Professor Mansur Matazu is the Director General of the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NiMET), in this interview with aviation press, he highlighted the many activities of the Agency to uphold safety both in the Aviation Industry and other sectors of the economy, through its weather forecast. He raised hope that NiMET has adopted the Doppler radar and North-Central approach as additional measures to check the menace of wind shear which was responsible for most air crashes in Nigeria in the past. Rating NiMET schools and graduates as highly recognised and sought after, he announced that Nigeria has been categorised as the best Met Service. Among other issues, he disclosed that under the UN SOFF, Nigeria is assisting Niger, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and Somalia.
Excerpts
Do some of these countries you provide aids for pay for the services you render?
We do provide technical service as I said. There is what we call World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) VCP (Voluntary Country Partnership), which is called in the International Civil Aviation (ICAO) as “No Country Left Behind.” So weather is dynamic and it moves from one area to the other. Even if you have the capability and you don’t share that expertise to your neighbours, I don’t think you are helping.
Like for Nigeria, if there is a problem in Niger for drought and flood, we have over a thousand kilometres borders, all of them would move, that is number one. The reason America and other countries are called superpowers is by providing some of these support.
I did one Postgraduate Diploma in Education, my dad happened to be an educationist and I was reading his books while growing up and I realised that school system started in Nigeria from missionary and then government started giving what they called, Grant-in-Aids and with those Grant-in-Aids, the government now determined the curriculum, everything before eventually taking control.
So for you to get relevance, credibility and become a big brother, you have to provide some support to the weaker community and with that we have achieved a lot as a country, we have been categorised as the best Met Service and they always refer to us if there is anything and I gave example with the issue of fertiliser. So, anything you have to start small and people will appreciate and value.
So we have started that Volume Coverage Pattern (VCP) with the WMO at no cost, but if I tell you, the VCP meeting that we attended, Nigeria was the only black nation because you have US, UK, Spain, Netherlands, eight of them plus Nigeria because we want to show the world that we are not a beggar nation in all ramifications, even in the science of weather and services, we are not waiting for any country.
We just had a meeting with the French Government, we are going to do a programme with them and they were very happy with what they have seen.
This provides credibility, trust and relevance and with that you would get recognised by the global community and they suggested Nigeria will help these countries under this United Nations financed Systematic Observation Financing Facility (SOFF). The essence of this SOFF is based on the UN Secretary General’s statement that in the next five years, all citizens in the world must have access to early warning; you have seen what happened in Libya; 10,000 people unaccounted for and more than 6,000 people confirmed dead in one incident. But if these people got early warning; it has been confirmed globally that if people get early warning on any imminent weather hazard, you are bound to reduce casualties by more than 70 per cent. But if they get the information one week ahead, it will increase.
Like the way we give our seasonal Climate Prediction almost six months in advance, that is a very good lead time and based on this, the UN gathered people, financing facilities, all these development banks like the World Bank, they have contributed money and it is through this money that they said, ‘Okay, bigger nations should help weaker ones.’ That was how they identified Nigeria and we are assisting Niger, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and also Somalia. This is just the first phase, we are going to do an additional phase and in all these, our staff are getting involved, they are getting more exposed and Nigeria is getting more relevant as a big brother in Africa and in the world generally. We are also getting additional funding also to support our services.
Could you enlighten us on the Health benefit of NiMET weather prediction?
Health is very critical because it determines productivity and in the tropical region, most of the diseases are climate induced. For instance, malaria due to the humidity, temperature and availability of vector breeding sites being provided by either waterlog operation or vegetation. So, we do have analysis that we do, NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index/weather climate) and we can predict during our seasonal climate prediction, we can predict the malaria incident including even the ability even of the mosquito to bite because that ability even depends on weather for the mosquito to breathe and even to bite. So with that we have permanent relationship with the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and Federal Ministry of Health (Public Health Department).
Under our Applied Met Department, we have a Climate and Health Desk. Every month we provide them information including how effective the performance of the drugs is because the drug performance, efficacy, is also being influenced by weather. Meningitis, Cholera, and Measles are all climate induced and with this, the agency was invited last time by the WHO to participate in a regional project to develop framework on climate and health. We have built this confidence and we can also provide from now alert for people that have asthma that this weather condition can trigger asthmatic attack based on our threshold analysis.
How many schools does NiMET has and how have the graduates from these schools fared in the labour market?
We have two schools – the WMO Regional Training Centre in Lagos and the Muhammadu Buhari Meteorological Institute of Science and Technology in Katsina. The one in Lagos is offering WMO classes certificates of class one, class two and class three equivalent of Diploma, HND and Postgraduate Diploma and the one in Katsina is accredited by the NBTE, offering Diploma in Meteorology and Diploma in Climate Change and we are working with NBTE to get accreditation for HND since we have graduated the first set.
