According to local authorities and witnesses, at least four people died and another was injured when a school under construction collapsed in Bukavu, a major city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on Thursday.
• Also read: Yemen: Four members of a security force killed in an attack
• Also read: Niger: The military regime that emerged from a coup has formed a government
• Also read: Nine dead and 30 injured in a bus accident in Cameroon
At around 2:30 p.m. (12:30 GMT), the Omega La Merveille school complex collapsed, killing at least four people, including the primary school director, an education counselor and a teacher, said Patience Bengheya, mayor of Bagira Municipality in Bukavu where the tragedy happened.
Dieudonné Kalabarha, a painter working on a construction site near the school, witnessed the scene: “The masons were digging while they (the teaching team) were in a meeting. The masons noticed a problem and fled. Suddenly everything collapsed, (…) the record buried her.”
This worker says he “pulled three men out of the rubble.” They were already dead.
Typson Idumbo, spokesman for the provincial government of South Kivu – whose capital is Bukavu – dismisses the seismic cause on the grounds that “there was no earthquake”.
Eastern DRC, which lies on one of the East African Rift fault lines, is subject to intense seismic activity, resulting in occasional building collapses and volcanic eruptions.
The latest case occurred in 2021 in Goma, a hundred kilometers north of Bukavu, and claimed several dozen lives.
A team has been dispatched to the site to “start the initial investigations,” spokesman Typson Idumbo said.
“The suspects are the builders themselves and the owner, because they should not have allowed the construction of a septic tank inside the building,” said Mayor Patience Bengheya.
“Imagine if we were in the era where the kids were indoors… it would be more serious than it is now,” the narrator begins.
But “God made it possible during the holiday,” the mayor concludes.
Landslides, collapses and spectacular fires keep occurring in the working-class districts of Bukavu.
More than thirty people have died in similar conditions since the beginning of the year.
Bukavu, formerly Costermansville, was founded by Belgian settlers on the southern shore of Lake Kivu in the early 20th century and was designed for around 100,000 residents.
Today there are probably around 2 million, a number that is difficult to confirm due to the lack of a census.