Surveying and geoinformatics in national development (II)

By Professor Akin Mabogunje, Chairman, Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform - Updated: Tuesday 03-11-2009

Professor Akin MabogunjeEducation and forced taxation were the two major strategies that the colonial administration used to get Nigerians into wage labour and integrate our labour into the global capitalist system. Education was an attempt to improve the capability of our labour while taxation ensured that even the most recalcitrant peasant was forced to increase his productivity, if only to have the surplus to sell to pay his tax.

Attempts at improving the education systems to develop the mental and physical capacity of Nigerians continue to be pursued by the post-colonial governments as a means of not only enhancing the peoples’ productivity but also increasing their capacity to absorb new knowledge for higher productivity. But there is enough evidence that the colonial administration could not undertake nor was it in its interest to promote our transformation to a full-fledged capitalist society.

This is why although the colonial administrations did much to initiate the promotion of human resource development through education and health and to promote our appreciation of the role of capital and entrepreneurship, they did not engage in ensuring that individual producers in our society are properly endowed and empowered through transforming and giving their basic asset of land the use, economic and capital value.

History of surveying in Nigeria
It is against this background of what we mean by “national development” that we intend to evaluate the history of surveying and geoinformatics in Nigeria. Broadly, we can distinguish three broad periods of surveying in Nigeria: the pre-colonial, the colonial and the post-colonial. Much of the materials for the pre-colonial and colonial period I have derived from the paper by O. Y. Balogun in the Nigerian Cartographic Journal of 1992. According to Balogun (1992), the pre-colonial period of surveying and mapping in Nigeria lasted from 1788 to 1861 and was dominated by the exploration and mapping of Nigeria rivers. It was the period of the great explorers such as Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton and the Landers Brothers. It extended also to the mapping of the coastal areas especially around Lagos and the Oil Rivers or the present Niger Delta.

The colonial period of surveying and mapping in Nigeria can, in turn, be divided into four major parts. The first, which lasted from 1861 to 1910, was the period of colonial expansion and consolidation. The Berlin Conference of 1884 had concluded by insisting that “effective occupation” was the major criterion for determining the “sphere of influence” of each European “colonial” power. Rapid “spot” determination of borders of these “spheres” was the order of the day and it enabled the different colonial powers to scope out in a rough manner, the areas under their jurisdiction. Indeed, a Colonial Survey Committee was set up in 1905 by the Colonial Office “to define the exact limits of national territory, to show the areas and villages under the rule of native chiefs for land registration and settlement, for the allotment of mining and forest concessions and for the organisation of internal communication”.

Starting a surveying school
In the meantime, in 1891, the government of Lagos Colony had requested the British Ordnance Survey to undertake the survey of Lagos so as to delineate land ownership within the colony. In short, the need for surveying and mapping was becoming so exigent that it was decided in 1908 to start a school for training Nigerian survey assistants to work with British surveyors. That school has grown over the last 100 years.

Serious colonial surveying in Nigeria, however, did not start until the third period, which ran from 1910 to 1926. The emphasis during the period was to identify areas with natural resources which can generate revenue for the colonial administration.

Topographical maps produced during this period were on a standard scale of 1:125,000 and were based on hurried triangulation. They were also fragmentary, having been designed to cover those small patches of resource areas such as part of the Jos Plateau and rail line believed to be economically viable. Even, these limited activities required a relatively large staff which were not always deployed strictly to carrying out survey tasks. The result, as noted in the Interim Report of Brigadier Winterbotham (Winterbotham, 1929) was the constant employment of survey staff in a variety of projects that should not have been executed by the Survey Department.
Effect of the global economic recession

It was, thus, no wonder that by the next period (1926 -1946), when the world entered the era of global economic depression, the colonial survey service in Nigeria was one of the most hard hit by the need to retrench most of its staff. According to Buchanan and Pugh (1955: 239), field staff in the Department reached a maximum in 1930 when the establishment was approximately twice what it was in the 1950s. As a result, emphasis during the period was concentrated on the systematic triangulation of the country. Thus, by 1939, when the Second World War began, although the triangulation of the country had not been completed, adequate foundation had been laid for accurate topographical mapping which started after the war.

The end of the war saw Britain promulgating in 1946, what was known as the Ten-Year Colonial Development and Welfare Act. This Act was designed to pay more attention to the development and welfare of Nigerians more than had been the emphasis of the administration before then. As a result, greater effort was devoted to topographic survey and mapping of the country. The Colonial Office established a central Directorate of Colonial Surveys (later the Directorate of Overseas Surveys) and deployed aircrafts of the British Royal Air Force to begin the aerial photography of the country in 1946. By 1948, this enabled the country to launch on the accurate topographical mapping of its vast area.

Large masses of detailed nformation on relief, drainage and cultural features of the country began to be collected. This was the time when the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS) of the British military collected tangible information about Nigeria for military intelligence purposes. As a result of the military and secret nature of most of the activities of the GSGS, its efforts in the mapping of the country as of other British colonies were not fully appreciated.

Regionalisation of surveying in Nigeria
The MacPherson constitutional reform of 1951 saw the regionalisation of survey services in the country. Each of the three regions now had its own Director of Surveys with the federal headquarters retaining administrative control of national triangulation, photography by the Royal Air Force, map production, and work connected with aerial photography using local resources (GoN, 1953: 58). Maps on a scale of 1:62,500 were produced from such photographs. By 1954, map series on scales of 1:50,000 and 1:100,000 were begun and it was intended that these will become the national map scales. However, the topographical mapping in Nigeria was not completed before Nigeria’s independence in 1960 but the technical assistance programme of the British government made it possible for the Directorate of Overseas Survey to continue aerial photography and topographical mapping of the country after independence (Balogun, 1992).

Some air photography was also carried out locally with small chartered aircraft but this kind of work could not be organised for large-scale topographic mapping and was normally concerned with individual projects for which photographs were required by other government departments or for large-scale plans for many of the large towns in the country.

In short, as Balogun (1992) observed of the history of surveying in Nigeria during the colonial period, there were many instances of the difficulty of making the administrators realise the importance of systematic surveying and mapping. To get any survey and mapping done, justification had to be made in terms of the effects on geological survey and mineral prospecting. Or, as Winterbotham (1936: 298) puts it, “geology brings up delicious thoughts of gold or copper and a booming budget” .

The post-independence history of surveying in the country was not much of an improvement on its colonial heritage. Although the Federal Surveys remained headed by the Surveyor-General of the Federation and assisted by six other Deputy Surveyors-General, each in charge of the six divisions of the Office, it has not been possible to get government to accord it the importance it deserves in a developing economy. The continuous breaking up of the country into new states whilst creating positions for many state surveyors-general was denying the profession at the governmental level of seasoned and experienced surveyors.

All of this was leading to a marginalisation of the profession and its being brought alive only when there are boundary disputes either between states or between the nation and its neighbours. Large topographic mapping and resource evaluation projects continue to be contracted out to foreign firms and agencies such as Huntings Surveys and Aero Films Ltd.