Chris Ochayi and Felicia Nanka
3 December 2008
To avoid future agonies and traumatic experience of the ceding of the oil rich Bakassi peninsula to Cameroun Republic, the Federal Government has embarked on aggressive boundary demarcation exercise in order to ensure that her boundaries between other African countries are properly demarcated.
Nigeria suffered losses of unimaginable magnitude when it handed over the oil rich Bakassi peninsula to Cameroun, August 4, 2008, a development blamed mostly on faulty and obsolete mapping and record system in the country.
Surveyor General of the Federation, Surv. Austin Njepuome, who stated this during an interactive session with journalists in Abuja, shortly after arriving from the inspection tour of ongoing boundary demarcation projects at the boundary between Nigeria and the Niger Republic, said Nigeria couldn't afford to loose an inch of its land to another country anymore.
He said, before now, what we have as our boundaries is the limit of administration of the colonies authorities that ruled us in the past and stones were used to mark the boundaries to show the limit of their administration.,
"You can agree with me also that those kinds of stones cannot serve as boundaries in this present day territories. So we have to replaced them and put something in a more permanent structure as boundaries".
He explained further that, "in some of these areas were those kind of stones that replaced the small decking and the telegraph poles but also telegraph and decking can be permanent boundary marks because people have tamper with them. So because people have tampered with them, internationally it was allowed to use big decking boundary that is of international standard to form our boundary that they cannot be easily removed and planted somewhere ease".
Njepuome pointed out that, "we have agreement between the colonies power that were in charge as what we now know as Nigerian, Niger, Chad and Cameron as well as Benin Republic".
"This countries that I just mentioned are our neighbours so we have the records kept in the past about the areas they covered, those records were in the forms of agreement and treaties. Those agreement and treaties described the limit of administration of those colonies powers and at independent African countries agreed to maintain those limit of administration as their boundaries, so we hadn't any input verily as to the boundaries".
On the current efforts, he said, "so far we have 148 pillars between the River Niger and the beginning of the Gomadogo River, which is in Yobe State. We have even erected those 148 pillars because it was fast deteriorating and we have re-established some of the pillars and the job is still on going".
"But like those pillars you see there, each pillar takes a minimum of 20 bags of cement to construct and where the soil is very sandy it may even take more than that, it may cost 25 or 28 bags of cement to construct one pillar and the intermediate ones you see also each takes more then 50 bags to construct because even the iron you see on top are also source of the concrete.
"We are going to do for the 1500 kilometres of that boundary, though like I told you, the Gomadogo River takes part of the boundary but still we intend to demarcate that area where the river forms a boundary, what we intend to do on a long run is to decking both side of the river".
And you know river can change cause. We don't want a situation where if the river changes cause and we start quarrelling or we start saying where is the boundary? Where did it go before? So we will put at both ends as the river goes".
"So, we still have a lot of work to do but it is a continuous exercise, it is not what we are doing just at ago. Because am sure you most have been told, we are working on Nigerian Cameron, Nigerian Niger, Nigerian Benin republic all at the same time".
He said the only boundary fully completed so far is that between Nigeria and Chad, which according to him covered only 26 kilometres.
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