Bukavu School Collapse Claims Four Lives in DRC

At least four people were killed and another was injured when a school under construction (the Omega La Merveille) collapsed in Bukavu, a big city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s east, according to witnesses and local officials.

Around 12:30 p.m. GMT, the Omega La Merveille school complex collapsed, causing the death of at least four people, including the director of the primary school, an educational adviser and a teacher.

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Dieudonné Kalabarha, a painter who worked 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 they fled. Suddenly, everything collapsed, (…) the slab buried them”.

Bukavu, which is positioned on one of the East African Rift’s fault lines, is prone to intense seismic activity, which can result in building collapses and volcanic eruptions.

The most recent occurred in Goma, a hundred kilometres north of Bukavu, in 2021, and killed several dozen people.

A team was dispatched to the field to “begin the first investigations”, said spokesman Typson Idumbo.

“The people suspected are the builders themselves and the owner because they should not have authorized the construction of a septic tank inside the building”, burgomaster Patience Bengheya got carried away.

“Imagine if we were in the period when the children were inside … it would be more serious than now”,  But God made sure that it happened during the holidays”, concludes the mayor.

Landslides, collapses, and spectacular fires frequently wreak havoc on Bukavu’s working-class neighborhoods. Since the beginning of the year, more than thirty people have died in identical circumstances.

Bukavu, formerly Costermansville, was built for 100,000 people on the southern side of Lake Kivu by Belgian settlers around the turn of the twentieth century.

They would be around 2 million today, though this is difficult to determine due to the lack of a census.

Africanews/Jane Aluko