TWO years after the federal government upgraded the scope of the former Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), now Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB) to a full multimodal entity, the bureau is being limited by the attitude of relevant government agencies.
Prior to the upgrade of the bureau, its scope was limited to investigating only air accidents or incidents until the coast was enlarged to other modes of transport including rail, road and marine.
Under the multimodal entity, the NSIB is empowered to take over investigations into any emergency that may occur in any of the transport modes in the country with the full cooperation of the officials in the different agencies.
However, the Director-General of the NSIB, Captain Alex Badeh Junior, revealed how other modes of transportation, apart from the aviation industry are not cooperating with the bureau on accident investigation.
Badeh cited how some of the correspondences sent to agencies in other transport modes were not responded to despite the NSIB Act 2022, which empower the bureau to investigate accidents in other modes of transportation like rail and maritime.
Speaking at the maiden Transport Summit organised by the Transportation Correspondents Association of Nigeria (TCAN) with the theme: ‘Intermodal Transport: Prospects and Challenges’, the NSIB DG complained that apart from the aviation industry, other modes of transportation in the country treated safety as a secret, stressing that the transport sector required total collaboration to drastically reduce recent accidents.
While describing safety as the most paramount in all the modes of transportation, Badeh declared: “Aviation industry is the second most regulated in the world after medicine. We talk regulations all over the world. The more loss of lives, the heavier regulations you see in the industry except in Nigeria where hundreds of people die in our inland waterways and we pay lip service to that, same with the roads.
“And then we find that here, aside aviation, everyone treats safety as a secret. You approach the other agencies, but they tell you, we are not aviation, why should we collaborate with you? Accident happens, you send letter to the agencies, but they ignore you. We can’t be everywhere as a bureau. Maritime agencies for example, don’t want to cooperate with us.”
According to him, aviation is the second most regulated industry in the world after medicine with safety as the number one priority and wanted other modes of transportation to emulate same.
He, however, reiterated the readiness of the safety bureau to replicate the safety enjoyed in the aviation sector to other modes of transportation with the cooperation and support of other agencies involved.
“As far as we are concerned in NSIB, we want full cooperation of other agencies. NSIB is ready and Nigeria is ready. Accident prevention is not just the responsibility of us, the accident investigators or the regulators, it is the responsibility of the public,” he added.
Also speaking at the gathering, former Commissioner for Transport in Lagos, Dr Kayode Opeifa stated that with the birth of NSIB as a multimodal investigation agency, other agencies could not investigate themselves.
Opeifa, who is the Executive Director of the Centre of Sustainable Mobility and Access Development (CenMAD) said it was wrong to come up with the cause of any accident without proper investigation.
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