An Umuahia-based legal practitioner, Mr Goodman Iheikwunacho has urged the team of experts investigating the collapse of a three-storey building in Umuahia last Saturday to look beyond technical and regulatory issues.
The Abia state government had announced that while investigating the cause of the collapse, the remaining two buildings will be subjected to integrity test to determine their conditions since it was the same site engineer that supervised the constructions.
The legal practitioner said that the investigators should look beyond “preconceived factors and dig deeper into the incident”, adding that the scope of the investigations should not be circumscribed but expanded beyond the usual suspected factors.
He pointed out that by considering every possible factors, the investigators would be able to unravel the real cause of the building collapse and appropriate measures would be put in place to prevent future occurrences.
Iheikwunacho noted that it’s already in the public domain that the owner of the collapsed building is Chief Ikechi Emenike, who is a well known political figure, and the Abia state APC governorship candidate in 2023.
According to him, with Emenike’s, political status, the possibilities that his enemies will be at work to get at him in any possible way cannot be ruled out.
“I have also read reports in the media quoting residents of the area where the building collapsed, as saying that they heard loud boom, some said sounded like thunder, others like an explosion,” he said.
Iheikwunacho, therefore argued that Emenike being a top politician, “you never can tell if there are people nursing grievances against him (Emenike), who might resort to doing all sorts of things to damage his name and image”.
He underscored the need for the investigators to go beyond the usual technical issues of structural defects and non-compliance with building regulations and check for any trace of sabotage.
“The investigators should check for possible sabotage, take into consideration all the circumstances, and also look out for extraneous factors that might have brought down the building, because, when an edifice crumbles like a pack of cards, a whole lot of things could have been responsible,” he said.
