AIB-N becomes NSIB to probe maritime, rail, road accidents
The Accident Investigation Bureau Nigeria (AIB-N) has received a legal boost to henceforth investigate serious incidents and accidents in aviation, maritime, rail, and road sectors.
The wider scope, from the AIB-N into a multimodal Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB), was sanctioned as President Muhammadu Buhari recently repealed the old AIB Act and passed the new NSIB Act 2022.
The Senate early this year passed the bill. The NSIB Act is meant to enhance investigations into the causal effects of accidents of various modes of transportation, including rail and maritime in a bid to provide recommendations that the stakeholders can learn from.
In pursuit of the multimodal objective before the Senate, AIB-N Commissioner, Akin Olateru, had explained that creating a multimodal transport accident investigation agency that is independent of regulators and service providers, would provide technically accurate, appropriate and timely information that the transport mode can implement to prevent accidents.
Olateru said the world over, multimodal has become the future of transportation accident investigation. According to him, like air accidents, other models would be thoroughly investigated without the intention of apportioning blame.
He said: “Multimodal is widely accepted as the future of Transport Accident Investigation and the transition has always been made from the extant air accident investigating agency.
“It has become expedient that the provision of Section 29 of the Civil Aviation Act (CAA) be reviewed to establish the NSIB in a separate Act to bring it up to speed with contemporary global best practices; to create a multimodal bureau of investigation for air, rail and maritime accidents.
“The purpose of the NSIB is to enable better safety. It is not intended for apportioning blames, but to provide technically accurate, appropriate and timely information, which can be used to implement measures to prevent recurrences and potentially mitigate the damages caused by such accidents.”
Enlarging the operations of AIB into a multimodal agency was one of the cardinal programmes of Olateru when he assumed office as the fourth Commissioner/CEO of AIB in 2017.
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