The Nigerian National Origin: Sustaining the Legacy

The Nigerian National Origin: Sustaining the Legacy

Fesowola O. V. Akintoye mnis,rs,mSCgis, msc gis & Env.
fesowola@glogeomaticsnigeria.com.

The pride of every nation is the beauty and functionality of the legacies left behind by their fore-bears. Legacies are spring boards for appreciating the labour of past heroes, understanding the successes of the past and evaluating the challenges of today towards achieving a better tomorrow. It is a fact that life is a continuum.

Nigeria: Relief

Mapping of environment and in fact nations has over the years faced several challenges conquered and subdued with several layers of technology over the centuries. Geodesy, a branch of science, focused on determining the shape and the size of the earth has achieved fundamental and unimaginable successes that has explained many of our earth’s mysteries.

Understanding of several of what used to be uncertainties in scientific understanding of global landscape dynamics have been achieved. This includes the possibility of projection systems for global mapping and coordinates system. The International Terrestrial Reference System (ITRS) and its product, the International Terrestrial Reference Framework (ITRF); a Global Navigational Satellite System (GNSS) has over the decades helped in better defining and generating earth parameters that has further explained global landscape dynamics and as such provided a more accurate shape and size of our earth. More accurate and appreciable facts about the dynamism of our earth is well appreciated but the efforts made in the past have brought the solution of today and local and national contributions require proper assessments and adoption for understanding the peculiar nature of local contributions to our today’s success.

    Our World

A global success without the appreciation of local contributions and legacies will erase and dump the inputs of our past local heroes into the dust bin of history. Before independence or the constitutional conferences that led to the Nigerian independence, Nigeria had leaders and patriots that held sway for the existence and unity of the nations within Nigeria and the survival of our collective national interests. Today, there exists no public knowledge of them.

The Nigerian national Origin or the national Coordinates system is a legacy system that was designed and created to provide a common geographic platform for national mapping. It was a product of the optical surveying era that gave our forebears a sense of pride and professional achievement. A lot of survey jobs in local origin were unified and administered with the NNO for decades. It has remained our national identity, considering the listing of its datum (Minna Datum) among several geodetic datum used across the globe. The NNO was the beautiful wife of the Nigerian survey world till mid-seventies when the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) was adopted as grid for national mapping.

The NNO has been said and seen to lack geoidal parameters and especially geoidal height; other limitations include the problems of gaps and overlap that introduces linear errors of 3 to 5 meter average in traverse closure from one belt to the other; The ITRF geodetic parameters are being improved on daily and practically the difference between ITRF 2005 DGPS data processed data and the 2008 equivalent was observed in Enugu/Nigeria to be about 30 centimetres. So the ITRS is still being improved on as more facts emerge from geodesy and geodynamics.

Professional and technical legacies may be faulted due to limitations of time and technology, they serve as knowledge platforms that eliminate re-invention of the wheel and provide impetus for greater achievements. Several countries of the world that had similar problems the NNO is having (limitation of technology) have corrected the anomalies, held on to their inherited legacies as we see them listed as local grids and datum in several mapping and Geographic Information System (GIS) software platforms.

Current efforts have been geared at providing a global grid system, the UTM built on World Geodetic System (WGS) 1984 global datum. There has in fact been the mixed use of datum; some surveyors use the UTM on WGS 84 datum while others use it on Minna datum. The mixed usage of the two datum has been based on lack of legislated national mapping standards and codes. As positive as the establishment of Continuous Observation Reference (COR) Stations are in the country they tend to rub us of our historical legacies and alternative mapping platform for building an indigenous, enduring and strategic surveying and mapping culture. A lot of academic research and professional legacies have been made on the NNO functionalities and its usability; it is worth sustaining and upgraded.

Of importance to the issues of upgrading and maintenance of the NNO is the issue of home security and safety of national heritage projects. The NNO is our national heritage and platform upon which our national security can be built like other nations do. We can revive its usage for pride and national fortress.