Lagos - About 18 South Africans remain unaccounted for in the disaster which hit the nation on Friday when a church building collapsed in Lagos, Nigeria, killing about 67 SA citizens.
South African High Commissioner to Nigeria Lulu Mnguni said on Wednesday that the death toll of 67 could go up – or even, hopefully, down as body identification experts, as well as search and rescue experts, fly into Lagos from South Africa to help his High Commission staff on the ground.
Mnguni said there was also still a possibility of finding South Africans alive in the rubble of the multi-storey guesthouse of the Synagogue Church of All Nations which collapsed on Friday - apparently because workers were trying to add two more floors without reinforcing the foundations.
Mnguni noted that a South African woman had been pulled from the rubble on Tuesday morning with just a broken wrist, so it was still possible to find survivors in the wreckage.
He said that his staff had been battling to identify the remains of the South Africans as the doctor they had sent to the local mortuary had been turned away.
On Tuesday, South African fingerprint and DNA experts would be arriving to help in the grim task of identifying the bodies.
Mnguni said almost all the people in the guesthouse when it collapsed had been South Africans. “When you go to that church, you think you’re in South Africa,” he said, describing his previous visits there.
This explained the fact that the South African death toll was about the same as the overall death toll announced by the Nigerian government.
“When we went to the church, there was only one other embassy there, Tanzania. They had about ten people in the building and all survived,”he said.
Mnguni said even the few other nationalities among the casualties seemed to be people who were living in South Africa and had come to Nigeria from there. There were also a few construction workers among the casualties, he said.
He said he had been told by TB Joshua, the charismatic tele-evangelist and self-styled prophet and faith healer who runs the church, that about 500 South Africans visited it every week.
Independent Foreign Service