Boats were acquired from Italian company

The interceptor surveillance boats were bought from Selex Communication, a subsidiary of Finmecanica, a conglomerate which also builds boats in Italy.

The newly acquired boats have two engines each and can cruise at between 70 and 90 knots, or about 150 kilometres per hour, twice as fast as the Volvo Penta-powered patrol boats that were in use before.

They also have a high-tech communication system known as the Automated Identification System that can show the location of the boat from the police base at all times. The system enables both boat-to-boat and boat-to-shore communication.

The government entered a maintenance contract with the suppliers recently because the personnel available in the country could not do the work, besides, certain adjustments on the equipment needed to be made.

“We had to change some components to suit the temperatures, altitude and density of the water mass, because they had not been built to local specifications,” said Mr Okoshi.

Mr Okoshi further said: “The boats were supplied with a training component that allowed our engineers to go for training in Italy for a week, and learnt things to do with communication, the engine and navigation.

In March, however, we sent one engineer and two technicians to learn more on the engines alone, this time at our own expense.”