Causes of building failure and collapse in Nigeria: professionals' view.

Abstract

Shelter or housing is the first thing humans need for living in this world even before food. The construction sector is the provider of physical infrastructure essential for human sustenance and economic development. Moreover, the advancement in vertical city expansion is enormous and to be celebrated; however in Nigeria, such development comes with huge human and material losses. For over three decades, Nigeria has been experiencing collapse of multi-story buildings. To investigate this phenomenon, primary data were collected through a questionnaire survey from professional construction consultants, contractors and clients. 150 structured questionnaires were randomly distributed of which 99 number were successfully retrieved for analysis. The 99 number questionnaires were analysed using simple statistics and charts. The result reveals that the frequency of building collapse in Nigeria is at an alarming rate and the impact is moderately major; substandard reinforcement, structural steel and cement used for the production of foundations, columns, beams and slabs are the main causes of building collapse (in descending order). While all these are associated with lapses in construction supervision with a relative importance index (RII) of 0.812 (ranked 1st) followed by construction process with RII of 0.709. Professions / professionals linked to the problems were also examined and recommendations are made based on the findings of the research.