Academy commercialises facilities to raise revenue

Ini Billie, Uyo

The Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN), Oron in Akwa Ibom has commercialised some of its facilities to raise revenue for the institution.

The Rector of the institution, Commodore Duja Effedua (rtd), who said this on Wednesday in Oron during an interaction with newsmen, added that the idea was to boost the internally generated revenue (IGR) of the academy.

According to Effedua, the move was necessary as the academy needs to utilise what it has to maintain the standard in the institution, noting that before now, the academy depended solely on the government and fees generated from the cadets to run the school.

He stated that unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has really affected the sources of revenue if the institution as international businesses has slowed down.

“In terms of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), we can’t predict that anymore because COVID-19 has scattered everything. Most of the ships are not there, fewer people are coming these days, so when they come, they come on mandatory short courses, so train them on that. That is our major source of revenue, but COVID-19 has slowed that down.

“But now we have a lot of equipment which we never had before like full-vision simulator, engine simulator, multifunctional classroom and we have the helicopter that water escape through, among others.

“We intend to commercialise most of those equipment which we used in training our cadets, we will open it to other schools that don’t have the money to buy those things.

“They can come, and train here and then pay us some money, but at a subsidized rate also, because the government should not be making money from capacity building, rather they should encourage capacity building.

“So, we will open it to them, I have told them already that they are free to come here. Some of them have started coming,” he stated.

The rector who said there were areas the academy has a comparative advantage over other maritime institutions, urged other institutions to come to the academy for exchange.

He said the academy has agreed that it will give interested maritime institutions a 50 per cent rate advantage and vice versa, adding that he would consolidate what the academy has achieved in the last four years by building on the structures and equipment to avoid going down.

“There are areas we have comparative advantage and there are areas they have over us. So, we’ve told them wherever we have advantage, we give them a 50 per cent rate.

“So, those are the only ways we can generate more money before we depended solely on attendance but now, we hope to commercialise our equipment, even the hostels people can come and stay.

“There are some special hostels that are not used by cadets, we called them guest houses or halls of resident. When they go there, they spent some token and spent a night, do their training, and go back,” he explained.