Dr Halilu Ahmad Shaba was announced as the new Director-General of the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) in April, 2021. In this exclusive chat with the 21st CENTURY CHRONICLE, he spoke on the progress made by the agency in developing and putting the Nigeria satellites in space; his vision for one of the oldest space agencies in Africa and the challenges affecting the realisation of its mandate. Excerpts:
21st CENTURY CHRONICLE: In your last media engagement, you were quoted to have said that Nigerian Satellite is living in a grace period; what exactly do you mean by that and how many satellites do we have now?
Halilu Ahmad Shaba: Initially we built a satellite which is out of orbit right now that is NigeriaSAT-1. It was built in 2002 and was expected to spend five years in the orbit but at the end of the day, it spent nine years in the orbit before it was deorbited. A satellite’s reentry period is 50 years and that is the tradition, so we don’t count the one that is already deorbited. We now have NigeriaSAT-2 which is still in orbit and is performing very well and streaming data and images down. We also have NigeriaSAT-X which was built by Nigeria engineers and it is an experimental satellite and which availed our engineers the opportunity to develop their knowhow based on the heritage of the training which they received during the building of the NigeriaSAT-1 and SAT-II. So that one is also healthy and performing well in orbit. Both NigeriaSAT-2 and SAT-X are built to spend seven years in orbit; counting from 2011, we anticipated that the satellites will have completed the period by 2018. Normally when a satellite is built you have to estimate how long that satellite will be in orbit with confidence. Now from 2018 to 2021 we have gained three additional years which are the grace period. Because the satellite was built with so much redundancy we don’t anticipate that it is going to fail; it is not a place you go to do mechanical work on your satellite so when it was being built a lot of redundancies were also built along with it so that incase of the failure of any of the parts, another one will pick up. So the satellite is in orbit and it has spent three years more than the estimated period.
What type of data is the satellites streaming down to the agency?
The satellites stream down images because apart from remote sensing there are also communication satellites. We built the first satellite, the NigComSAT-1, and because of the fuel issue it has to be deorbited even before it reaches its life span. That communication satellite which was the first Nigeria launched, was replaced and that is why we now have NigComSAT-1-R, the ‘R’ standing for the replacement. You have to know that when we build satellites we insure them in case of any eventuality; a lot of people have been asking why we have to insure satellites despite the huge cost, what many people don’t know is that there are more satellite failures than successes. But the good thing is we don’t have such a dire situation because even the NigComSAT-1 had reached its destination and was used for a period of about seven months before it was deorbited and the reason is that we were losing control of it.
You don’t allow your satellite to collide with others because there are many satellites in orbit. If that happens you replace the one you collide with and also your own and you know the cost implication. They may have customers who use that satellite for telephone, internet and even broadcasting among others, so when such an accident happens you also have to pay the liabilities that will accrue.
Communications satellites are meant for telephone, internet, broadcasting, data, navigation among others but for remote sensing satellite, it provides you images, something like a picture of the earth for monitoring of all happenings like disaster management, environment, water and other resources that we have in the atmosphere. It is also the same one that is used for security purposes so that you see the artefacts, movements, formation and strategic planning when they are going for warfare. Satellite like remote sensing emanated from the military after the second world war for warfare but are now being made open to civilians and for other uses.
You spoke of how insufficient cash flow is affecting your operation in the earlier interview; are you asking for dedicated budget for programmes then?
Yes, we require that. For example, we see a situation where we can boost agriculture, because there are a lot of people going into farming we can reduce the risk. We can also reduce the cost of input and the fears as well as uncertainty that always prevent the youth from going into agriculture. We are already doing something with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through their Anchor-Borrower programme and they are getting results for it. We can reduce the number of disasters, disaster erodes development; we can monitor environmental issues that affect agriculture and provide the much needed information. We are more of a strategic asset, strategic in the sense that we have a lot of partners coming in such as ministries of agriculture, water resources, environment, military, NIMET and hosts of others. So we are like a feeder and more strategic as a service support, special purpose vehicle supporting their programmes. I will give you an example, the Office of the Surveyor General mapped Nigeria from 1960 to 1965 to produce the map of the whole country; it took them five years to do that. If you have a satellite imagery of the whole Nigeria, you should be able to map the entire country in six months, so it is a special purpose vehicle. When there is disaster we monitor it, you don’t have to go to the people affected to know what happened. Remember when there is a serious flood for instance, it is dangerous to immediately go there on assessment but satellites will be there.
