By Muhammad Ibrahim 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 Bio-Medical engineering at an Indian university.
As contained in a release issued by the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to the Governor, Muhammad Bello, Hassan Usman, who hails from fako village in Binji local government area of the state, was among 77 other students that graduated with first class degrees from Indian tertiary institutions.
Another student, Dr Muzammil Lawal Maidoki, Dr who hails from Sokoto North local government, who while pursuing his study also memorized the Holy Qur’an and Sahih Bukhari, graduated with a first class degree in Medicine from Nahda University in Sudan.
All the students were products of a scholarship scheme bankrolled by the state government, which has expended the sum of N14 billion between 2016 and 2022 on the training of 46,000 indigenous students as medical doctors, engineers and other professionals.
The graduates were presented to Governor Tambuwal in Sokoto by the Permanent Secretary in the state scholarship board, Alhaji Bello Isah.
Receiving Usman and his counterparts who graduated from universities in India, Sudan, Ukraine and Ghana on Friday, Governor Tambuwal who expressed his delight with their superlative academic feats, awarded the silver medalist a scholarship to pursue his masters 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, Alhaji Bello Isah explained that 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.
