Don’t revive the NPSCS drainpipe
An official of the Nigeria Communication Satellite Ltd [NIGCOMSAT] announced in Abuja last week that the federal government plans to revive the $470 million National Public Security Communication System [NPSCS], including the vandalised Abuja and Lagos Closed Circuit Television Cameras [CCTVs]. Musa Otaru, NIGCOMSAT’s Head of Telecommunication Service, said the federal government wants to revive […]
An official of the Nigeria Communication Satellite Ltd [NIGCOMSAT] announced in Abuja last week that the federal government plans to revive the $470 million National Public Security Communication System [NPSCS], including the vandalised Abuja and Lagos Closed Circuit Television Cameras [CCTVs]. Musa Otaru, NIGCOMSAT’s Head of Telecommunication Service, said the federal government wants to revive the system “in view of its security significance.”
NPSCS is one the worst public projects in Nigeria in terms of wasteful expenditure, remaining uncompleted for a decade and also raising high hopes, only to dash them completely. Contract for the project was awarded in 2010 to a Chinese firm, ZTE Nigeria Limited to provide audio, video and data information for use by the Nigeria Police Force and other security agencies. The contract provided for installation of five components, namely Global Operating Network Architecture [GOTA]; Video Surveillance Subsystem [VSS]; Video Conferences System; E-Policing Subsystem and the Emergency Collation Response Subsystem.
The project was first conceived in 2008 when President Umaru Yar’adua visited China. The project is owned by the Ministry of Police Affairs with NIGCOMSAT as the implementation consultant. It is meant to cover the 36 states and Abuja. The project came to be known to Nigerians as CCTV but Otaru now says CCTV, which is the Video Surveillance Subsystem, is less than 15 per cent of the entire project. He said, “If you go out, you will see cameras, so everybody thought it’s all about CCTV. We have about 696 Base Transmission Stations (BTS) so it is actually more than CCTV.’’
According to Mr. Otaru, the entire project is about 90 or 95 per cent completed but “we still have some issues.’’ His rendition of what happened since 2010 however completely undermines this claim. He said federal government was supposed to take over from the Chinese contractors once the network is deployed. He said “the preliminary acceptance test was conducted in December 2012. So…we ran the network between January and June 2013. That was before we had a major challenge of fund that made the network to stop. The cost of running the network is quite enormous and it was due to paucity of funds that we shut down. Even after June 2013, the network was still in part running. It was not shut down nationwide…Up till the early part of 2014 before the switch was finally shut down in September 2014.”
According to him, it is money, a lot of it, that is now required to complete and also operate the system. He said, “The network has been idle for so long which has exposed it to vandalism as most of the components of the network had been seriously vandalised.” Which almost means starting from scratch. Two years ago, Daily Trust reported that only 40 Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras out of the 1000 installed in Abuja under the project were still working. House of Representatives ad hoc panel headed by Rep Ahmed Yerima that visited its control centre at Nigeria Police Headquarters was told by a police officer, Mr O. O. Onalaja, that the system was supposed to have 1000 cameras each in Abuja and Lagos but that as at that day, “40 cameras are online.”
According to Onalaja, the remaining 960 cameras in Abuja “are down” while others were vandalized. Committee member Rep Tony Nwulu (PDP, Lagos) was so angry that he said the project was “planned to fail from the beginning because from all indications, all the components didn’t do the right thing.”
The committee even demanded for evidence to show that the 1000 cameras were installed and had worked before they were vandalized.
It is this scandalous drainpipe that we are told the Federal Government is considering pouring in more money again. This must not be done until there is a full accounting of what happened before, how much was spent and who was responsible for the huge losses suffered by Nigerians in this wasteful project.