What is the importance of surveying to the Nigerian economy?

The importance of mapping and surveying the Nigerian economy cannot be overemphasized. It is also the determination of the relative position of the surface of the earth. If we decide to break it further down, that is capturing both wanted and unwanted information on the surface of the earth and processing the data. After processing the data, you keep the information to be used in later days for informed decision-making and sustainable development. That is the simplest way of explaining the importance of Surveying and mapping because surveying has so many branches. We have surveyed in civil engineering, we have surveyed in Geodesy, i.e, trying to know that thing that is not visible to the eyes, which are domiciled underneath the earth surface. We have surveying in the air that is what we call photogrammetric before now. However, that has diversified into a lot, we now use the drone to carry out surveying, and these are new technological advances in surveying. In the past, we used photogrammetric but now, we are using drones to survey and map large areas with more sophisticated equipment and the process of mapping and carrying out information for Sustainability. We have surveying and mapping everywhere.

In one of your recent meetings, the Survey Coordination Conference to be exerted, you said that surveying can be used to guarantee food security in not just Nigeria but the entire continent of Africa. How can this be achieved using surveying and mapping?

We deliberately picked that topic because we were looking at the possibility where we will have a kind of shift in the way and manner we attend to our agricultural activities in this country. Farming as we know, growing up in this part of the world was rudimentary with cutlass and hoe. But what we are advocating now is a shift from that rudimentary method to a more advanced way of farming. There are new ways through which we can have three seasons of farming each year instead of the one season that we are used to. What we are saying is that we can use the drone to help big-time farmers in the country to do soil type analysis to determine what kind of crop we can plant in a particular soil type to maximize yields. Beyond the crop, what are the nutrients underneath the ground? The nutrients that are good for yam production may not be the same for corn and vegetables. What we are saying in essence is that we can use a drone to carry out soil analysis and when we carry out this analysis we will be precise on what kind of crop is suitable for farm A or B. But that is not what we are trying to look at alone, that is just the minutest part of it. What we are looking at is, if we go to the farm now, as energetic as we are and we decide to say, let us go into farming. Will we be looking at farming one plot, or one hectare, or fifty acres of farmland? If we are talking of food security, we should talk about mechanized farming and when we talk about mechanized farming we are talking about semi or full automated mechanized farming. We still have the kind of mechanized farming where human capital still plays major roles in operating the tractors and all that, which is a semi-automated system. So, what we are saying is that we can program these tractors and other modern farming implements to start from a particular spot in the farm, the process to an end and turn to other direction of the farm that we want and thereafter move to the shelter where it will be serviced and reprogrammed for the next day’s job. I don’t know if it has occurred to us how great countries like China and the Philippines were able to feed their population without importing food from outside. They are into full automated mechanized farming. These had to do with the Continuous Reference Station and the tractors. The Continuous Reference Station streams the information because the whole farm was mapped and the tractor via the information from the Continuous Reference Station, knows its location and also knows the kind of crop to drop at a designated spot. That is why we are saying that the kind of farming we are still practicing in Nigeria will not help us, even when we have arable lands everywhere. If we go up North and drive 120 kilometers an hour, look at the kind of land we have there as a country. The state government should go into full automated mechanized farming. This is what we are trying to promote. People should come in, collaborate with this office, so we can use our drone to carry out a soil test and analysis for interested parties so that they can know the kind of crops they need to plant to maximize benefit. Looking at our numbers now, though we are not as big as China, our population is still within the range of 200 to 210 million. Our next census will confirm how many we are and not these estimated figures. When you compare us to China with a population of two billion people, the disparity is much. But what we are saying is that we need to feed our population and still export to earn foreign exchange for the government and boost our balance of trade on the international front.

Beyond the advocacy that we have seen thus far on this particular issue. What practical steps is your office taking to get the state government involved in this project?

That was why we organized the meeting you referenced in your earlier question, and deliberately chose that topic to draw their attention. We are also collaborating with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture. We have a unit in the ministry and with the unit there, we will showcase this to them. We also invited them to be part of that meeting so that they can take the message home. They even signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), with this office to help in the advocacy. What we are advocating is that we should stop manual and subsistence farming. We need to mechanize our farming processes so that we can shift away from the oil economy. In the next 20 to 50 years, there will not be anything like oil, whether we like it or not. As we are all aware, research is ongoing on fossil oil, which is part of a global effort to phase away the crude oil economy to pave for a cleaner energy regime in the world. Already, some countries are test-running electric cars which is part of the grand design to discourage overreliance on petroleum products.

Foreign Investors often complain that it is only in Nigeria that an investor starts his business from group zero because of an absence of data. How frequently are we supposed to update our maps in line with global best practices?

