One of the best available options open to us with respect to the very urgent matter of securing our rail lines is to deploy drones to monitor the entire tracks for possible dangers. This is the system used in several countries including India, Russia and China.
Two drones can be deployed between every two rail stations. They could survey the entire rail track 24/7, with a view of 140 metres radius. They could spot damaged track, suspicious movement of people, cattle herds and every other type of danger. They could then relay high-resolution images of the threats to a control center.
We may not be able to manufacture the drones in Nigeria but our national space agency, National Space Research and Development Agency, NASRDA, has the capacity to design and configure these drones to our specific needs. Some of this capacity was recently displayed at an exhibition in Abuja by agencies under the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology. A Chinese or other foreign manufacturer can then build them according to that specification. Otherwise, foreign designed drones are meant for their own use, not ours.
The drones should be coordinated from a centre that operates efficiently, 24/7, monitors all the information gathered by the drones and relays it real time to the military and security agencies for prompt action. This country is not using its space capabilities optimally. NASRDA said at the exhibition that it has 150 engineers with PhD degrees. Are we making the best use of this resource in the light of the existential security challenges that we now face?
Not only rail tracks, but drones should also be deployed to monitor the highways, to locate terrorist dens and where they are holding hostages. That’s a lot of drones, but then, they are relatively cheap, often no more than $1,000 apiece. We can acquire them in the hundreds or even thousands. We must accompany these with very effective monitoring center or centers. A decade ago when the police installed CCTV cameras around Abuja, there was no functional centre to collate information from the cameras.
It is one thing to have drones monitoring tracks, highways and bandit dens and relaying the information to a monitoring centre, and quite another thing to have the fast response capacity to act on the information. For that we need attack helicopters, bombers and well-trained commando teams.
In the situation that we find ourselves, all hands must be on deck to combat the menace of insecurity. We must make the best use of all the resources at our disposal. We have a barely used national space agency on which we have expended billions over the years. This is the time to make the best use of NASRDA!