The satellite will be there to see the situation before the flood, monitor when the flood takes place and the situation after the flood. If it happens every year, you already have a database; data base in the sense that we chronicle the acts.
As far back as 1984 when the Nigeria Geographical did a conference in Bayero University, Kano, I still remember as a student then researchers were saying desertification was moving at the rate of five kilometers per annum, it was just a prediction and there was nothing used scientifically to arrive at that assumption. And if the prediction was true, desertification would have passed Kogi State by now. However, we carried out research and we see that the way desertification is moving, is that it goes forth for some years and recedes again. We are able to establish the trend based on monitoring, we will be able to advise the government to say this is the way to go. Some of you must have heard about the Mpape earth tremor, nobody spoke to the space agency about it but we took a step forward which is a plus, we now have a trend, which is also a plus but what will happen if it is killing people?We are aware of the farmers/herders clashes in Benue, the question is what was the situation many years back and what is it now and what are the causes? Again we have what we called land conflict analysis, any time you want to bring development to a place you need to ask what are the stipulations in the Land Use Act, what will be the change and the conflicts? I can give you an example, anywhere you establish a university, it will trigger more development. For those who read Progression Geography and the rest will tell you that once you put one thing in a place, you have changed the dynamic of growth of that area. But the question is whether those changes are what the people of the area really need at that point in time. We see a lot of crises in the country because of resettlement issues. Anytime you want to do resettlement you want to ask the hosts whether they are willing to accept those you are moving there because that is where they have been living for many decades, even centuries. Mind is attached to land, what will happen to the resources that are already on ground; is it going to be overwhelmed or over burden, will it be adequate, will it cause conflict? These are some of the issues space organizations like ours will certainly look into and provide the information for whoever needs the same.
Your agency is also critical to disaster monitoring, could shed more light on this role?
The second thing is the likelihood of you using what I have. The Nigeria satellite is used very well for disasters and we are part of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation once there is any disaster. And that is why our satellite was the first to be available for Hurricane Katrina because we were part of DMCI. Wherever disaster happens, they can look at what satellite passes through that country at the time, because our satellite can be affected by cloud cover and if our satellite is not in Nigeria during a disaster we can leverage on others. And we did that because we have activated the charter so many times for Nigeria. Again, we contributed five percent of our data to Amazonia Forest because it is seen that once Amazonia Forest is affected, there will be heavy catastrophe which will increase disaster that can bring down all the ice and the rest that will fill our seas and oceans.
Dr Halilu Ahmad Shaba, Director General of the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA)
You know because of the restrictive way the military work, they don’t have any obligation to anybody. They hardly share information and their operations are not quite common but we fought through advocacy to get the defence space administration colocated with us here. So all these are efforts we have been making and there are times we share our data with them also. By military operation you see a situation where you have a lot of people trained but they are in different commands and you don’t have them put together to do the same thing. Also, most of their posting is often two years. You wil see someone coming in today and before he institutionalises, he has already moved to another place. Until you have it keyed into military career progression like you have communications in the military as career progression, there will be problems. You can’t fight war without technology and that is why if you check, in most countries, the Director General of their space agency has a permanent seat in security meetings because they will say certain things and he will work towards it. The Security Council does not necessarily involve the Director General of the space agency but we try to speak to them and I’m happy most of them are responding. We now have a military that is aware, ready to learn and improve.
NASA is the most prominent space agency in the world and even though it seems to be civilian-driven, it still deals with security issues; is there a possibility for NASRDA to understudy NASA and adopt the same policy framework in future?
If you look at the case of NASA, they built more military satellites than civilians but you don’t just get to know because you don’t have business in that area. And we ask can Nigeria also use a similar model so that the military will be focused on what they are doing. Kenya is trying to put the space agency under the military but here we are domiciled under the Ministry of Science and Technology. If our mother ministry sneezes we will shiver because the commitment to science and technology is low, so you can’t take the Agency out of it. Even as things are, how have we fared in terms of budgetary allocation when our mother ministry is not fully funded? The war on insurgency and banditry is not the usual warfare, if it were, the military will have been done within a space of three months. But because it is not the usual warfare, it has dragged on for long. And it is the kind of technology, terrain and the nation of warfare that we have stayed too long. If we don’t go the same way, it may take more time to see the end of it. Again the military cannot do it alone, they need information; the DSS provide information because they have structure across all local government areas in the country which the military don’t. The Police, the NSCDC also have the reach like the DSS with structure all over the country but what is the synergy and how do we put that synergy together? What we are proposing with the National Recommission Centre is to create a space that will accommodate the military, police, DSS and others and everybody will be talking to his boss.
