News broke out earlier this week that one of the branches of arguably the largest church in Nigeria collapsed killing the resident pastor of the church and other worshippers sustaining grave injury in Makurdi, Benue state.
When it has to do with religious settings like this the first person to accuse is the devil. The default response will be some religious mantra like, “It is the work of the devil but the devil has failed the battle”. Expectedly, this was the response of the pastors of the church and other members.
Honestly, I am not oblivion of the forces of dark supernatural powers and their activities, I have seen it at work on numerous occasions and religiously and spiritually speaking the collapse of a large church building like that and the occurrence of other despicable evils could be the work of the devil but after cussing out the devil and all the accusations we will have to go back to the drawing board and analyze facts and logic on why a large church building like that collapsed.
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Building collapsing is becoming the order of the day in Nigeria; residential buildings and commercial complexes are always caving in, especially in big cities like Lagos and Abuja but a church building with thousands of active daily worshippers who could have been the victims collapsing is highly nerve-racking. Just imagine if the building had collapsed on a Sunday or during a weekly church service, hundreds of people could have died and the survivors could have blamed the devil and prayed that affliction should not rise again the second time.
I still cannot forget about a building that collapsed close to my area here in Abuja earlier this year when I witnessed many dead people being excavated from the debris of the collapsed building. Some of us wrote petitions to the Federal Capital Territory Development Agency (FCDA) and even to the FCT minister himself asking him to launch an active investigation on the cause of that collapse but we are yet to hear of what has been done about that especially if the developers and the contractors have been made to face the music of the law and steps that has been taken to ensure that incidents like that do not occur regularly hence why anytime I see or hear from the news that a building collapsed it is always traumatizing for me because most of the reason why some of these buildings do collapse is just sheer carelessness and negligence of the builders, the contractors and the development agencies contrary to the accusation that it is devil’s handwork.
We may continuously accuse the devil but the devil did not actually or directly cause them. Someone somewhere approved a building without doing a proper inspection; some developer somewhere did bribe a development control agent so as to overlook some irregularities; someone somewhere used substandard materials for the building, someone somewhere failed to properly supervise the ongoing building process, someone somewhere wanted to cut cost and used a bag of cement to get tonnes of bricks more than it was due. These were not the devil, these are human beings; believe me, the devil did not do it.
Building control agencies really need to step up their games. It is now a national crisis that the federal government will have to take charge and declare a state of emergency on building collapses and set up active task forces to monitor buildings; vet and approve new buildings, insist on standards and quality control and demolish old buildings that pose risks.
Builders also need to stop using cheap or substandard materials or trying so much to cut costs or to get more for less. These are human lives that we are using to gamble like this. If your budget as a builder is two million naira, please build a house that is worth two million naira. Trying to build a house that is worth ten million naira on a two-million naira budget is dangerous. You cannot use one bag of cement to get a hundred or even more bricks of blocks. It may save immediate cost for you but the future threat could be devastating and when it happens, everyone will blame the devil.