By; PATRICK TITUS, Uyo
The newly inaugurated St. Gabriel Coconut Refinery in Akwa Ibom will earn foreign exchange for the state and inject life into the economy. Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr Ini Ememobong has assured.
Ememobong said that although the Refinery is 100 per cent owned by Akwa Ibom Government, it is built to run under private enterprise system to ensure the optimum goals of revenue generation and jobs creation.
He added that the governor being a financial expert, adopted this model so that the companies can in turn give dividends to government.
Speaking after a recent projects tour in the state, the commissioner who admitted that government is not a good business manager, noted that Ibom Air as well as the Ibom Icon Hotels are privately run and are bringing a lot of dividends to the state.
He added that the governor being a financial expert adopted this model so that the companies can in turn give dividends to government’s huge investments
He also explained that the process has injected life into the economy of the state, saying that such would be replicated in the newly commissioned coconut refinery.
“There is no fear of how to properly manage those businesses as the governor has shown great example with the way Ibom Airlines is being run. Though owned by the government, it is run like a private enterprise.
“Same thing is applicable to Ibom Icon Hotel. The management and the board are dominated by private business people and every six months, they come to the State Executive Council meeting to give update on their activities. The state is getting dividends from them,” he stated.
The commissioner said that the state governor, Mr Udom Emmanuel has, in an attempt to create jobs for the teeming youth, engaged humans to perform some tasks, machines can do in some of the industries noting that St. Gabriel Coconut Refinery crushes about one million nuts daily.
With mechanization introduced to industrialization, His Excellency consciously designed a human interface into it, some things machines can handle, His Excellency employed the youth to be doing them to engage them.
“The principle of private sector is what we use in running all our endeavors, level of equity in Ibom Air is purely government, fully owned by government but run privately, we don’t have government interference unless where very necessary.”
On the production capacity of the refinery, the commissioner gave the initial installed capacity as three hundred thousand nuts per session and it can run three sessions which would of course take up to a million a day.
To sustain inputs supply, the information boss said the location of the plant at Mkpat Enin Area of the state, places it on comparative advantage because it is a natural coconut belt all year round.
“But the subsistent production of coconut, cannot feed that factory even for a day. The state government has established two plantation sites in Mkpat Enin/Eastern Obolo and Okobo where over two million seedlings have been planted already. This is besides individuals farm and schools farm that government has given incentives to grow a special specie of the coconuts”.
The state government, he added, sees coconut oil as alternative to crude oil as the price of coconut oil per barrel in international markets costs more than crude oil, and there is no OPEC that will regulate the quantum of coconut oil producing.
