E-ticketing: NRC to generate N22bn in 4 years

 

The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) will generate an estimated N22 billion from tickets sales with the proposed introduction of  electronic ticketing solutions on the Lagos-Ibadan and Warri- Itakpe standard gauge train services in four years.

 The corporation, in collaboration with the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) will Monday, begin the assessments and prequalification of firms that have expressed interests to bid for the provision of e-ticketing solutions on a build, operate and transfer (BOT) PPP arrangement for an initial four years.

ICRC acting drector general, Mr. Micheal Ohiani, who led a team of ICRC to present a Certificate of Compliance for an Outline Business Case (OBC) to the NRC managing director, Fidet Okhiria, expressed satisfaction with the works the NRC has put into making the exercise a success.

Mr. Ohiani said: ‘’The federal government is expected through NRC to generate N12.4 billion within the four years on the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge network and N9.6 for the Warri-Itakpe within the period under review.’’

Managing Director of NRC, Okhiria said with the success of the e-ticketing solution on the Abuja-Kaduna Train Service (AKTS), the corporation approached the ICRC to enable us to advertise for the electronic solutions on the new Lagos-Ibadan and Itakpe-Warri routes.

introduction of the e-ticketing on the AKTS, the revenue has gone up either by encouraging users to use the e-ticketing or if there were leakages, I can say they have been blocked somehow and ticket racketeering has reduced by the use of the e-ticketing and its technology. We cannot be perfect in one day. We are also reviewing it on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and we try to improve on what we are doing.

 “Now that we have introduced new routes, we believe we should do them separately so that we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. We approached the ICRC with a business case and went through several reviews and we are happy today that they are officially presenting the Outline Business Certificate that enabled us to advertise the e-ticketing solutions. Immediately we will go for the accessing and prequalification and then unto the commercial and financials once the advert expires on Monday.

“The overall objective of the project is the successful procurement of private- sector secured providers with the requisite technical competence, managerial capacity and financial resources to design, develop, deploy and manage the infrastructure to enable train passengers on these railway corridors purchase both electronic and manual tickets with ease.”