Three rescued, others trapped as a one-storey building collapses under construction in Mushin, Lagos. Probes into substandard materials and oversight begin.
Mushin Horror: Reckless Construction and Shoddy Oversight Lay Bare Lagos’s Deadly Pattern
On Sunday, 18 May 2025 at approximately 15:40 hrs, a one-storey building under construction suddenly pancaked on Ishaga Road in Mushin, directly opposite the Idi Araba Central Mosque, sending shockwaves through one of Lagos’s most densely populated quarters.
The unfolding tragedy – three people were ferried to safety, while others remained perilously buried in unstable rubble – is the latest grim chapter in a long catalogue of avoidable calamities that have claimed countless lives across Nigeria’s commercial nerve-centre.
At the scene, panicked residents scrambled for shovels and their bare hands, racing against time as dust and despair enveloped the once-bustling site.
Within 16 minutes of the distress call, the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA) had dispatched its Rapid Response Team from Cappa base, confirming the collapse and initiating recovery operations.
By press time, one survivor had miraculously been pulled out alive, and no fatalities had been officially recorded – a rare silver lining amid unfolding tragedy, according to Permanent Secretary Dr Femi Oke-Osanyintolu.
Structural Failure or Systemic Failure?
While the precise cause remains officially undetermined, preliminary assessments by on-site engineers point to a lethal cocktail of substandard materials, inadequate supervision and cavalier engineering practices.
Yet this is no isolated occurrence. In March 2016, a five-storey block in Lekki gave way mid-construction, killing at least 30 people and injuring dozens more – a disaster Reuters attributed to regulators’ failure to enforce contravention notices and unchecked additions of extra floors.
More recently, in November 2021, a glittering high-rise in Ikoyi collapsed, leaving 42 dead and exposing the impotence of Lagos’s construction watchdogs.
According to the BBC, Lagos now endures an average of one building collapse every fortnight – a macabre statistic that speaks volumes about chronic regulatory neglect, perverse political influence and near-total immunity for errant developers.
Despite well-published building codes and inspection regimes, enforcement is routinely thwarted by bribes, forged documents and opaque approval processes.
Those who cut corners are seldom held to account, emboldening a culture of impunity that repeatedly clogs hospitals and fills morgues.
Residents’ Fury and Official Bluster
In Mushin, tempers flared alongside mounting dust clouds. Eyewitness Abdulrahman Jimoh angrily lamented: “We warned the contractor and local officials last month – the walls were already cracking after heavy rains.”
His sentiments echo countless cries across Lagos: from Ojodu-Berger to Ikota, communities have long sounded the alarm over the perils of profit-driven construction in the absence of robust oversight.
Meanwhile, government spokesmen fall back on ritual assurances. Dr Oke-Osanyintolu vowed a “thorough investigation” even as his agency scrambled excavators and chainsaws to free trapped victims.
LASEMA, Lagos State Fire and Rescue Service, Lagos State Ambulance Service (LASAMBUS) and the Neighbourhood Safety Corps have all mobilised under the glare of impatient cameras.
Yet similar pledges after previous disasters have led, at best, to meagre fines and at worst, a slow fade from public consciousness.
Accountability Deferred, Tragedy Repeated
Political will is the missing pillar in Lagos’s infrastructure architecture. Despite President Bola Tinubu’s High-Level Infrastructure Council and Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s repeated pronouncements on “zero-tolerance for substandard building”, cascading collapses persist.
Developers routinely exploit loopholes – bribing local authorities to overlook contraventions or to rubber-stamp flimsy engineering plans. Even after loss of life, prosecutions are rare, sentences lenient, and restitution scant.
Just yesterday’s collapse must be the final straw. The sheer frequency and human cost of these incidents demand urgent reforms: criminal prosecutions for culpable engineers and contractors, independent audits of ongoing projects, and transparent publication of building approvals.
Lagos cannot continue to trade human lives for hurried profit.
A Call to Action
The people of Mushin – and all Lagosians – deserve assurance that their lives matter more than bottom-line returns.
A no-nonsense Construction Accountability Board should be empowered to sanction and bar irresponsible firms, while community-based monitors could be trained to flag early warning signs before walls bow and roofs cave in.
Digital tracking of permits, real-time publication of inspection reports and severe penalties for falsified documents would serve as potent deterrents.
As excavators claw through mounds of debris, the latest survivors– and the families of those still missing – must not be the last victims.
For every lives saved today, countless others could perish tomorrow unless Lagos confronts its building-collapse epidemic head-on.
In Mushin, as darkness fell on Ishaga Road, rescuers continued their painstaking labour of hope. But without swift institutional overhaul and unflinching enforcement, this horror is destined to repeat – and the next collapse may not yield the mercy of survivors.
- Additional report from Taiwo Adebowale and Omonigho Macaulay
