This paper assessed some of the reported cases of building failures and their possible causes in Nigeria between 1977 and 2011. The reported major failure causes are structural failure (SF), Carelessness (CLSS), poor workmanship (PW), poor supervision (PS), poor materials (PM), and quackery (Q).These causes of failure were subjected to Chi-Square statistical test at 5% significant level and 4 degree of freedom to know the most common cause of failure in Nigeria. The analysis showed quackery as the principal culprit in the reported building failures in Nigeria with prevalence of 8 over poor supervision being the minimum in occurrence. Structural failure occurred 5 times, while poor materials, carelessness and poor workmanship occurred 4, 2 and 2 respectively. The Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) with Engineering Regulation and Monitoring (ERM) as her arm as a technical professional group discouraging quackery and failures generally in Engineering Practice. The holistic approach needs effective training of Engineers starting with strong mathematical and scientific background at the secondary and tertiary education levels in conjunction with rigorous field and Industrial training exercises. There after effective scrutiny, professional registration process of competent engineers is followed.

The World Bank and United Nations do normally use the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure the progress of nations. The usual criticism of this parameter is that GDP is too narrow and limited to absolutely measure the development of any country. In this paper, the author attempts to measure the development index for West African countries over a period of 40 years (i.e. 1960 -2000) using a composite value of 13 socioeconomic development indicators including demographic, health, education, employment, life expectancy data as well as the GDP. Using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) statistics, the author computes the principal factors, the factor scores, eigen values and communalities of the data obtained per year. The resultant development index for each of the years were tabulated and graphically presented for clarity purposes. The analysis reveals that although the countries varied in their developmental path over the years, most nations rose and fell at different times. ANOVA showed that there is no significant change in the development of the countries prior to the establishment of ECOWAS (1960ECOWAS ( -1975 and after ECOWAS has been established . Its recommendations include good governance and ECOWAS intervention for improving the Member States since more nations recorded improved development index under better administrations.