So all the English speaking West African countries and all NiMet staff that you have seen across the country are products of the Regional Training Centre in Lagos, all the directors of Met Services in English speaking West African countries are our students and they are performing wonderfully well and that is why every year, WMO sponsors people.
Even these Gambians, Cameroonians and the ones from Niger that would come to the Centre in the next few days, they would come under WMO fellowship and we are getting revenue in dollars from that participation. So we are bringing forex into the country and we are bringing credibility and relevance also into the country, including even our Diploma graduates in Katsina, most of them had gotten direct entry admission for their degrees and with this issue of climate change we have a lot of government agencies that can absorb them.
How far have gone with the proposed Aerospace University?
Admission is ongoing for students and I have one admission on my phone that I can show you and lectures would start in December.
What are the courses you offer?
B.SC Aviation, B.Sc Meteorology, B.sc Business and even Masters Degree. This is the first approval gotten by the National Universities Commission (NUC) to start both undergraduate and masters at the same time. We are starting Masters in Air Transport Management by February 2024 and others. There are also four Masters Degree in Meteorology.
For the B.Sc Meteorology, some of the practical will happen at NiMET and certificates will have elements of WMO. For the Air Transport Management and Aviation Business Studies, they will also have partnership with ICAO. It is one roadmap that has been achieved 100 per cent. Thanks to the previous and present administration for this.
What are the major challenges confronting NiMET?
Challenges are natural, that is why human beings have brain and that brain is being housed inside a skull that is 60 times harder than all the bones in our body for you to see how you overcome these challenges. So, mostly in governance because of budget issue, there is challenge of funding and also how acceptable is your service? So, you (the media) are helping us get this acceptability and with the visibility we have, we are getting a lot of demands now, which is creating a lot of positive challenge to us. There is a lot of interest now in what we do and that is good for us.
So, it sharpens our work and then let us do more on this and with that revenue will come, client satisfaction would be achieved and then sustainable development will also be achieved. I just don’t believe and say because of dwindling revenue, you cannot perform. What we do is just to block leakages and then implement performance management system whereby you work not because you are being supervised, but because it is your work and you are happy doing it.
I can tell you most of them (the workers) close very late, just make them happy with regards to welfare, training, working environment, internet and all this and you can get the best from them. Even, our website was created by our staff, we didn’t pay a Kobo. We only sent them for training and we are getting the best.
Our people are working diligently. Most of our software were created by our staff; in fact, some of them don’t have degrees and they are doing the job well. We just send them on training, stay there for a week and we spend less than N2 million training them. Some of these kits are being done by organisations with millions of naira, but we develop them all in-house.
Could you expatiate on the issue of funding?
Even, when I close my eyes and look at how we do it, I can tell you we don’t owe any contractor the moment your job is finished. We run a financial transparent system, we do a cash plan, we capture you and we implement that cash plan, two times in a month and we get you paid. You are also helping the economy by doing that. Any contractor must have hired labour, skilled and unskilled and if you pay him, the money and the resources will go down and part of the money would revolve round the government to come under Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).
I think one thing that has helped us is just sincerity of purpose. If you just have a clear-cut purpose of getting results and you have the right team, I am sure we can achieve a lot. In aviation, we have almost the least in terms of revenue, but I tell myself and my team, they all know, we are also the happiest. Despite the small salaries and allowances that we get, we are happy. One thing that adds to our happiness is some of our services are being received and utilised by common man and you see that simple information is changing someone’s life. So naturally we would be happy doing that. But we would do more with the help of the management.
How do you check the Low Level Wind shear (LLW)?
Actually, the LLWAS (Low Level Wind Shear Alert System) project started after the Sosoliso crash in 2005 and it is a phenomenon that is very dicey and dynamic, something that happened within seconds and then it goes. Abinitio, we were not as an agency of government and also within the industry, able to track this, but after that incident, it became open to us; we came up with a proposal for this LLWAS and today we have done it in 18 airports.
Here comes the challenge, at times before you finish a project, you are already experiencing vandalisation. In Port Harcourt, they cut the whole mast from the base. In Lagos, even within the airport perimeter, we recorded vandalisation, but we were able to weather through the storm.
One, we are working on an alternative technology that we call Terminal Doppler Radar, though it is very expensive. We are also devising what we call North-Central approach which helps us to study cloud physics over any area in the country. With the cloud physics knowledge, you would know whether cloud could result into microburst and it is from microburst from an entire set of clouds that we could have wind shear. So we are using multiple approaches to the wind shear just as they are doing in the US. They still have LLWAS though they don’t experience vandalisation, but they combine it with ladder and then Terminal Doppler Radar and also the North-Central Approach. So, we engaged a UK Vpartner from the University of Leeds to acquire the knowledge and skill and we have the platform now. So we have done the initial test-running of the process and we want to go into large scale to complement the LLWAS. So it is one of our critical projects and every time, every period you see us running around, trying to get it.
