At least 16 people have been confirmed dead after the collapse of a 21-story apartment tower which was under construction in Lagos, Nigeria. The collapse occurred on Monday, November 1st in the city’s Ikoyi district, on a construction site for luxury apartments. As of Tuesday, November 2nd, nine people have been pulled alive from the rubble with over 100 people still feared missing, many of whom are construction workers.

The apartment building had been under construction for the past two years and is one of three towers being built on the site by a private developer named Fourscore Homes. The cheapest unit to be marketed in the now-ruined structure was selling for $1.2 million. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian authorities have now arrested the owner of the building on undisclosed charges.

In June of this year, the building site was temporarily sealed off for failing to meet structural integrity requirements and to allow for anomalies to be corrected before construction recommenced. In the aftermath of the collapse, the city’s chief architect Gbolahan Oki has claimed that the property’s developers added six more floors than was originally approved by the building permit, illegally bringing the building’s height from 15 floors to 21 floors. However, the Lagos state government has subsequently placed Oki on indefinite suspension while an independent investigation is launched into the collapse.

While the cause of the collapse remains unknown, the incident has amplified a concern over poor enforcement of building code regulations in Lagos, as well as poor workmanship by private developers seeking to keep pace with the city’s housing demand. In 2014, a religious guesthouse in the city collapsed due to structural failure while additional floors were being constructed in the building. 115 people were killed in the incident.

Meanwhile, an expert on Lagos development warned CNN in 2019 that over 1,000 buildings in the city were at risk of collapse, following the loss of dozens of lives in two separate building collapses that year.

The underlying structural questions surrounding the latest collapse mark a comparison with the aftermath of the Champlain Towers South condo collapse in Miami, which we reported on in June of this year. 98 people were killed when the Surfside apartment tower collapsed, with investigations still underway following the building’s history of structural deficiencies.