As a country, do we have capacity to build, test and launch satellites from here?
We have capacity to build but not to test because our assembly integration and design centre has not been completed; we have been on it for the past 11 years. I was happy when the president said he doesn’t want to leave any project uncompleted both the ones he met and those he started. We started when the cost was within N2 to N3 billion but it’s over N6 billion now looking at the exchange rate.
Our engineers built NigeriaSATX but they have to use other county’s facilities to do so and that is why we said the capacity is here but we can’t test and launch. It is when we have the assembly integration and design centre and the standardisation is done that we can conveniently enter the market. Talking about the launch, we have also been developing that capacity, satellite is about 36,000 kilometres from the earth but we have only been able to achieve 20 kilometers. And that is why some people will tell you that this is not a rocket science and that rock science they talked about requires so much money. It is one of our most underfunded centres because to a common man he didn’t see why you should put so much money in trying to send rocket to space. What he wants is immediate benefits that’s if you put money he is expecting the return immediately. So even when you go for budget defence nobody want to see that feat because you will keep demanding for more but what it brings back. The language the man giving you budget understands is what are you bringing back. It has to be valued in naira and kobo.
You earlier planned to build CubeSat, what’s the status now?
Dr Halilu Ahmad Shaba, Director General of the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA)
Building satellite cost so much money because we are talking about N120 billion and more. You could develop a simple CubeSat but how long is it going to last? We can be building satellites every year, you want to build something that will be up there for a long time. So we built Nano satellite with Japan but we didn’t put so much platform on it because you are dealing with high resolution. Recently what we did is to sponsor some research in-house for CubeSat and the need to build a first model which we have to put in a constellation. To build the first model we need N70 million and if you have just N5 million for it what will you achieve? So we say let’s see what design we can first come up with. Other countries are thinking of building CubeSat but our major concern as a Space Agency is to look inward by sourcing for local material and make it durable. So we are working in the area of composite and resistance materials with the University of Ilorin currently. We also have a laboratory here, we are looking at materials that are also different from what they have. So the aim is to reduce cost by exploring what we have locally because necessity is the mother of invention.
What happened to the CCTV cameras earlier installed all over Abuja; were there also part of your projects?
That has to do with communication satellites. We were never part of the CCTV project. However, like I keep telling people, if we can built a camera which will survey the earth from 36000 kilometres away and its functioning, giving you clear image and good resolution, we should be commissioned to design, build and test CCTV cameras that are unique…
Do you have capacity to do that?
We have a lot of training and we have specialists that can develop even the software and build what the country needs but when we can’t even get the funds to carryout our primary mandate, how can we venture elsewhere? To reduce crime in Nigeria looking at the situation, we can build smaller cameras that can be installed everywhere to reduce crime. We are already developing some smaller cameras which we installed on balloons and getting images for our use here. We are also working on spinoffs although we don’t want our attention to be diverted from our primary responsibility.
Is it possible to partner with states to invest in CCTV project?
We have been talking to states but no significant progress has been made yet.
Your agency has a staff strength of about 3,500 people some of whom are non scientists, don’t you think this is overwhelming and counterproductive?
It is a critical problem which I must admit but I’m also a realist. They are already here; it is just like you wake up and all you see is flood. I know the last employment opened a floodgate but for me who has spent over 10 years in the Agency, we have to find a way of utilising everyone. We get the scientists and engineers doing the business of putting satellites there and we now get these people we called unrelated to do the business of developing and testing the spinoffs. We have to get everyone engaged and in a way that will be productive for Nigeria because they are taking taxpayers’ money.
We are restructuring the departments, and the Act has given us the power to establish more sections. We are dividing the engineering department into four and all of them will go into key engineering activities. We have more than 150 PhD holders who specialised in all aspects of engineering and we are using them effectively. If we have the right budget the issue will not come into play because everybody will be effectively utilised. As it is now we don’t have adequate engineers and scientists and what we did is to train those on ground in higher areas. The nano engineering for instance, which has become the new trend; we also have area of artificial intelligence which we are working towards and developing our manpower in that direction. We also need to have people in core project management which are already developing the capacity of our existing manpower for in addition to exploring opportunities our various centers provide. What we are doing is to develop their capacity in specialised areas outside the knowledge they came in with. So we need so much funds for capacity building but unfortunately for the past two years we have not had funds for manpower development. But when we do, we will do the needful to keep everyone busy.
