He shook his head intermittently in disbelief, wiping off tears with his right palm. For about two minutes, Nurudeen Solagbade, could not utter a word from his bed at the Lagos Island General Hospital.
He kept nodding his head in assurance to his worried relatives waving at him through the ward window that he was fine. The more he tried to engage them, the more he betrayed emotion.
“I never thought I would be alive,” the 33-year-old bricklayer intoned when he eventually mustered courage.
Solagbade was one of the survivors rescued from the rubble of a 21-storey building that collapsed around 2pm on Monday on Gerrard Road, Ikoyi, Lagos. The building was one of the three high-rise residential buildings owned by the Managing Director, Fourscore Heights Limited, Femi Osibona.
The building project which started in 2020 was billed for completion in 2022 with appreciable units of flats worth millions of naira said to have been sold to some potential homeowners whose dreams were shattered on Monday when the skyscraper crumbled.
As of Thursday evening, 40 corpses comprising 37 males and three females, had been recovered from the site.
Luckily, nine persons survived the tragedy with three of them treated and discharged from the hospital on Tuesday. The six others admitted at the general hospital are Solagbade, Timileyin Oduntan, 26; and Waliu Lateef, 32; Ahmed Kinleku, 19, a national of Benin Republic; Sunday Monday, 21 and Adeniran Mayowa, 37.
Solagbade, a native of Iwo, Osun State, told our correspondent who visited the hospital on Wednesday that he, Lateef and about 33 others came from Ibafo, Ogun State, on Monday to work at the site.
He explained that he was putting finishing touches to a plastering work at Floor 15 when the building suddenly collapsed.
The bricklayer stated, “Waliyu (Lateef) and I have been living in Ibafo for over 10 years. We are from the same compound in Iwo. We were about 35 from Ibafo that went to work at the site that day. We were many and came from different areas. That was my first day of working at the site. Ordinarily, I would not have gone there to work but I didn’t have any other means to feed my family.
“Waliyu, Ayo (yet to be found) and I were asked to plaster an apartment for N40,000. We were about to complete the task when the building collapsed. I initially thought it was the lift installed in the building that crashed until I found myself buried.”
Having spent a day inside the rubble without food, water or sufficient air, Solagbade felt the end had come; more so with the gory sight of dead bodies scattered around him. He and Lateef were eventually rescued on Tuesday.
“Early Tuesday morning, we heard voices of people around the site and started shouting ‘help, help.’ After some time, they responded and told us to be patient. It was God that saved us; it wasn’t our knowledge. I couldn’t believe we would come out alive and see our families again. The developer was also in the building when it collapsed. He was there with some other people.”
Solagbade sustained injuries in his spine, left leg and hand but said he was gradually responding to treatment. “I am still feeling pains in my spine and left leg. They have done a scan and they are attending to us well,” he added.