Managing Director, Nigeria Railway Corporation, Fidet Okhiria, shares his thoughts with LILIAN UKAGWU on the recent kidnap of train passengers in Edo State and the challenges facing the corporation, among other issues
LILIAN UKAGWU
You can see the acceptance of people using rail, and we are not there yet till we start moving freight. That is when people will start to know the benefit of a functional rail. When all the rail freight is organised to come by rail, the road will be safer. Accidents occur on the roads as a result of stress on drivers. You see a driver taking the road from Lagos to Kano to get somewhere to sleep. Some of them don’t know where to stop and sleep.
You said last week that the security measures the Federal Government put in place were not restricted to the Abuja-Kaduna train station. Why then did terrorists attack the Edo train station, which led to the abduction of 32 persons? They kidnapped people from the station. No glass was broken, nothing got missing apart from the fact that they came in and took people, who had business to do at the station. I felt bad and as usual, my greatest worry was that we had security men present, then we had the police, civil defence and the community vigilantes that we engage and pay money just to deter criminals from coming to our stations.
We are about installing those generators. So, the CCTV is there, the generators have been supplied and the powerhouse station has also been built. The installation of the generator and commissioning have been done, and not just commissioning; it is another headache for me to be able to fuel the generators at this high cost and make the CCTV really work perfectly. We are also looking at the option of how we can provide minimum solar power so that we can reduce the cost of diesel.
We are putting security measures in place to deter reoccurrence. I don’t know, but it will limit it because right now, we have what we call the medium and long term measures. In the medium term, we try to see that we monitor our train real time. At least, the driver will be able to see two to five kilometres ahead of time so that if there are suspected attackers, because it takes about one kilometre for a train to stop if the train driver sights something.
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