Cape Town - Grieving relatives and rescue workers are desperately trying to find out precisely who were among the 67 South Africans who died when a multistorey religious guesthouse collapsed in Lagos on Friday.
At least 300 South Africans were on the campus of the Synagogue Church of All Nations on the outskirts of the Nigerian capital, and families do not know if their loved ones are alive or dead.
Palesa Jordan was told that her brother Sidima Jordan, 34, from East London, was in the building when it collapsed, but that’s all she knows.
She said: “They established that he was in that building and they could not tell us anything.
“When I asked whether he was in hospital they said they did not want to say over the phone and that they would send a team to come to South Africa and speak to us. I don’t know why they are doing this to us. If they already told us that he was in the building, what is the point of leaving us hanging like this?
“I asked, but they won’t budge.”
A representative from the Gift of the Givers charity in Nigeria, who is trying to track down the missing brother of a South African, told the Cape Argus that access to hospitals was being restricted by the government in Lagos on Wednesday.
“Officials refuse to verify any information until their internal process has been completed,” said Mohammed Jamie.
With the church’s self-styled prophet TB Joshua keeping quiet, families in South Africa are desperately seeking answers.
Gift of the Givers spokesman Imtiaz Sooliman said: “We requested our representatives in Nigeria to try and trace this family relative and check on the well-being of other South Africans.”
But by Wednesday night the organisation had hit a brick wall. Local representatives said
officials were not allowing them to enter hospitals, so they had resorted to visiting the disaster site, where rescuers were picking through the debris, to begin their own investigation.
“Movement from one area to another is very slow,” said Sooliman.
There has been criticism of the way the situation has been handled by both the Nigerian and South African governments, with information about missing South Africans emerging only on Tuesday.
But International Relations and Co-operation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said the government had been aware of the disaster as soon as the building fell.
“When it comes to how many dead, we cannot just come running until we have spoken to the families,” she told a press conference on Wednesday night.
She said her department would “leave no stone unturned” in its search, rescue and recovery operations launched earlier this week.
“This is not a time for finger-pointing. The focus here should be on giving families the urgent consular services they need.”
The department said a call centre dealing with the missing South Africans in Nigeria had been inundated with phone calls.
South African Thandeka Mayekiso recalls sitting by a window facing the building when it came down. “It was like pouring sugar on the side of a glass and you see the sugar coming down. The whole thing took about five or 10 seconds at most, but it felt like a million years.”
Mayekiso, a medical doctor from Cape Town on private business in the city, said instinct had kicked in and she started to help the injured.
The final South African death toll, released on Tuesday night, was the result of working with tour groups who organised trips to the popular church.
Voxismart Travel, a Polokwane travel agency, confirmed it had sent one of five tour groups who were lodging in the building when it collapsed.
“There were eight people from our group, some from Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, and Mpumalanga,” said an employee who declined to be named. “They left last Thursday. There were no children.” She was unsure if any from the group were among the South Africans who died.
SA2LAGOS, a tour agency based in Pretoria, said it also had a group visiting the church at the weekend. It said information on details such as the number of people in the group was “incredibly sensitive”.
Cape Town-based Soli Deo Gloria Tours, which specialises in trips to the church, said it had not had a tour group in the area when the building collapsed.
Sooliman said Gift of the Givers had had countless calls to send a search and rescue party to Lagos, but at this stage Nigeria had not called on them for help.
Both Gift of the Givers and Rescue SA were on standby in the event that there was a call for assistance.
Deputy Minister of International Relations Luwellyn Landers said there could be even more casualties.
Cape Argus