FIRE DESTROYS NIIT OFFICE IN ACCRA

 FIRE, today, gutted the office of the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT), a computer training school in Accra, destroying property worth thousands of cedis.


The office, located on the third floor ‘Abena Ateaa’ Towers, also houses several businesses and other academic institutions which have currently been closed due to the impact of the fire.


The ground floor of the seven-storey building, said to be the property of the mother of Ghanaian football international, Mr Samuel Osei Kufuor, also houses Access Bank.


Eye witnesses told the Daily Grapic that the fire started at about 6:30 am with smoke coming from the third floor of the building.

Attempts to  quench the fire proved futile as the fire extinguishers available could not put out the flames.

A call was then made to the Fire Service, who, on their arrival, took an hour to put out the fire completely in order to prevent it from spreading to other parts of the building.



The Sikkim Manipal University, a sister institution to NIIT, which shares the third and fourth floor with NIIT was also affected.




In an interview with the Daily Graphic, the Managing Director of Sikkim Manipal University, Mr Kapil Gopta, said classes for the students have currently been suspended.

“We will be having exams in April and until then, we have suspended classes for the students. We hope to find alternative classrooms should investigations on the fire delay,” he said.



On the source of the fire, Mr Gopta could not immediately confirm but expressed confidence in the GNFS to help identify the source.


A source close to the family of Mr Osei Kufuor,  blamed the current load shedding exercise as the cause of the fire outbreak.


“We are lucky it did not happen during working hours. The current load shedding exercise is not helping us at all,” he said.


He, therefore, pleaded with the government to speed up measures that would help rectify the situation in order to prevent other fire outbreaks in the future.have currently been shut down due to the impact of the fire.