Speeches

30th Annual Conference And General Assembly Of The Nigerian Cartographic Association

Oct 21, 2008 - I am delighted to be here today at your association’s 30th annual anniversary conference which promises to be intellectually stimulating and practically rewarding for participants with its workshop, exhibition and technical sessions spanning the 4-day event.

I find the conference theme, entitled Cartography, GIS and Digital Mapping for e-Governance, timely and apt at a period when the challenges of modern day governance require the cooperation and participation of stakeholders in the delivery of facilities and amenities to the people.

Modern day governance, particularly in urbanized setting is becoming electronic by the passing of the day as advances in information technology grow geometrically in direct proportion to the pressing and challenging issues of social and economic development. The use of cartographic/ GIS tools in decision making in such a modern setting has therefore become very necessary.

I speak from the experience of governing a mega-city with a population of 18 million requiring comprehensive spatial information to formulate policies and programmes for the sustainable infrastructural renewal and social transformation of the State.

Indeed, cartography/GIS tools cover such a wide range of products that make planning and policy formulation very rewarding. They include environmental mapping, engineering and construction, real estate development, flood plain mapping, telecommunication planning, navigation, physical planning and transportation planning.

In fact the Lagos State government recently awarded contracts to some companies on the digital mapping of the state following an exhaustive and rigorous procedural work by an advisory and a technical committee set up by the government to work out the modalities of the project. The digital mapping exercise is broken into seven areas, namely:

1. Geodetic control and aerial photo acquisition;
2. Determination of geodic model and establishment of continuous operating reference station;
3. Orthophoto, Contour lines and digital(vector) mapping;
4. GIS database and enterprise GIS;
5. Bathymetry survey of Lagos lagoons and creeks
6. Supply of equipment and training;
7. Public enlightenment and education.

The mapping that will be delivered under this exercise will be at the scale of 1: 500 for Metropolitan Lagos and 1:1,000 for rural areas. The other products include: Orthophoto (1:2,000; contour lines (1:500 for urban and 1: 1,000 in the rural areas, digital elevation model and digital terrain model.

The purpose of this project is to ensure sustainable, all-round development of the State whose mega-city status imposes serious infrastructural renewal and development challenges that must be solved frontally with adequate tools and knowledge.

In carrying out the digital mapping exercise, the State government engaged the services of technical expertise in surveying, mapping and GIS. It is the policy of our administration to partner stakeholders in the private and public sectors in the implementation of the projects for the welfare of the people. On this digital mapping/GIS project, we encourage the stakeholders to interact with the consultants during the execution of the projects and make inputs where necessary.

This gathering should be the beginning of such an interaction as the government will be waiting to receive any useful suggestion made at the end of this conference to the successful implementation of the GIS tools.

Let me remind you that our goal is to use every initiative, every policy, every project to deliver the dividends of democracy to our people.

I wish you all successful deliberations. It is my pleasure to declare this conference open.

I thank you all for listening.

“Eko O ni baje!”

Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN)
Governor of Lagos State