President visits TGMI on 5th Anniversary as an autonomous entity |17 May 2023
Interacting with staff
President Wavel Ramkalawan visited The Guy Morel Institute (TGMI) yesterday afternoon for the institute’s 5th year since becoming an autonomous professional centre.
The President was accompanied by the Minister for Education Justin Valentin; chief secretary of the Public Service Bureau, Shella Mohideen; and the institute’s executive director Patrick Bristol.
They visited various departments inside the administrative block, as well as other rooms such as the IT department.
He had a pleasant conversation with the workers inside the various classrooms that he visited.
Mr Bristol explained the reasoning behind the President’s visit, stating that he had always wanted to visit TGMI but had not had the opportunity to do so.
“This is the most ideal moment for him to visit us, since we are celebrating five years since the existence of The Guy Morel Institute.”
He continued by stating that this would be perfect for the president to be able to discuss the various needs of the institute and the challenges it is going through.
“This is a chance for us to also share some of the projects that we have.”
Some of the challenges include staffing and budgetary constraints, for example.
“Last year, the President himself announced that he would like TGMI to work in partnership with the Public Service Bureau. To make this work, TGMI as an institute cannot rely solely on the government for budgetary needs. This hinders our plans from moving forward.”
Mr Bristol assured that there was a positive discussion with the President regarding the budgetary constraints.
“One of the reasons why Ms Mohideen was also present was that she could also share her experience on how we can move forward.”
One of the projects discussed was to make the public sector college fully fledged. This was difficult since last year. In addition, ICT is one area where TGMI focuses on a lot and in fact, it is one of the strategic objectives to make it grow and develop the training to move into a ‘hybrid mode’.
Mr Bristol said the President explained that there are ways to make this happen and it will be done in writing to send to the President’s Office to make it a reality.
Mr Bristol’s impression on the last five years of TGMI is that the beauty of the situation is that it has retained the workers since the days of its precursor – SIM (Seychelles Institute of Management). “So all of these people know what we are going through and we mentioned financial difficulties, everyone knows that we cannot do certain things. We work as a team that permits us to be where we are today.”
He went on to explain that the positive attitude is one that will carry the staff for the next five years.
Mr Bristol also talked about the liquidation of the location that the institute is based at. The property is still registered under the name ‘SIM’ since its existence.
“It has been ten years since we have been trying to push this new reality and the President has given us his assurances today that hopefully by end of this week, the process will be completed and this will bring us a lot of advantages.”
The fact that the property is not registered under TGMI it cannot receive support from banks or any other entities.
“The official change in name will open a lot of doors,” Mr Bristol said.
The President also had a pleasant conversation with the caretaker of the canteen and he visited various classrooms along with the IT department. In addition, he also visited the library where he had a glance at the various books and the accounts section.
The President also had a fruitful meeting with the board members of TGMI before ending the visit.
Sunny Esparon
Photos by Joena Meme
