by
Bala Muhammad
One area we
Muslim Northerners have a great deficiency in, perhaps second only to our abysmal
public education, is our almost comatose public health sector. Our hygiene and
sanitation and immunisation and general healthcare are almost in shambles –
perhaps owing to the fact that our elite (as they have done in education) have
established their own private medical facilities and (from top to bottom) continue
to troop abroad for the slightest ailment
For Arewa,
as in education, as in healthcare. The poor are left to their own devices. No wonder
they call rural dispensaries in Arewa “Sha-Ka-Tafi”; Indeed! It is so! When pictures
of dilapidated classes are splashed on pages of newspapers, governments usually
scramble their defensive modes, brandishing figures of billions spent on
education, bla bla. Similarly, when news and current affairs and pictures of ramshackle
public hospitals and clinics are highlighted, the same ‘billions spent’ are
regurgitated.
But sometimes
you get a silver lining – when communities come together to establish schools
and hospitals for the benefit of their communities. We remember Zaria’s Muslim
Hospital, for example. But one very important and significant intervention, which
interestingly straddles both education and healthcare, is the Muslim Community
College of Health Science and Technology, (MCCHST), Funtua, Katsina State,
which held its maiden Convocation Ceremony last week.
Founded by
a group of young people under the auspices of Muslim Students’ Society of
Nigeria (MSSN) Funtua/Malumfashi Area Council in 1999, the School was later to
be transferred to the ownership of the community on account of the enormous
progress the college recorded. A Board of Trustees under the chairmanship of
Sarkin Maskan Katsina, District Head of Funtua was incorporated to take up the
challenge of overseeing the affairs of the college.
According
to Provost Umar Aminu, in 2003, The College got its permanent site through a
donation by Funtua LGA. This paved the way for the school to get full
accreditation in 2005 for Community Health Department. Bolstered by this, the
college introduced Environmental Health Department, then affiliated to Shehu
Idris College of Health Science, Makarfi, Kaduna State, before it was
subsequently fully accredited in 2012. The College further introduced
departments of Dental Surgery and Health Information Technicians in 2014, while
Departments of Medical Laboratory and Biomedical Engineering were introduced in
2016 and 2017 respectively.
The School
started with a population of 20 students in 1999, but currently has one
thousand and two hundred (1,200) students studying various diploma and
certificate courses. Some of the successes recorded in the College include the
expansion of courses from only one to nine different in these years; increase
in admission capacity from 20 to 1,200 students, and the construction of its
permanent site, having transited from various borrowed and rented premises at
various stages of its development. It now has state of the art laboratories, a Dental
Clinic and a demonstration clinic for the students.
Academically,
the College is not all talk – in Community Health it scored 100% consecutively
for 5 years in national examinations, becoming the best in the country. Again,
it scored the best result in Dental Surgery in 2017 and 2018. From inception to
date, the school has graduated about 3,000 students, many of them at present manning
health services at all levels of government. But there are many challenges: take,
for example, Midwifery studies. Quoting a scholar, Prof Otolorin, the Provost
lamented the situation that: “it will take Nigeria 50 years of training
midwives in this current phase and without anyone retiring or dying before we [Nigeria]
can achieve the WHO desired standard of having 1 midwife to 2000 population”.
Example of
this sorry state: there are two hundred and thirty six (236) Schools of Nursing
and Midwifery in the country, including those training post basic Nurses and
Midwives. Out of these, according to information from the Nursing and Midwifery
Council, the South East and South West geopolitical zones have about half of
these while the North West, with almost the same population as the two zones,
has only 10%. To bring the contrast closer, Lagos State has 14, Oyo 13, Enugu
14, but Kano with a population of over 15 million has only 5. Katsina itself
has only 2.
Our
pitiable lot reached the extent that there was so much scarcity of health workers
in the North that retired midwives have to be mopped from the south and sent to
our communities in the North, and in most instances with poor retention. What
stops our wealthy people from investing in this health education venture to
salvage the Ummah from this ugly scenario, lamented Funtua Provost? It is for
this very reason that the people of Funtua, led by the College’s Board of
Trustees, decided to venture in establishing the college and the future schools
of Nursing and Midwifery to add to the courses now going on.
The
College particularly honoured those who made it possible for the school to succeed
and even excel in its core assignment of training health personnel for many
states in the North; the honourees included the 20th Sultan of
Sokoto and leader of the largest pre-colonial state in the history of Africa;
the Emir of Katsina; the Emir of Daura; former Governor of Kano State and
former Minister of Education, Sardaunan Kano
Ibrahim Shekarau who was very instrumental in making the initial
financial contribution to kickstart the school; elder statesman and topmost
businessman Alhaji Aminu Dantata who financed major projects in the school;
late philanthropist and college benefactor Alhaji Bala Abdullahi Funtua; and
Alhaji Mu’azu Isa Funtua, another philanthropist and benefactor. (It is always
important to mention benefactors of such good causes to ginger similarly-minded
people to do same and more).
The Convocation
ceremony of the Funtua College was a revelation: the school surpassed and surprised
itself by witnessing such an impressive turnout. Katsina Governor was there, and
so was the Sultan himself – the spiritual and traditional and royal head of
Northern and Nigerian Muslim communities (whose investiture as Grand Patron of
the College was an important component of the event). And so were the Emirs of
Kano, Birnin Gwari, Lere and others.
The Sultan,
in his address, urged Northern Governors to rise to the challenge of filling this
gap in public healthcare institutions and, as if in response, Katsina Governor
Masari pledged to construct some of the buildings to house the proposed Nursing
and Midwifery courses in the college, and challenged other communities to
emulate the good example of Funtua people.
Guest
Speaker Emir of Kano Muhammad Sanusi II painted a sorry picture of our situation
– reeling horrible statistics in poverty, education, healthcare, drug abuse,
unemployment, and such other pointers to our sorry state, and sorry local
government! But he added that schools as this Funtua Community College will go
a long way in addressing part of these maladies.
FROM THE COLUMNIST: In sha Allah from next week and
until the February Elections, this Column will start a series titled “MY VOTE
IS…” where readers will state FOR and AGAINST what issues will determine how
they will vote. No issue is too big or too small. For example, for this
Columnist MY VOTE IS… “FOR anyone who will build a Kaduna-Kano Modern Rail Line”
and MY VOTE IS… “AGAINST any Cabal, Real or Imagined.” Readers may email their
FOR or AGAINST in no more than 100 words apiece. Some readers will replicate these
opinions on social media for wider reach.
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