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Rotimi Ajayi, Abuja
Posted to the Web: Sunday, October 30, 2005
The National Emergency Management Agency is an agency that many Nigerians may not know exists until there is a calamity of the type that happened to Nigeria penultimate Saturday when the Bellview Flight 210 from Lagos to Abuja crashed at a village near Ifo in Ogun State. The agency was set up to among other things plan against national disasters as well as mitigate the effect of disasters and emergencies. Initially, NEMA was set up as emergencies relief agency but later, the enabling Act, Act 12, was amended with the result that its scope of activities was widened, to include search and rescue in Act 50 of 1999.
Of the 12 topical role assigned to NEMA by the Amended Act 50 of 1999, three were very salient and it is on the basis of these that Nigerians could actually assess the performance or otherwise of the agency connected to the Lisa plane disaster in Ogun State. NEMA’’s arguments seem to have shown gross negligent of duty on the part of other agencies as well.
The Act specifically saddled NEMA with formulation of policy on all activities relating to disaster management in Nigeria and coordination of the plans and programs for efficient and effective response to disaster at national level.
Also the agency is to monitor the state of preparedness of all organizations or agencies which may contribute to disaster management in Nigeria and collate data from relevant agencies, so as to enhance the forecasting, planning of field operations of disaster management.
When the plane crashed in Lisa, it did in such a way that the functional role of NEMA was put to acid test. The plane lost contact with the control tower three minutes after take-off. It was not the crash itself that tasked NEMA emergency handling abilities but the long duration of time it took for the plane debris to be discovered after losing communication contact with the airport.
Arguably, it could even be said that the plane debris was never found by any of the government agencies including NEMA, Aviation Ministry and NAMA. The crashed plane was discovered by the efforts of the frontline Nigerian television station, AIT which sent its crew on precisional discovery mission. This team went in the probable direction of the crashed site while other government agencies were busy combing and mapping remote sites in far away Kwara State, 25 minutes flight from the Murtala Muhammed Airport where the plane took off.
But what could be responsible for the seeming lack of intelligent search ability on the part of NEMA? The spokesman of the organization, Mr Biodun Oladunjoye was the first to give an informed position. According to him, the agency rose to the task promptly as soon as it was possible for it to deploy its machinery. In the fact sheet prepared by the organization in respect of the controversy surrounding the disaster managerial ability of NEMA, the Airport Control Tower alerted NEMA about the missing plane at about 10.30 p.m. that Saturday, the date of the ill-fated flight. It is curious that the Airport Control Tower waited till about 10.30 p.m., good two hours before alerting NEMA to use its Mission Control Centre (MCC) to find the missing plane that took off at the Airport about 8.45 pm and which ought to have reached Abuja by 9.50 and perhaps return to Lagos if it had to make quick return trip by about 11.00 pm. Now the airport traffic management waited two hours before showing any concern on the lives of 117 people on board the plane.
This blows some air of negligence at least on the part of NAMA, National Airspace Management Agency. Secondly, NEMA has told Nigerians that the ill-fated plane had no emergency radio beacons (406 MHz beacons) which it could have deployed to send distress signal to the MCC of NEMA for prompt action on the part of the agency. No agency, including the owners of the plane, Bellview Airlines, has refuted this claim by NEMA and this again calls to question the monitoring expertise and transparency of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). We were told that the plane had passed all necessary checks, whether C, which it did in February, or A, which it did 10 hours before the ill-fated flight. How did the plane get certified to fly without this all important beacon that could in some circumstance save lives? Was it that the checks were done in the usual Nigerian Civil Service way of granting papers without adequate checks getting carried out? Was it a ""padipadi"" like a Nigerian musician would say? NCAA certainly has replies to give to the charges of NEMA.
Also between October 12 and 14, NEMA, in conjunction with NAMA, NCAA and other agencies organized a workshop on the need to sensitize users on satellite aided search and rescue systems domiciled in the MCC of NEMA. This workshop was organized in Port Harcout and all stakeholders including all airlines operating in Nigeria were invited but, appallingly, only two of the airlines, Pan-Afrian Airline and Aero Contractors, were present at the workshop. Now, what does this speak of NCAA which the regulatory body charged with the certification of planes for flight. The men and women in the organization just took it in their strides and for their lukewarmness, 117 people, not ordinary people in Nigerian economy, were slaughtered in what could have been averted. It is doubtful if any punitive action was taken against the absentee airlines, one of which is the same Bellview which NEMA has clearly told us lacked the beacon necessary for rescue communications. Mr President should check the profile of some workers in NCAA as he did in FAAN just a few weeks ago. Some people should pay for putting the "flying coffins" called planes in the air in Nigeria.
