The Accident Investigation Bureau, Nigeria has concluded plans to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, with Saudi Arabia for the training of its investigators.
This is just as the AIB is optimistic of expanding its functions to road, rail and marine with the recent draft bill sent to the Nigerian senate for passage into law.
Speaking at a news conference after a training organized by the AIB in collaboration with the US National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB under the Safer Skies for Africa Project, the AIB commissioner, Akin Olateru said the MoU with Saudi Arabia in the area of training would focus on looking beyond the Cockpit Voice Recorders CVR and Flight Data Recorder FDR in accident investigation.
He explained that Saudi Arabia had some expertise the bureau want to tap into to make it accident reports better, adding that the Ministry of Justice had given clearance to the AIB to sign the MoU.
Olateru said the MoU would be signed in the month of September, he noted that the signing would have been done before now but was delayed due to the ongoing hajj exercise.
“It is not everything you see on the CVR and FDR you need to look beyond that sometimes and that can cause you to actually make your report a much, much better, each country has its own, we look at each nation and see what benefit to us”.
He emphasized that the AIB Nigeria had gained credibility since 2017 in accident investigation which had attracted many countries of the world to seek it assistance in the area of power training, setting up their own bureau among others.
“Currently, we have signed an MoU with France, Republic of Benin, a São Tomé and Principe and in the next one month, we will be signing with Saudi Arabia, these are great nations”.
He added, “But to me, you must have something sellable, you must have something they see in you that they have admire you before they can sign an MoU with you”.
Olateru said, “like the a Republic of Benin what they signed is if i have an accident please just come and help me I don’t even have anything on ground but if you have training please come and help me. Like Gambia, we had an agreement with them through BAGAIA today, we have helped Gambia, today Gambia has an independent Accident investigation through the help of Nigeria, we supported in writing their regulations, the Act, the whole lot even our SOPs, we helped them. They came to Nigeria, they sat with us for two weeks and we put them through and they went back to Gambia, today it has been passed by their parliament, so these are the kind of things we have been doing to help our African countries”.
On the multi- modal accident investigation, Olateru said, the AIB was fully prepared to take up this responsibility if the draft bill before the Nigeria senate as approved by the National Executive Council was passed by the National Assembly.
“We are currently, working on the possibility and the approval for AIB going multi- modal. Going multi modal means we are going to be investigating not just the air accident, we are going to be investigating the rail accident, marine and road. We are joining nations round the world who operate this multi modal system of operation.
Last year, the Federal a Executive Council of Nigeria that’s the highest approving authority for Nigeria, approved a proposal the new draft bill for AIB”.
“Before the senate went on recess, this bill is right on the table of the senate and hopefully before the end if this year, this bill will be passed and that would make AIB Nigeria one of the top nations that dies multi modal”.
Olateru who expressed optimism that the bill would be passed said, all mechanism had been put in place for the successful take off of the additional function with the recent review of its regulations two months ago.
“we reviewed our regulations to take care of all those gaps”.
“Yes, it is a huge scope but I thing you will agree with me is in AIB Nigeria we don’t charge for our work, all over the world accident investigation bureau are not expected to charge for their work NCAA do charge, they call it cost recovery but we don’t even charge anything so we expect to be funded that’s the norm a UN kind of operation for humanity sake kind of. So the more accident we have, the more money it cost the AIB because all these investigation visit us money.
If you look at the new Act that is currently sent, we have kind of increased our scope of earning to make sure it is widened to accommodate enough money for AIB Nigeria to be able to function, to be able to support itself, operations, to train, buy mire equipment necessary and then to support the whole system as a whole, so that is our strategy on that”, he concluded.
