The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi on Monday
October 21, announced that the Federal Government has sent over 150 Nigerians
to Chinese universities to study railway engineering.
Amaechi who disclosed this while defending his Ministry's
budget before the National Assembly’s joint committee on marine transport, said
the aim of sending these Nigerians to China is for the maintenance and
sustainability of trains in Nigeria.
“On maintenance and sustainability, if you check the picture
of my trip to China, you will see some black men with the Chinese. I told them
they learned from America and you copied the Americans in producing your
coaches, because when I went there, they were teaching them leadership and
managing resources.
“I told them, let’s not manage, tell us how you built these
trains so that when it breaks down, we don’t have to make a telephone call for
you to come down and fix it. So we have agreed to design a curriculum and train
all these people out there.
“Secondly, we have sent over 150 persons, children, to two
universities in China, funded by the Chinese government to go and read railway
engineering. We hope that in four years they will graduate. Those who will do
masters and PhD will do that. We are establishing a transportation university
in Daura. We are making sure that we have manpower to take over from the
Chinese. We are trying to localise railway technology,” he said.
On railway safety,
the former Governor of Rivers State said;
“The first thing we
address about railway is safety because once it happens, a lot of persons will
die. Each coach for now contains 87 persons, if we multiply it by 10 coaches,
imagine the amount of persons that will die. No driver will move if there is a
safety problem. It is the same thing with our tracks. We watch our tracks.
“Someone told me that he saw on social media that they shot
at the train. I didn’t reply because that is not true. There are air force
planes following the train as it is going. There is a police vehicle on the
side. There are policemen in the vehicle and when anything happens, they report
to the minister even when there is a stop.”
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