Abducted schoolgirls: CACOL slams FG over moribund satellites

From Ayodele Samuel, Lagos

The Coalition Against Corrupt Leaders (CACOL) has flayed the Federal Government over the uselessness of country’s two satellites in proving information on the whereabouts of over 200 girls abducted by the Boko Haram in a Government Secondary School in Chibok, Borno state.

The Director-General of National Space Research Development Agency (NASRDA), Prof. Seidu Mohammed, in an interview, had claimed that Nigerian satellites cannot track the girls. The DG who claimed that the country requires a specialised kind of satellite for intelligence gathering, said that the NigeriaSat-X with 20 metre resolution and NigeriaSat-2 with 2.5 and 5 metre resolution cannot identify a person, hence cannot be used for strategic military operations.

Reacting to the DG, NASRDA’s claims, the Executive Chairman of CACOL, Comrade Debo Adeniran described the satellites as huge waste of taxpayers’ money.

He said, “If NigeriaSat-X and NigeriaSat-2 cannot be useful for the protection of the Nigerian people or to enhance the capacity of our security agencies, then to us, they are huge waste of scarce resources and shouldn’t have formed our priority when the government made it so. Of what use is a satellite that is not serving the interest of ordinary Nigerians? Of what use is a satellite that could only be engaged in grandiose project that has no bearing with the security and welfare of the Nigerian citizenry?

“We could be safe to say that the satellite project is fraught with fraudulent underpinning as it is difficult for ordinary Nigerian to verify its efficiency and effectiveness as regards the services for the protection of the Nigerian territory. “Because, if it is not serving the purpose of intelligence gathering, whose interest are the other services it is rendering benefitting when satellite of other countries could do similar services? Is it Nigeria with a preponderance of poor people that needs such white elephant project in the midst of ravaging poverty?It should be de-orbited and sold and the cost should be returned to the national treasury”, it stated.