Twenty-two people were killed after the The Saints Academy school building collapsed last Friday.

Victor Dennis had five children enrolled in the school, he told Reuters he lost one of them in the collapse.

Twelve-year-old late Emmanuel Dennis, one of the victims, is being laid to rest at the Jos Zaria Road Cemetery.

“I went there to see the collapsed building, a two-storey, I saw the building. So, people were helping to rescue the students. My two girls, one jumped out, they (the rescue team) rescued the other one. My boy was down, it took some time before they (the rescue team) brought him out from the rubble, he had an injury on his head, I saw his dead body in the mortuary,” he said.

Survivors of the collapse were taken to Bingham University Teaching Hospital, Jos, for medical attention.

Esther David, a survivor, recounted the moment when the building collapsed on them.

“When our teacher left, we were just relaxing so a student came to call us to go for another class. Before we could leave the class, it collapsed on us,” she told Reuters.

Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutwang visited the victims in the hospital and called for a thorough review of building standards across the state’s schools.

Building collapses are frequent in Africa’s most populous country due to lax safety regulations and often substandard construction materials.

--Reuters--