The has appealed to State Governments to allocate 2.5 per cent of their total budget to surveying and mapping for proper infrastructure development.
Adeniran made the appeal on Thursday in Lafia, Nassarawa State, at the 2019 Conference On Survey Coordination And Advisory Board on survey training.The theme of the conference is:`Surveying and Mapping In Sustainable Infrastructural Development and Good Governance.’
According to him, surveying and mapping are on concurrent legislative list and should be used by all the tiers of government to harness their benefits for effective development.“The problem is that many State Governors are not well informed about surveying and mapping and their usefulness in developing all aspects of the states’ resources.
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“This ignorance is one of the reasons state governments are not paying proper attention to surveying and mapping.“The geo-spatial information from surveying and mapping can serve as a viable product for good governance.“Surveying and mapping is a proper and evidence-based decision making tool,” he said.
Making a case for the upgrading of states Surveyors-General to the equivalent of Permanent Secretaries, Adeniran said the elevation would enable them to have access to policy makers and contribute toward proper planning for development.
He said the essence of the conference was to harmonise the survey and mapping practice and be able to monitor surveying and mapping activities in Nigeria.The acting surveyor-general said that at the conference they shared ideas and information on what each state had done in surveying and mapping to enable other practitioners to tap from it.He said it also helped them to manage the scarce resources that would have been used to do the exercise separately. (NAN)
