From Uche Usim, Abuja
The Minister of State, Petroleum Resources, Mr Timipre Sylva, has assured those living in the terror-ravaged North East to keep faith with President Muhammadu Buhari who has an unflinching desire to rebuild the region so that social-economic life can be rekindled.
Speaking during the commissioning and handing over of the Radiography Centre at the ModibboAdama University Teaching Hospital (MAUTH), Yola, Adamawa State, solely funded under the Oil and Gas Sector Intervention Programme, on Thursday, Sylva said the completion and handing over of the projects was a clear demonstration of the federal government’s readiness to restore normalcy through the oil and gas sector interventions in providing the necessary infrastructure and services in security, healthcare, education, agriculture, energy, climate action, human capital development and poverty alleviation in the country.
Sylva, who harped on the urgent need for collaborations between the government and the private sector said it was only through such efforts as demonstrated by the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, that the nation needs to fast track the needed development across the broad spectrum of “our national lives”.
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According to him “this is the kind of collaboration we need in our nation to get things moving. What I have seen here is commendable and I dare say that collaboration like this is the only way through which we can grow as a nation. There should be a handshake between the government and the private sector.”
The project according to Sylva “forms part of the commitment of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration to redeem its pledge to the people of the Northeast in accelerating the desperately needed rehabilitation, reconstruction, and rebuilding the region due the Boko Haram insurgency that ravaged lives, property, social infrastructure & services and livelihood in the recent past.”
The minister noted that the upgrade of the MAUTH facility is “intended to enhance the training of medical students, boost health care delivery as well as reduce the doctor-patient ratio in the state and neighbouring states in the region.”
The commissioning of the hospital with state-of-the-art CT-Scan, x-ray and MRI, he said will go a long way towards improving to quick response time to all health-related matters and strengthening learning ability stressing that with laboratory testing and case management in one location, “there is a much shorter time between sample collection and infection confirmation, which ensures early initiation of treatment and thus mitigate the mortality rate in the state.”
The upgrade of the medical teaching hospital catapulted the facility to become one of the best healthcare facilities in the country.