|
Listen now
|
Abdulfatai Abdulsalami, Sokoto
A Sokoto state indigene sponsored by the incumbent administration of Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal is a recipient of the first African silver medal for outstanding performance in an Indian university.
Hassan Usman, a graduate of Bio-Medical engineering was among 77 other students that graduated with first class degrees from Indian tertiary institutions.
They were all products of a scholarship scheme bankrolled by the state government, which has expended the sum of N14 billion between 2015 and 2022 on the training of 46,000 indigenous students as Medical doctors, Engineers and other professionals.
Receiving Usman and his counterparts who graduated from universities in India, Sudan and Ghana on Friday, Governor Tambuwal who expressed his delight with their superlative academic feats, awarded the medalist a scholarship to pursue his master’s degree and PhD.
Equally, the Governor directed the state’s Head of Service to ensure that all the medical graduates were immediately employed after completing their mandatory youths service scheme under the National Youths Service Corps (NYSC).
According to him, his administration’s huge investment on medical students is aimed at addressing the lack of adequate manpower in the state’s health sector… “We know our challenges. We do not have adequate medical manpower.
“This is the reason why we came up with this programme so that we can have enough manpower for our people, especially now that we are building more hospitals in the state,” he said
The Permanent Secretary in the state scholarship board, Bello explained that the 1,121 were trained on medicine, engineering and other paramedic courses, while 15,000 were graduates of sciences and social science related courses from different universities in Nigeria. Among them were 300 lawyers.
He said an additional 30,000 are currently being sponsored to study various courses in Nigeria.