NIWA threatens legal actions against operators violating safety rules

Temitope Adebayo

The Nigerian Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) has disclosed that it will soon start arresting boat operators driving against the agency’s safety rules. NIWA’s General Manager, Corporate Affairs; Mr. Tayo Fadile, made this disclosure in a chat with newsmen in Lagos. Fadile also revealed that NIWA’s law and code of operation is still being finetuned at Federal Ministry of Justice and as soon as they are done with gazetting the laws, the agency will start arresting offenders. According to him, the NIWA law and code of operation is with the Federal Ministry of Justice, they are supposed to gazette it. Once they gazette it, we can start arresting people who go against these laws and take them to court, because we have reasons for doing that. Fadile, however, acknowledged that the agency lacked adequate manpower to take charge of all the jetties in the country. “And NIWA does not have the capacity to check all the places that we have boats in this country at the same time. So we will continue the education and enlightenment to let people know that some of these things you don’t do it”, he explained. He identified ignorance on the part of some boat operators as one of the major reasons there is a high rate of boat mishaps in the country. Buttressing his point, he added that, “But some of them (boat operators) will tell you that their grandparents have been using the boats like that therefore they don’t are any need for improvement”. Arguing that NIWA is understaffed, he said: “We have been doing our best within the capacity that is available to us. NIWA is more than 10, 000 kilometres across the country and we have a staff of less than 500. If you remove the staff in the administrative department, if you deploy them I don’t think we can make any impact”. He stated that the agency had done a lot in terms of education and enlightenment of both passengers and boat operators, he lamented that there is a great deal of stubbornness on the part of providers and users of inland waterways. “Don’t carry excess load, or over speed, we have done all these things; we have even done documentary on all these. So what we do is self-education, we try to educate these people on the need to obey safety rules and regulations. When they tell you do not travel after 6pm and you start your journey by 9pm, what do you think will be the end result”, he asked. He said that the new Managing Director of NIWA, Senator Adeleke Mamora, has introduced Water Marshals which according to him will help reduce the case of boat mishaps. “Our MD is trying now to introduce what we call Water Marshal. For every community we try and pick some enlightened people and train them they can be our representatives.