The Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN), Oron in Akwa Ibom has concluded plans to commercialise its facilities inorder to increase Internally Generated Revenue, IGR.
Rector of the Academy, Commodore Duja Effedua (Rtd), who made this known while receiving a Certificate of Recognition from the Correspondents Chapel of the NUJ in the state yesterday in Oron said that it was necessary for the academy to look inwards inorder to maintain its standards.
Effedua who said that before now the institution depended solely on government and fees generated from the cadets added that the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has really affected the academy as International businesses have 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. So, our sources of revenue are very few.
“Few people are coming these days, when they come, they come for mandatory courses and we train them on that. That’s our major source of revenue, but COVID-19 has affected us.
“But now we have a lot of equipment which we never had before like full-vision simulator, engine simulator, multifunctional class room 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 those who 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 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.” The Rector explained.
He said that there were areas the academy has comparative advantage over other maritime institutions making a case for exchange programmes and offered to give 50% rebate to other institutions.
“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 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 said.
Effedua said that he would consolidate on what the academy has achieved in the last four years, build on the structures and equipment to avoid it going down.
