaring open the public hearing by the senate committee on lands, Housing and Urban Development on “The Need to Prosecute Building Laws Violators”.
According to Saraki, the Upper Legislative Chamber would also employ more aggressive oversight scheme.
Saraki, who was represented by the Senate Leader, Ahmed Lawan, noted that the forum would help the legislature to “provide a platform to undertake a detailed and thorough investigation with the engagement of all the relevant stakeholders with a view to finding possible and lasting solution to these preventable housing disasters”.
He further said, “working together we will all rid our country of this menace, if not in its entirety, but bring to the barest minimum the occurrence of these disasters and also very importantly, purge the construction industry of all forms of unsafe and negligent acts in the construction processes”.
Saraki added that Nigerians had in recent times endured unacceptable incidences of building collapse, which have sadly claimed the lives of a number of people and lamented, “many cases of building collapses have been recorded with many lives lost, yet very few people are held responsible’.
However, he added that cases of building collapse were not peculiar to Nigeria, adding that across the globe, building development practitioners were working hard to reduce these incidences to the barest minimum, saying “rate of occurrences and intensity of damage are low in the advanced nations where strict controls, enforcement of the codes and high ethics of professionalism are made imperative”.
He continued, “in our country, the principal causes of these collapses are non-compliance to the building laws, use of unskilled artisans, poor supervision, inferior materials ignorance, lack of maintenance, misuse of structures, conflicts among professionals and corruption”.
He also said, “the lack of enforcement of building laws and flagrant violations is directly connected to the exacerbation of this problem, it could also be said that the non-adherence to these laws may also be linked to the other problems observed now with the constant infernos being recorded at market places across the country and other housing disasters”.
Chairman of the committee, Senator Barnabas Gemade, in his remarks, stressed the need to prosecute building  law violators in the country, saying that, “the incessant building collapses in the country had given the government and Nigerians sleepless nights due to huge loss of lives and properties”.