Twenty-two people were killed after a two-storey school building collapsed in Plateau state of central Nigeria, Sky news reported on Saturday.
A total of 154 people were trapped under the debris, and everyone apart from those who died were rescued. The injured are being treated in various hospitals, Sky news said citing a police spokesperson.
The authorities said that the two-storey building collapsed on Friday shortly after students, many of whom were 15 or younger, arrived for classes.
The building belonging to Saint Academy in the Busa Buji community of Jos north district in the state, collapsed during school hours around 0730 GMT.
The school is believed to have more than 1,000 pupils.
Thirty people are still in hospital, Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a Facebook post, adding that rescue efforts had ended and the site cleared.
NEMA said rescue and health workers and security forces were deployed at the scene immediately after the building collapsed.
“To ensure prompt medical attention, the government has instructed hospitals to prioritize treatment without documentation or payment,” Plateau state’s Commissioner for Information, Musa Ashoms, said in a statement.
The state government of Plateau said that the tragedy was caused by the school’s “weak structure and location near a riverbank”
It urged schools facing similar issues to shut down.
Residents said that the collapse came after three days of heavy rains in Plateau.
According to news reports, a large number of villagers gathered near the school to volunteer help as excavators combed through the debris from the part of the building that had caved in.
Building collapses are frequent in Africa’s most populous country due to lax safety regulations and often substandard construction material.
In 2021, at least 45 people were killed when a high-rise building under construction collapsed in the upscale Ikoyi district in Nigeria’s economic capital Lagos.
The following year, at least 10 people were killed when a three-storey building collapsed in the Ebute-Metta area of Lagos.
