 Welcome back. It's the breakfast in Plosivia, Africa. We head straight to our second conversation at this point. We look at infrastructural deficit, now towards ensuring that Nigeria meets the infrastructural need for its population by 2050. The federal government has been urged to put in place necessary legal framework for the adoption of tunneling and underground space technology in the country. Transportation Minister Routimea Meiji had said in view of the reality there will be need to build capacity of Nigerians to embrace the imperatives of developing the underground space, broaden it to combat the challenges that mitigate the impacts of congestion in Nigeria's growing city. Studies in Europe have shown huge urban benefits of technology to include the resolution and solution to traffic issues in cities, save time for all the rest, fund and study, air quality improvement, decrease in fuel consumption, vehicle operational costs, decrease in daily death rate, tunnel is important for transportation and clean energy, drinking water for irrigation, internet and electricity cables, air conditioning as well as sanitation. Abidemi Agwar is a chairman, tunneling association of Nigeria currently advocating the development of tunneling and underground space infrastructure in the energy city of sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria and maybe Lagos. It's good to have you join us, Abidemi Agwar. Thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you this morning. Okay. So let's get straight to it. I mean, as fantastic and as brilliant as all of the benefits for having tunneling in our space and on the ground space technology, do you think that we're right for this? I would not just say we're right for it. I would say that we are well overdue for a city, the magnitude of Lagos state, which is also classed as one of the biggest cities in Africa. Africa deemed to be the fastest urbanizing continent in the world. We already have challenges with our urban space in terms of the density and the congestion that we have in the city. So underground space use actually offers a different, offers an alternative for us to be able to plan and develop our city in such a way that would be more habitable. But just like we had that conversation before, we're right here now. If you look at what we have already, we're talking about the road infrastructure. And we're not faring well, we're not doing well with the road infrastructure. The roads are really nothing, almost nothing to ride on about. Now, if you look at Lagos as a city, biggest city, Africa, business city, whatever it is you target. You want to also look at the fact that poor road network is also an issue. So do you think that we can actually say that, hey, we should be delving, it's like we're jumping from one point, from age one to ten? So I would like to look at it from a different perspective. So there's a cost for inaction. And the cost for inaction is basically what we're seeing. The reason we have bad roads is because the capacity for those roads are basically they've been exceeded. So when we have less cargo on the road, when we have less vehicular movement on the road and a percentage of the population transit or mobilizes across the city via a mass transit means. Then that takes a lot of burden away from the road and saying we have less challenges with the quality and the road because the roads are basically designed for a certain capacity. But because of the population and the magnitude of loading on the road and traffic on the road, it would basically be susceptible. So for me, I would say the biggest challenge now is that there's a puzzle, there's an element, a piece in the jigsaw that is missing. For us to have an holistic or a complete infrastructural network, there has to be an alternative means of moving 24 million people across the city of Lagos and even looking at different cities in Nigeria as well as Buja, Kano as well. So having on the ground space use as a means of transporting people within the city would actually give us the opportunity to be able to plan our cities in a more holistic way, looking at ways by which we could rethink or reshape the cities so that they can be a lot more habitable, like I said in my introduction. So let's even say, alright, this is fantastic and it should be embraced just like you are advocating and every other person advocating that there should be a legal framework to this. How will this work? So Nigeria apparently now is a member nation of the international tunneling and on the ground space use for which I'm currently an executive council member as well representing Africa. We have the benefit of hindsight, so there are a lot of countries, there are 78 other member nations that have developed tunneling on the ground spaces and there's a lot of lessons learned that can be leveraged on and so we have the opportunity to learn from other countries developed and even developing countries on how we can look at the conceptualization as well as the implementation of tunneling on the ground space use and the biggest mistakes now when you look at countries like China and India is that you when you look at the development of your infrastructure we need to adopt what you call a collaborative approach where we have multi we have it's basically we have professionals collaborating from the early phase of concept development. So for this you know for us to be able to achieve this would basically need to start leveraging on the information we have from other countries as to how not to do it basically. Okay so but the how not to do it do we also need to factor in I mean let's come back to some current reality that we have faced in Nigeria or in Lagos as it is we've talked about buildings collapse and right and so several buildings have collapsed because the relevant authorities or stakeholders have not followed the entire procedure and then certain conditions need to be met and so you would say you have to meet maybe the geological condition or you know the hydro logical condition. Do you think that you know our climate we can meet all of this condition before thinking about all of this? So all these are basically ethical and you know compliance issues it's a different you know it's a different cup of tea and it's all down to leadership