My brother, it is the problem of funding. This office is grossly underfunded. It is just our appeal and we are still complaining to the government. We tried to access some donor funding and approach some organizations so that they will come to our aid. The last time we mapped Nigeria was around 1967, 1970 and1971 and it was solely funded by the Canadian government. There had never been any other attempt to map this country as a whole since then. What we are doing is that if we are interested in a particular topo shift, we will map that area or state in question that we are interested in, at our headquarters or state headquarters. So, what we do is just to map that place or if we are interested in particular mineral resources, we just look at that window and map that part. What we are saying is that there cannot be any sustainable development without mapping. One thing is to talk about development and the other thing is to talk about how to sustain it. If you want particular information on a particular topic or a particular issue, this office should be able to give you the information because this office is everywhere. Very soon, a particular type of aircraft may not be able to fly into Nigeria. Somebody said that some aircraft types are not already coming in due to a lack of certain survey information. There is a need to provide gravity runway information. If we cannot provide that as a country, some airlines will not come in because aircraft run on auto. We need to provide information about the obstacles around the airport. They will not come because they don’t have the information which, that they needed to program into the aircraft. As a pilot is approaching or taking off from an airport, even when he makes a mistake, the system will notify him. I sense that we may likely hit an object if we go this way, and the pilot will take note and rectify the mistake he made earlier that warranted the auto warning.

The map of Africa as we have it today was said to be the product of European explorers and imperialists. As the number one Surveyor in Nigeria and by extension Africa. Is the map of Africa the true reflection of the continent?

Based on the technology available at the time the map was produced, we can say that the current map of Africa is not the true reflection of the continent. But other questions are, has there been any attempt to validate or invalidate the map of Africa that was handed over to us? Has there been funding to truly map the continent? We had read in some places where some scholars came up with semi-prove that the map of Africa is not the true reflection of the continent. I said semi-prove because it has not been subjected to the full rigor of academic tests to say that this is how the map of Africa is supposed to be or not. Some people said that there was an attempt to downgrade the size of Africa, especially, when compared with maps of other continents of the world. There are proofs but most of these hypothesis has not been validated through proper research or remapping. Surveying is scientific, so, what we cannot substantially defend, we cannot say that it is true or not.

Has your office been able to send the proposal to United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU), or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to substantiate this claim, as the number one surveying agency in Africa?

We have not been able to do that because we don’t even have funds to map Nigeria, let alone Africa. We are still struggling to map Nigeria, so if you now go into research on whether Africa has its true shape or not, it is of no consequence at the moment. So, we should concentrate our energy on how to develop National Geospatial Data Infrastructure. When you hear people talk about Geospatial Data Infrastructure, what they are saying is that the whole country has been mapped and they have all the information about their country in a digital format, stored somewhere on the saver. When we talk about transportation systems, we have information about the transportation system. When we say that there is an attack somewhere, we will quickly go to the system and tell people that they don’t need to follow trunk A road because of the attack. They can follow trunk B road or A road because we have this information. But again, where do we have this information, how do we send it out? We disseminate what we have and what we don’t have we don’t disseminate. But it is not when we have problems that we will start sourcing for this very important information, no. We are supposed to map and keep and once we don’t map and keep this information we will not have anything to fall back on in the period of crisis. In advanced countries, this critical information is called personal geospatial data information. We should attempt to develop our NGDI and develop better data. This is because, if we are the primary source of an information, we will have the right to disseminate it when the need arises. This practice where individual institutions lay claim to data is not healthy for us as a country. There is a need to bring all the MDAs under one platform for better management of information. There should be cross-fertilization of ideas instead.

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Some surveyors alongside other professionals in the built environment said that the Nigerian Land Use Act 1978 is obsolete and therefore, needs to be repealed and re-enacted. Do you share this in sentiment?

Of course, I do. The Nigerian Land Use Act 1978 is obsolete and there are so many flaws in it. For example; the place of surveying and mapping is not properly defined in that legal instrument. But that is a discussion for another day. The Nigerian Land Use Act 1978 has a lot of misinformation. There is a need to put the right peg in the right hole. If surveying and mapping, as well as the Surveyor-General of the Federation, is not recognized in the Act, then there is a need to sit down and review the Act or come up with entirely new legislation. We need to adopt a modern legal framework that had worked elsewhere. The Act is obsolete and retrogressive.

There has also been a call by relevant stakeholders for the review of the Survey Coordination Act 1962. Do you also support this call for a review of the Act?

Yes, I support the call because everything about Survey Coordination Act is obsolete and outdated. The law was enacted in 1962. If there had not been any attempt to review the law since then, it shows that the law has outlived its usefulness. Its usefulness in terms of flexibility to technological advances, its usefulness in terms of the way surveying is carried out in this digital time. It is also outdated in terms of the school curriculum. When I left the university 20, 30 years ago, the surveying equipment used in teaching us is gradually phasing out, even when I had not applied up to 40 percent of that knowledge. New equipment is already replacing those, so there is a need for a legal framework that accommodates and recognizes these new changes. Whether we like it or not the equipment must continuously be upgraded to meet the dynamics of modern times. The law provides that before one carries out any form of surveying and mapping, the person must come to this very office to take permission and when he is done with it, he will come back to this same office with his results, which of course will be the hard copy for vetting and approval. But today, a hard copy is no longer required, what the person needs to bring now for approval is the compact disc containing the work. We will then slot it in our machine to check if what he has is right or wrong. The legal framework needs to capture some of these shifts in the way we conduct our work. We have moved from analog to digital. Survey Coordination Act 1962 needs to be looked at holistically and reviewed.