By Izunna Okafor, Awka
After few hours of ONYOKOMITA’S investigative report about a four-storey building that shows dangerous crack signs of near collapse in Awka, the capital city of Anambra State, the state government has officially sealed the building.
ONYOKOMITA, on Tuesday, reported that one of the buildings in a 113-room popular hostel, known as Diamond Hostel, located near primary/secondary school around the UNIZIK Temporary Site in Awka, had developed some alarming cracks, thereby sparking off fears of a possible collapse.
This made some proactive tenants to hurriedly begin to relocate and evacuate their belongings from the compound, while many others remained, saying that they don’t have where to relocate to, or have enough money to rent house elsewhere, and further concluding that the building would not collapse, since the Caretaker had promised to bring some engineers on Wednesday to fix it.
However, following the report, the officers of the Awka Capital Territory Development Authority (ACTDA) —an agency of the state government, on Wednesday morning, stormed the scene. And upon the inspection and confirmation of the instability of the building, immediately sealed it and ordered the immediate vacation of all the tenants in the entire hostel, as the building is unsafe for habitation, as a result of the dangerous crack, which had already worsened from what it used to be on Tuesday.
In their discussions during the enforcement, one of staff ACTDA, recalled how a similar situation recently occurred in another gigantic students hostel, known as Dubai Lodge, somewhere in Ifite Awka, where the building shockingly collapsed just few hours after the ACTDA evicted all the tenants from the house after having inspected and sensed serious defect and danger in the structure.
This made the tenants to start hastening to evacuate their belongings from the hostel as ordered by ACTDA. It was observed that of the many of the tenants evacuated their belongings with mixed feelings, given that even though the eviction was for their own good, majority of them were said to have just recently rented their rooms in the hostel which some just recently renewed their rents there, and, hence, are currently stranded, with no refund of their newly-paid rent, and with no enough money to pay for another accommodation elsewhere.
Snippet of some tenants’ discussions show their crave and passionate appeal for the intervention of the relevant authorities to retrieve their newly-paid rents, so as to enable them secure and pay for accommodations elsewhere.
While the news publication about the condition of the building, the proactive intervention of ACTDA officials, and the immediate eviction of the tenants have been commended by a great majority; it was observed that many of the affected persons are seriously angry and displeased with the journalist, Izunna Okafor, for raising such alarm “in a time like this when the economy is too bad.”
Although, yet-to-be-confirmed, grapevine sources also have it that some of the bad elements affected by the latest development of the total eviction and sealing of the building, have vowed and threatened to ‘deal’ with the journalist for writing and spreading the news.
These notwithstanding, efforts by this reporter to contact the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of the Awka Capital Territory Development Authority (ACTDA), Hon. Ossy Onuko, for further inquiries regarding the agency’s ongoing operations and intervention on the building, proved abortive, as he was yet to respond to his calls as at the time of this publication.
