29 June 2009
(Page 3 of 3)
Sometimes they say seeing is believing, at the time we came in, whenever I talk, people will say because he wants to just make noise because he is a politician. If you go to all the local governments, the previous administration constructed two kilometre of roads in each of the local government but it is now that I am paying the debt, they are part of the debt that I inherited, no single kobo was paid and it is the same contractor that is doing the job now. You can see that is very challenging. Out of the 24 boarding secondary schools, we have done 18 now and we are yet to commence in full the rehabilitation of primary schools. One of the primary schools has over 6000 pupils, when the Minister of State for Finance came here, I had to take him to the school, I say come and see. There are potholes in the school, no desk, no roof and teachers have no place to write. I had to demolish everything and start all over. I am building 80 class rooms and it is almost completed, it just remains the plastering. This is the type of the thing that we intend to do for the primary schools. Right now through the SUBEC we are building new schools and rehabilitating the old ones through federal intervention and also counterpart funding to the state.
What is the health situation of the state and why the engagement of Egyptian doctors?
I don't think that giving the population of Nigeria that is over 140 million, the ratio of doctors to a number of citizens is good for us to say that we have sufficient doctors in the country, I don't think so, the ratio is so big and unfortunately, the previous government of Bauchi did not develop conscious effort to sponsor students who read medicine, if they had, may be by now, we would have so many Bauchi State indigenes as our doctors, but we have them, you won't believe some of them are not working for the State even though they enjoyed Bauchi State scholarship. We have quite a number of them working in Abuja, Kano, and the rest and we tried to attract them back.
Apparently, Bauchi State is one of the very few states that has implemented HATTIS salary scale for health workers and we are paying through our nose just to get the medical personnel properly motivated to be able to work and render services to the sick and we have placed adverts in the papers for doctors and nurses and we have quite a number of Nigerians from the East, West, North Central who are working in the Bauchi State Specialist Hospital and the Egyptian doctors are under special arrangement with the Egyptian government. We don't pay them salaries, we pay them allowances and we provide accommodation and transportation for them.
There is Arab fund for Africa and under that, we were able to secure the services of 30 Egyptian doctors and it is something like an extended goodwill of the Egyptian government towards Nigeria and we are about the only state in the country that is enjoying this patronage and I think after us, may be the door was closed and I have to assure you that all of them had to go registered with the Nigerian Medical Council. In fact, we had a running battle before Medical Council eventually accepted them. This is because some of the universities that some of them went to are world renowned universities. So we didn't have much problem. But some of them also went to universities that are quite known. So, they had to sit down and write examination before they were eventually admitted. So, you can be rest assured that that the condition has been fulfilled. Because of complete absence of female medical doctors, right now I'm sponsoring about 23 females and they went through a very tough screening process and we identified the most brilliant among them. In fact, all of them are extremely brilliant.
One from each local government; just like our pilot scheme, we have about 24 students in Florida reading Aeronautic Engineering and Piloting. They are graduating next year. By the time I visited them last year in the University, the Vice Chancellor and School Authorities congratulated us because we gave them the brightest brains the human race can introduce because they are among the best in the university. They went through a very serious screening process. It's not because somebody is somebody's child or daughter. Most of them are children of the poor. You won't believe it. Some of them have not even gone out of Bauchi and they find themselves in Florida. So, the same thing goes to the female. Almost all of them are children of the poor but very brilliant. They are in Ashanti University and we have 15 young boys in the University of Alexandria. They hope to graduate in the next four years.
These are part of interventions past regime should have been doing. If they were sponsoring 10, 15, by now we should have had sufficient medical doctors as long as they go through a screening process to give everybody a level playing field and choose the best because medicine is a very tough subject. So, you have to get somebody who has the mental capacity to be able go through the course. You are journalists by profession; I'm a banker by profession. Somebody is good in medicine. Everybody has his own core competency as gift from the almighty. I think when eventually we have them; we will be sufficiently staffed by medical doctors. But meanwhile more are coming. We recently recruited two specialists; one is for the ear and nose and they are very hard to get. He opted to come and work in Bauchi. He is from Kogi State. We are doing those kinds of searches so that at least we can get the good ones to come and join us here.
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