By Grace Udofia
Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN) has announced plans to commercialise most of the institution’s equipment to help raise more funds to run the school.
The Rector of the Academy which is located in Oron, Akwa Ibom State, Duja Effedua made this known to journalists on Wednesday.
According to him, it had become necessary for the academy to look inwards on its sources of revenue to maintain the standard in the institution instead of depending on only funds from government and fees paid by cadets.
He said, “The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic had affected the academy as International businesses had 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 subsidised 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.”
Effedua added that there were areas the academy has comparative advantage over other maritime institutions and he urged others to come to the academy for exchange.
“The academy has agreed that where they have advantage over another maritime institution they will give them 50 per cent rate and vice versa.
“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 added.
