LASBCA warns building professionals against role overlap

Lagos State Building Control Agency

The Lagos State Building Control Agency has warned building professionals against taking on roles outside their areas of expertise.

The General Manager of LASBCA, Gbaye Florence, gave the warning on Thursday at a conference organised by the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, Amuwo-Odofin Cell, in Satellite Town, Lagos.

The conference, themed “Building Resilient Lagos through Synergy,” was held against the backdrop of the collapse of a four-storey building on Ladipo Street, Satellite Town, in June, which claimed several lives.

Gbaye said the building industry could not achieve safer construction when professionals abandoned defined responsibilities and attempted to perform functions requiring different areas of expertise.

She compared construction to a surgical procedure, where different specialists perform distinct roles towards a common outcome.

According to her, an architect should not assume the functions of a geotechnical or structural engineer, surveyor or regulator simply because those functions are connected to the same project.

She said, “The government cannot do it alone, so also professionals in the building environment – the architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical consultants, town planners – you can’t do it alone. We cannot have a resilient and safer Lagos if we continue to do this alone.”

Gbaye added, “Let the town planners do what they are supposed to do; let an architect consider the functionality by having the brief from the developer and advising them rightly on what to do. The structural engineer will ensure that the structure can safely carry its load, not saying we can manage it. Let us organise. Let us come together and engage professionals.”

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She also called on institutional bodies, community leaders and other stakeholders to alert the government to distressed buildings in their areas so that action could be taken before lives were endangered.

The coordinator of the conference, Chibuike Okafor, said the June collapse in Satellite Town had exposed the need for communities to take a more active role in building safety.

“In the face of this tragedy, we realised that the government alone cannot do it all. As a community, we have a role to play,” he said.

Okafor said the incident demonstrated the importance of collective action in protecting lives and improving the safety of communities.

The chairman of the occasion, Austin Otuoke, also described the frequency of building collapses in Lagos as a call for collective responsibility among practitioners and other stakeholders.

“We have to develop a city we can bequeath to the next generation. Lagos must develop, but we must ensure it develops safely. No government can make the state resilient alone; the answer lies in partnership,” he said.