they will say everything rises and fall on leadership and of course for the example of building collapse in I know that developed countries especially the United Kingdom also went through a face where they had you know some of these challenges and there was a response and I believe Lagos state governments you know when we had the last couple of few collapse responded in a way that were basically looking to address you know the regulation looking at regulation and that's what we need to do. We need to respond to a lot of these incidents or events that are catastrophic or that could be detrimental to or fatal you know for people and implement the lessons from this across board. So we're not just looking at buildings we're looking at you know maybe you know things I have to do with NAVDAC we're looking at different sectors and ensure that there is compliance and like I said it's all down to leadership and you rightly said there are protocols that needs to be followed in terms of developing on the ground space use and if those protocols are not followed there will be consequences just like any other engineering project or any engineering intervention where you set out guidelines and the expectation would be that there will be guidelines but someone would have to regulate and monitor and manage that so my expectation is that we would have the right people it's basically having the right people but the most important thing is having the buying of the decision makers and the leadership to drive this. In other words it's not limited to a certain climb. Absolutely not it's not. As long as you have a perfect regulation. Absolutely and monitoring. I'm monitoring that's right so and I would say it's just like the aviation industry. The aviation industry is perceived to be the safest and the reason is that it's heavily regulated and also well monitored because of the perceived high risk of fatality and it's the same way with tunneling as well so you you wouldn't have a lot of disasters because it's been regulated internationally and there's a lot of experience around it that we can live, rejoin as a country. So as much as it's okay to be forward thinking and be very progressive in our thoughts we can also not take out the fact that there are other issues that we are still grappling with and major on these days it's almost difficult to take a road trip the way used to be I mean way back you can actually take a road trip it wasn't a perfect system entirely but it feels like we're getting what deteriorating as the day goes by and so the security is a major issue have we factored in the issue of security how how what's what's going to be the mode of operation to ensure that you know those who are going to be plying the tunnels and underground spaces are safe look at the trains the train tracks or however you want to call it we're still also dealing with the fact that it's not safe the airways have been threatened a couple of times even would have not had a major incident and so where does this tunnel leave us in terms of security? Well so it's all still down to the fact I know it's it's a big challenge you know when we look security is a very big challenge but like I would always say it's still down to leadership at the end of the day if it's worked somewhere else that it should work if you have the right people in the right places and in terms of the planning of subterranean infrastructure for transportation or for whatever functionality we want to use it for all these peculiar challenges are factored into what you call the design phase so if you need to have you know CCTVs if you need to have kind of real-time monitoring as a matter of fact a lot of tunnels in the world is part of the international standard requirements would need to have what you call a control room just like you have a tower in an airport monitoring visually activities in the you know in the tunnel so it's a standard operation and I would expect that this will be adopted as part of the implementation especially if it has to do with transportation but like I said you can use underground space for different things for utility tunnels for sewage and water for storage and you can even use it as a basement park you know so whatever you want to use it so you could adopt the level of security framework that you want on it and around it. But so can you take us through an update how far is the Nigerian government you know going with this how far have we embraced this development and initiative? Yeah so obviously the initiative started a couple of years ago about four years ago and since then we've had interfaces with the Ministry of Transportation, Lands Ministry of Housing as well and Ministry of Water Resource and a few other MDAs. We were interested to know that I think the one of the most interesting highlights has been the adoption of tunneling underground spaces into the Land Transport Act and that was done in 2019 when we had Senator Benga Shafant and it's on Mama Gege as the Chairman and Co-Chair of the Committee at the time. But yeah that was the face where that was adopted but I believe now we're now overdue for the next phase which is implementation. This now has to be implemented into some kind of strategic master plan for how we plan our cities. Is it limited to you know mega cities or it cuts across the 36 states of the Federation including the FCT? It will cut across the 36 states of the Federal Federation and maybe later on I would also touch on an initiative that we're working on that is basically addressing how underground space use can be integrated you know for the 36 states of the Federation. Many thanks Abidemi Agour for being part of the conversation this morning. I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure. Well we have been talking about an initiative that a lot of experts and a lot of persons think it would be a good development for Africa and Nigeria. That's it this morning on our conversation on the breakfast. If you missed out on any part of it it's alright to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Do subscribe to our YouTube channel at Plus TV Africa, Plus TV Africa Lifestyle. I am Massey Bockelman. Thanks for watching. Have a fantastic Friday and happy children's day to all of the great fantastic amazing children out there.