The National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) has disclosed that the agency would soon re-engage the dredgers that handled the dredging of lower River Niger some years ago, adding that it does capital dredging and not maintenance dredging.
The Managing Director of NIWA, Dr Adeleke Mamora, said this recently when the executives of the Association of Marine Engineers and Surveyors(AMES) led by its national president, paid him a courtesy visit at NIWA's zonal office in Lagos.
The NIWA boss also said that dredging of the waterways is one of the challenges the agency is facing, even as he expressed hope of addressing it.
He reiterated the need for urgent removal of wrecks on the waterways to ensure safety of navigation.
“I understand of course that often times, what we do is capital dredging, we don't do maintenance"
"And before you go back, some siltations would have occurred along the line which will now make it more difficult. We met with some contractors that handled the lower Niger dredging some years back; we are sending something to them which we need to do", he said.
Mamora explained that to ensure safety of waterways for navigation, dredging is very vital.
"It (dredging) is one of the challenges and we are looking into that, of course the safety of navigation which is a function of so many things.
Wrecks and derelicts which we need to remove on our waterways to make for our safe navigation"
"Of course we also want to be sure that the waterways are navigable which will make the dredging very important", he added.
He however reemphasized the importance of enhancing the technical capacities of the dockyards in the nation’s maritime domain.
Mamora explained that a lot of equipment are laying fallow in some of the dockyards around the country due to unavailability of technicians to man some of those equipment.
"On the issue of enhancing the technical capacities of the dockyard, I just mentioned that I discovered that both in Lokoja and in Warri where we have some of these dockyards, we have quite a number of equipment and machineries that have been laying fallow"
He reiterated the agency's commitment to revamping the dockyards.
"The reason is because we have not really had the right personnel particularly the technicians to man them. There are quite a number of things that can be done on those dockyards, but over time they have been neglected. So we are looking at how best to revamp and make these things work again because I think its not too good for us to have these things be wasting away", he told his guests.
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