Boat of Boat of the State of Niger: dozens die in Nigeria

At least 32 people died in the northern Niger State in Nigeria after a boat flowed into a river, an official at the BBC told.

The boat would have been overloaded, carrying around 100 passengers, including women and children, capsized when it struck a submerged tree strain on the Niger river in the Borgu region on Tuesday morning.

They were on the way to a neighboring village to pay tribute to someone who was recently deceased.

Abdullahi Baba Ara, the spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) of the State, the BBC Haus said on Thursday that more than 50 other people had been saved, eight disappeared.

Research operations are continuing.

Ara said that the government had set up a team of “water marshals” to prevent boats from overloading their ships and guaranteeing that passengers wear life jackets.

“Perhaps the water marshals were not in service when this boat took off,” he said, adding that the investigations had started.

A local district manager told the Reuters news agency that he was on the scene shortly after the accident.

“I was on the scene yesterday around 12 noon until 4 p.m. the boat was carrying more than 100 people. We were able to recover 31 river corpses. The boat was also recovered and withdrawn,” said Reuters Sa’adu Inuwa Muhammad.

Boat accidents are quite common in Nigeria, often due to overload, poor regulations and inadequate security precautions.

About 25 people disappeared last month after a boat accident in the state of Sokoto.

In December of last year, 54 bodies were recovered from the Niger river after a boat that may transport more than 200 passengers.

The government has made it compulsory for water travelers to always wear life jackets, but this is often not applied.

In February, the Minister of Marine and the Blue Economy, Adegboyega Oyetola, set up a “special committee on the prevention of boat misadventures in Nigeria” and, in May, the ministry announced that it would distribute 42,000 rescue gains in 12 river states in the country.

Later in the month, the National Inland Water Ways Authority (Niwa) launched a campaign that they called “without life jacket, without travel” and “no night trip” to Niger and Kwara, the states where boat accidents occurred regularly in a recent past.

The state of Niger is the largest in Nigeria by the earthly mass and people tend to travel a lot in water because it is often the fastest and cheapest means of moving.