On the issue of vandalism, we engage in community policing and we have seen significant improvement with regards to security and also the aviation security of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and other paramilitary authorities have been involved and they are helping us a lot.
As a weather expert, could you comment on the earthquake and flood in Morocco and Libya?
Earthquake is a geophysical phenomenon and it is not being influenced by atmospheric process. Climate change and global warming are just like malaria and signs of malaria. So, there is no relationship with the geophysics that happened within the earth cross and we have zones that are prone to that.
We are lucky Nigeria is not among. Secondly, our system also in Nigeria is a consistency system, so we don’t expect such high level intensity of activities we have seen in Libya. Libya used to be a dry area, at times they experienced only 25 millimeters of rain that can fall in two hours in Abuja; this is what Libya would experience in a year. Imagine because of the issue of climate change – increasing temperature, increasing condensate activities and increasing the possibility of having high intensity storms over Europe, this was as a result of passage of a bigger storm over Europe that created a very long pressure over the Sahara Desert and with high energy because of the solar radiation in it coupled with dust in the atmosphere that they have a lot of Sahara and a lot of particles. So, that developed into a very severe system that impounded the area; area that had been dry for several decades, several centuries, now experienced flooding.
We don’t expect much of that intensity, but definitely there are evidences of climate change in the country but in our case we are being influenced by high intensity rain that results into flash flood within cities and villages and riverine communities as a result of prolonged rain and also inflow of water from neighbouring countries as a result of opening of dams.
We have predicted that this year in Nigeria, we are not expecting a lot of high intensity rain, we are just having an average weather and climatic condition with some pockets of above and below and we have seen this happening in Maiduguri, Bauchi, and Yola, that they had to pray for rain some weeks ago. But, we will keep the public informed of any situation whether on a short or long term.
Could you please throw more light on the introduction of multi-language into your weather forecast?
If you don’t digest to the level of the understanding of the users, it has no value. So you can do all the science, you can spend all the resources, and you can do all the analysis but if the users don’t understand it won’t be valuable. So, in everything we do, we consider our users. As a result of this, we engage in a lot of partnerships and under these we were able to see the demands for co-production.
Before we even do the forecast, we invite stakeholders, they give us their experience of the previous year’s forecast and we also want to know how they need the forecast, in what form and frequencies and that was what informed our translation to three languages. And under collaboration we could do any language.
This year we were able to downscale to 28 states and then this year we want to cover the whole country with the help of the governors. We have addressed the Nigerian Governors’ Forum more than three or four times. We were invited by the National Economic Council and we want to sign a MoU with most of the countries.
The feelers we are getting from the users are very positive and these are some of the things that encourage us, a simple information, but changes the lives of people. For instance, just tell a farmer that the beginning and end of the season and what is likely to happen; the time to plant and the rainfall amount, with that he would know the variety to go for.
We tell them what to do from land clearing to harvesting with regards to weather and we even give them yield forecast.
As regards a recent major incident would you say the airlines are really complying with your advisory?
When they say pilot, Pilot-in-Command (PIC), even control tower, Air Traffic Controller (ATC) can’t dictate to them. They give them information and they say at your discretion. So part of that information is our Met information. Every 30 minutes and real time, there is a screen at the control tower where they give them update if there is any sudden change in weather and I am sure ATC must have warned that pilot about mild wet runway because the moment you take off, even before take-off, we have pilot briefing room where you get our fodder and that is why we are beginning to publish those airlines that collect our fodders and we have email platform. So the issue is compliance and you know pilots, they have the final say and the National Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB) has already written to us to give them the weather situation in Lagos.
On that accident, they cannot say we didn’t report rain and we have rain. We reported rain with the intensity and I am sure the ATC must have said watch out for wet runway and there are procedures for wet runway landing and if you don’t apply that, it’s a problem.
Lagos Airport is one of our flashpoints and so you get the best of our staff and the best of our equipment. As you know almost more than 70 per cent of our flights happen in Lagos and so you don’t expect anything below standard in terms of our services in Lagos.
How are you tackling the challenge of Technical personnel inadequacy?
For us in NiMet, we don’t mostly suffer, only that some of our staff are young, vibrant and they acquire higher degrees and with that their marketability increases. So at times we get some of them poached, not internally, but by international organisations. But you know something, we don’t see it as a major challenge because we have thousands of qualified Nigerians that can replace them because we imbibe the issue of mentoring.
One thing that we suffer is because some of our recruitments happen in syndicate. If 30, 40 people come at the same time that means they would go at the same time. So under natural attrition, during retirement, you would see about 36 people retiring, but one thing that is helping us in NiMET is some of the things that could be done by 10 people abinitio could be done using technology by two persons. So, it is not much a major problem. And if a NiMET Staff got poached by WMO, we feel happy for him as a person and we feel also happy as a country because we should also consider people sending forex home as an input to our economy.