Nigeria: Adekunle - Health Sector and the Doctor's Ego (II)

opinion

I AM a pharmacist, a proud one at that. I remember that in 1989 when I gained admission into the pharmacy school at Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, the highest mark in the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination by both medicine and pharmacy applicants was scored by a pharmacy intake. In my first year in school, medical and pharmacy students did same courses but one. Yet, a pharmacy student still had the best overall grade. At Ife and other pharmacy schools that I know, nobody ever gets admission into pharmacy if he did not choose pharmacy as his first choice. The only other route is to change your course to pharmacy if you have excellent results in your department. The relevant records are still there for those who wish to check them out. So where comes the illusion that it was those who are not brilliant enough to read medicine that were being shipped to other courses allied to medicine.

In my third year, a colleague was withdrawn from pharmacy school for academic reasons. He was then admitted into Year 2 to study Computer Science with Economics. He did not only graduate as one of the best in his new department, he is today more successful in every sense of the word than most of his colleagues that he left in pharmacy. There is hardly any year that the cut-off points for admission into Computer Science is not greater than Pharmacy in O.A.U. So, on what basis can one probably start a comparison of Pharmacy and Computer Science to determine which is superior or inferior?

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