Then this, NAMA gave a standing rule that no helicopter should fly in the Nigerian Airpsace in the night. This ban, according to NEMA officials prevented the search and rescue helicopter of NEMA to fly as soon as the first alert was received at about 10.30pm. Notwithstanding what informed the no-night-chopper rule, NAMA people basically displayed lack of initiative in respect of the scope of that rule. If there were to be earthquake in any part of the thickly populated cities of Nigeria at about 11.00pm, the chopper will be sitting pretty somewhere on the ground waiting for the mother nature to give us daylight before taking off to rescue people. This does not conforming to the realities of today. NAMA officials should certainly know that technologies are made to be used for man’’s reality. These choppers could be fitted with night flight equipment and search and rescue problems in the night would be greatly affected. NAMA should review its ban before another emergency would make mince-meat of people of Nigeria as a result of ludicrous policy of an organization.
Another thing that NEMA revelations showed is that the National Orientation Agency (NOA) may need to change its focus in respect of its enlightenment programs and topics. NEMA’’s Biodun revealed that when they got the alert signal from the Airport Tower at about 10.30 pm, the Agency made calls to Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) for a broadcast urging Nigerians with useful information in respect of the missing plane to report to the nearest police station. This certainly would have assisted NEMA to zero down on the area of search in the absence of signal from the crashed plane. The NTA did the broadcast but the Lisa village people simply failed to go to the police until early in the morning when one of them reported to the AIT station at Alagbado, which sent its reportorial team to the village where in deed the plane was lying in its smithereens. Again the discovery was not made until over 18 hours largely because the AIT team had to forage in an uncharted forest. NOA needs to step up its civic enlightenment campaigns in almost all local government areas of Nigerian with respect to giving information. It is an accepted truth in Nigeria that people loath giving information to the police because the men and officers of he police could not actually be trusted on what would happen to the giver of information. Many times, because of the greed and unspeakable corruption in the police, such giver of information had always ended up being locked up in police cells until someone coughs out money for the station officer before being released.
So, NOA could at least enlighten the people to imbibe the culture of passing information, if not to the police, to the village heads in respect of issues such as disasters like the plane crash as well as in respect of crimes while the Inspector General of Police continue with sanitizing his house by removing those ill-educated, ill-trained, ill-mannered men and officers in the police.
Generally, NEMA should not be the one to shoulder the blame of the Bellview plane crash as every available information has shown decadence in the agencies immediately connected with checking the airworthiness of our planes and the navigational efficiency of our airports. Just as members of the House of Representatives had pointed out at their plenary session in honour of the victims of the crash, there is a need for thorough review of the manner in which the agencies at the Nigerian airports do their job. According to the leader of the House, Abdul Ningi, "it was outrageous, irresponsible, unbecoming and unacceptable to the House the way the disaster was handled by the agencies.
""We feel embarrassed as an African super-power that such avoidable disaster could happen and nothing was done immediately to locate the site and mount a comprehensive rescue operation. It is against what the President has been preaching. We have to investigate this matter, especially to determine the reliability, airworthiness and the longevity of the aircraft. How can a plane crash after three minutes and nothing was done until after 14 hours".
In his contribution, the Deputy Speaker Austin Opara, said "what happened last Saturday exposed the inadequacies and impotence in the nations aviation industry. "Saturday has raised more questions than answers in our aviation industry. There are reports that the aircraft was 25 or 30 years old. Any of us could have been in that plane, many wives have now become widows, many children now have become orphans and many husbands have suddenly become widowers.
We appropriate money here so that things could go fine, and yet the agencies that suppose to oversee the industry have failed. We have to do something, I disagree with Minister of aviation that a committee is being set up to stop a future occurrence. All those involved in the criminal negligence must be punished", he said. The federal government should not be afraid to carry out any incisive surgical operations needed to clean the system. Nigerians cannot continue to be laughing stock to the world on issues which could tackled with just diligence and dedication to duty rather than indolence and crave for financial benefits as is the case in the Nigerian civil service today.
Just as the former head of state, General Mohammadu Buhari said, ""the death of of such a large number of people, many of in their productive years is worrisome, it is a great national tragedy.
"The tragedy has once again caught us unprepared, it has exposed our inadequacies as a nation. It is, to say the least, a national embarrassment. This has clearly shown that several years after the military plane crash and that of the ADC airline both in the surburb of Lagos in 1992 and 1996 respectively and the latest in 2002, involving EAS airlines in Kano; it would appear little or no efforts have been made to strengthen our national emergency system." | 
