At least 32 people have died in Nigeria’s northern Niger state after a boat sank in a river, an official has told the BBC.
The reportedly overloaded boat, said to have been carrying about 100 passengers including women and children, capsized when it struck a submerged tree stump on the River Niger in the Borgu area on Wednesday morning.
Abdullahi Baba Ara, the spokesman of the National Emergency Management Agency (Nema) in the state, told BBC Hausa on Thursday that more than 50 other people had been rescued, with eight still missing.
Search operations are continuing.
Mr Ara said the government had set up a team of “water marshals” to stop boat operators from overloading their vessels and ensure passengers wear life jackets.
“Perhaps the water marshals were not on duty when this boat took off,” he said, adding that investigations had started.
A local district head told the Reuters news agency that he had been at the scene soon after the accident.
“I was at the scene yesterday around 12 pm until 4 pm. The boat carried more than 100 people. We were able to recover 31 corpses from the river. The boat was also recovered and removed,” Reuters quoted Sa’adu Inuwa Muhammad as saying.
Boat accidents are fairly common in Nigeria, often due to overloading, poor regulation and inadequate safety precautions.
About 25 people went missing last month after a boat accident in Sokoto state.
In December last year, 54 bodies were recovered from the River Niger after a boat that may have been carrying more than 200 passengers capsized.
The government has made it mandatory for water travellers to always wear life jackets, but this is often not enforced.
In February, the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Adegboyega Oyetola, set up a “Special Committee on the Prevention of Boat Mishaps in Nigeria”, and in May the ministry announced that it would be distributing 42,000 life jackets across 12 riverine states in the country.
Later in the month, the National Inland Water Ways Authority (NIWA) kicked off a campaign they called “No Life Jacket, No Travel”, and “No Night Travelling” in Niger and Kwara states where boat accidents have occurred regularly in the recent past.
Niger state is Nigeria’s largest by land mass and people tend to travel a lot by water as it is often the fastest and cheapest means of getting around.
