FG sent 150 Nigerians
to China to study railway engineering – Amaechi
The Minister of
Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi has 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.”
