Follow Us on Google
Joe Effiong, Uyo
A former chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Uyo branch, Ekanem Ekanem, has said families of victims, dead and injured, of the collapsed Reigners Bible Church, can now sue the Uyo Capital City Development Authority (UCCDA), the government agency responsible for authorisation of buildings in the capital city.
Ekanem, relying on the findings of the a commission of inquiry set up to probe the immediate and remote causes of the collapsed building, said: “UCCDA had marked that place several times for demolition, but they did not pull it down on the claim that they had no equipment. The question is, why did you need any equipment to pull down, when, at the time you marked it, only block work was done?
“So, they are even more liable to be sued than the church because the fault lies squarely on the doorstep of UCCDA. They saw a building where it should not be and turned a blind eye.”
Ekanem wondered why the commission tried to indict Pastor Weeks, on the grounds that he asked that a scaffolding be removed from the centre of the church, a day to the event, stressing that even if the scaffolding was made to remain, the building would have collapsed, because scaffolding is not part of the structures which can permanently sustain a building.
The church collapsed on December 10, 2016, and the state government set up a commission of inquiry on December 26, 2016, while a white paper published recently by the state government, based on the commission’s report, revealed that UCCDA ‘served several ‘stop work’ notices on the church, and a demolition notice on August 16, 2016, but failed to stop the construction of the building at the foundation level, and thus “was found remotely responsible for the collapse of the church building.”
