Femi Osibona's trajectory was the kind of story Lagos loves to tell. He started as a shoe salesman before moving into property development, building projects in Hackney, London, in Atlanta, Georgia, and near Johannesburg, South Africa. His company, Fourscore Homes Limited, was based in Ikoyi -- the same upscale Lagos neighborhood where the 360 Degrees Towers would rise. The project was ambitious: three high-rise buildings on Gerrard Road, with the tallest designed as a luxury residential tower. Apartments were marketed to Nigeria's elite and diaspora buyers eager to own a piece of Lagos's booming skyline. But the Lagos State Building Control Agency had approved plans for only fifteen floors. By the time the tower reached its full height, it stood six stories taller than anything the agency had sanctioned.

Construction workers were still on site when the collapse began. Early official estimates placed about forty workers on the property that afternoon. The tower did not topple sideways or shear apart in sections -- it pancaked, each floor compressing onto the one below. Rescue teams from the National Emergency Management Agency converged on the site, working alongside local responders under the supervision of the Lagos State Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development. By November 6, fifteen people had been pulled alive from the rubble, though eight were critically injured. But for most of those trapped inside, the compressed layers of concrete and steel left no survivable space. The confirmed death toll reached forty-two. Structural engineers later told reporters they had warned the project's owners about the building's integrity before the collapse, warnings that went unheeded.

The Ikoyi collapse did not occur in isolation. Lagos has a grim record of building failures: collapses in 2006, the Synagogue Church building disaster in 2014, another collapse in 2016, and a school building that came down in 2019 -- each one a reminder that the city's construction boom has consistently outpaced its enforcement capacity. The Lagos State Building Control Agency suspended its general manager, Gbolahan Oki, in the immediate aftermath. An independent investigation panel was given thirty days to produce findings, and their report was eventually presented to the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria in February 2022. Meanwhile, the state government seized the two remaining towers and announced plans to demolish them.

Not everyone accepted the government's response. In August 2022, a group of fifteen subscribers -- people who had paid for apartments in the 360 Degrees complex -- filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent demolition of the surviving towers. Their argument was direct: no independent engineering report had demonstrated that the remaining structures were unsafe or beyond repair. The suit also turned the government's own failures back on it, alleging that state agencies had been negligent in supervising the construction of the tower that collapsed. It was a messy legal tangle, pitting bereaved families and angry investors against a government scrambling to account for its own role in the disaster. The case laid bare an uncomfortable truth about Lagos's construction landscape -- that responsibility for a building's safety is diffused across so many parties that, when things go wrong, accountability becomes almost impossible to pin down.