By Peter Fabricius
Foreign Editor
Over 50 South Africans died when a multi-storey guesthouse collapsed on Friday at famous faith healer TB Joshua’s church in Lagos, shocked officials disclosed.
“This is the biggest calamity we have experienced outside the country,” one official said, describing the shock discovery, five days after the accident, that so many of the dead and injured were from this country.
The official sources said over 300 South Africans had been staying in the structure which mostly housed visiting foreigners on the campus of The Synagogue, Church of All Nations.
Joshua has been very popular for many years with South Africans, many of whom, suffering serious or even incurable illnesses, have flocked to Lagos, hoping to be cured.
The full extent of the calamity only dawned yesterday. Although the building collapsed on Friday and the South African consul-general and his staff had been on the site since early Saturday morning, they had not been able to establish by yesterday morning for certain if any South Africans had been killed or badly injured.
South Africans officials had learned earlier from the relatives of those at the church and through tour operators that at least five South African church tour groups were staying at the Synagogue church at the time the building collapsed.
So they suspected many South Africans were probably injured or even killed but couldn’t get any reliable information from the Nigerian authorities.
“The building collapsed on Friday. How can you not know, whether there were any South Africans injured?” one irritated official had said.
Then the full horror of the accident began to emerge during the course of yesterday as the South African diplomats on the ground in Lagos began to get confirmation of the South African casualties. Officials said that over 300 South Africans had been staying in the large guesthouse and that over 50 had died when it collapsed.
Countless others were injured. “We’ve never had something like this happen to us before,” one shocked official said, adding that the government was preparing a response.
It was not clear last night if the government would send a disaster rescue team to Lagos last night. Survivors were still being pulled out of the rubble alive yesterday and so it seemed that more lives could still be saved.
Joshua has tried to implicate Islamic extremists in the building collapse, publishing a video purporting to show a mysterious aircraft flying low over the building four times before the disaster, Sapa-AP reported.
He told a televised service Sunday that his church has been targeted before by Nigeria's homegrown Boko Haram extremist group. He told congregants that enemies were trying to keep them from his church, but not to worry since he was the main target.
However Nigerian emergency response officials said the building appeared to have collapsed because of poor construction work. They said workers were trying to build two additional floors onto an existing four-story structure without reinforcing the foundations.