A new financial strategy may herald the revival of Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC), as the management fine-tunes measures for the organisation's re-birth.

The new strategy is expected to tackle the challenges besetting the corporation's come-back bid.
"The measure has become imperative because of the near zero allocation to the corporation in the 2008 budget,'' NRC Managing Director, Mr. Jetson Nwankwo said.

Addressing a quarterly meeting of all the regional district managers of the corporation recently in Enugu, the Managing Director charged the managers to put their hands on deck to salvage the corporation, as they could no longer rely only on government for survival.
Nwankwo said that it was only the corporation and its management that could articulate the way forward.

He urged them be more "diligent, proactive, honest, transparent and ready to make the difference between success and failure.''
The managing director, however, said that the corporation was still hopeful that government would use the supplementary budget to assist them to secure funds to enable them to re-invent the corporation. He said that the Railway Property Management Company Limited would play a major role in its financial drive.

Nwankwo said that the management had set up a procurement committee charged with all procurement matters in compliance with government's directive. According to him, NRC has continued to co-operate with the Reform Committee of the Federal Ministry of Transportation in order to ensure that the process was quickly concluded. On its Public Private Partnership programme, the managing director said that Kano, Kaduna, Lagos and Plateau States had since commenced mass transit train services. He said that the corporation had signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Delta and Cross River states. He, however, said that efforts were in top gear to repair the damaged rail line between Aba and Port Harcourt.

The rail link between Aba and Port Harcourt was suspended because of a landslide that occurred on the line. The managing director called on the Federal Government to assist them by releasing the ecological funds to help the corporation in repairing the damage and checking natural disaster that disrupted their operation.

Nwankwo announced that a Senate Adhoc Committee has been raised to investigate the ministry of transport from 1999 to date, adding that the public hearing would commence on June 23 in Abuja.Regional managers of the seven districts as well as other management staff attended the one-day meeting.