By Archibong Jeremiah
The Nigeria Institute of Surveyors, NIS, Cross River State Chapter Chairman Dr. Gertrude Nnanjar Njar has again revealed to CrossRiverWatch that “In the state we have less than 10 practicing surveyors and in Nigeria we don’t have up to 5000 dead and alive”.
She decried that the state of the survey profession in Cross River which she said is comatose but expressed hope that only the younger generation can salvage it by becoming actively interested in surveying as a profession.
According to the firm talking woman there is need to train more young indigenous surveyors because of the skeletal number of professionals that doesn’t increase but keep decreasing.
She said those around are getting cut up with old age and can’t go to the field or even when they go they can’t swiftly galvanize and compile data only the younger ones can because of the strenuous nature of surveying which no facet of the society can do without.
Dr. Nnanjar lamented that another factor affecting the profession apart from very thin participation is lack of equipments that are technologically up to date.
The Cross River State NIS chairman said, “With the new technologies in vogue, the younger ones are the ones that will easily appreciate and effectively use these technologies because they are the descendants of technology age”.
Continuing, she added: “Most of these equipments are very expensive and even the state survey department cannot afford them and has qualified people to man them fervently, not to talk of the geographic equipment which is another ball game entirely, even the cadastral equipment is another ball game, the engineering work and others all you hear us talk of is that we have real time Global Positioning System, GPS, single dual frequency, total station. Only very few surveyors can afford these and other equipment”.
Dr. Gertrude, maintained that “In our institutions both federal and state, we don’t have surveying as a course, the survey we have in the University of Calabar, UNICAL is the basic survey which we have in the department of geography and environmental science where I lecture but that is not enough”. Adding that “In Cross River University of Technology, CRUTECH we have building and quantity surveying which is a branch”.
Njar ended by disclosing that “As at the time of Donald Duke we pushed hard for a faculty to be established that will house the full flesh course but it failed”.
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