By Vivian Emoni
The Federal Government on Saturday expressed commitment to transform and promote geological survey activities to global best practices.
The Director-General (D-G) of Nigeria Geological Survey Agency (NGSA), Dr Abdulrazaq Garba, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
Garba said that the agency had trained a lot of its staff members on geological survey activities, adding that the effort was to ensure that the NGSA developed necessary global standard practices required.
“When I came on board as the agency’s D-G, having been in the system and having understood most of the problems or challenges in the system, I came up with three plans, first is generation of data for development, the second is to put in place infrastructural development in the sector that is within the system,” he said.
Garba said that the third plan was to build a strong capacity development across the sector.
According to him, “we have visited geological surveys and institutions across the world and we discovered that both non-technical and technical members of the staff are geo-scientists.
“The non-technical members of the staff work together with the technicals and they work in a very good mutual understanding.
“So, in our own effort, we ensure that all the staffers are fully trained – the technical, the administrators, accounts and all the members of staff in general.
“The NGSA is an institution whereby we need to continuously build the capacity of the people because it is a research institution,” he said.
The agency’s boss said that the NGSA has done a lot of training and put credible efforts to ensure a strong collaboration with relevant institutions.
He said that the NGSA partnered Colten University in the area of capacity development, adding that the agency had engaged with embedded staffers on various projects.
He said that the essence of involving such people was not just about getting people to work and get money, but offering knowledge and the necessary experiences to the people.
“When we were about to start our project, we insisted that we must have what is called internationally-recognised competent persons driving the project.
“The reason why the embedded staffers have to be part of it is to ensure that the capacity development of the people trained will be able to do investigation and report according to international policies.
“The same thing with our support staff, we make sure we train them online with the international accounting reporting standard.
“We make sure our accountants are well trained.
“We have a system with the server whereby all the components in the system are available and we ensure that all our staffers will report on international bast practices.
“Also, our administrative staffers are sent on training at the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON) in Lagos State, to upgrade them on recent developments,” he said.
The director-general said NGSA officials visited other African countries such as Morocco and Nairobi, among others, where non-geologists were trained to enhance their knowledge on geological survey.
He said that the agency had also collaborated with China Geological Survey Bureau Development and Research Center, adding that some of the staffers are presently at the China University of geological survey. (NAN)
