In a bid to secure the Nigeria waterways, the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), to provide weather information and data that will aid boat operations.
Speaking on the agreement, the managing director (MD) of National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), Chief Dr George Moghalu said, ” We are here to build a relationship. Like I said earlier, when the DG NiMet visited me, we received them and I made a promise a commitment that I was going to return the visit. So, in the course of that discussion, we agreed to work together as a team. It was a need for us to come together for the benefit of our people.
“We have set up two technical teams, NIWA and NiMet technical teams and we will be working together. And they’ve come to a point where a memorandum of understanding was developed and then we set out today to do the formal signing of that memorandum. But, before today, we have been having meeting, we have been working, collaborating, sharing information, sharing data, so that we can use it to improve navigation for us, in all our waterways.”
Also speaking on the target of the agreement, Moghalu said,
“We have the information to work with. Information is power. When you talk about statistics, we’ll talk about data, that’s the principle essence because when we have the data, for example, if we have information with regards to weather conditions, we can advise on our boat operators not to put your vessel on the water at this time because NIMET has advised. We also have an in house weather department. So, by time we collaborate on information, we get get the data and distribute to our area offices and they give them to our critical stakeholders and keep them informed. So basically, information is key and Information is power.”
While speaking on the agreement, the director general and chief executive of NiMet, Prof Mansur Matazu said: “I can say we are really fulfilled today because we are achieving one of our mandates of providing effective weather service especially for safe navigation for Nigerian air and land water ways.
“We have been doing this over a course line of 800kilometers under NIMASA and NPA partnership and we have been doing this for several years and now it is perfecting the whole navigational system of Nigeria as we are doing in aviation.”
He further said: “for us, NiMet is in the market place of product and services. Based on our mandates, service or information or product to own the socio economic sectors of the country and all these sectors are weather sensitive: agriculture, water resources, health and environment and the setup of NiMet is also aligned with these because they have various directorates and units are responsible for the different sectors.
“We have a lot of shipping activities whether for fishery or movement of goods into the country and so on. The shippers collect these information abinitio from other countries and come to Nigeria so we have improved on our information and also our service to provide the information needed.”
