The New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) presidential candidate, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, has said that if elected to become Nigeria’s president come 2023, his administration will prioritize correcting all anomalies in the nation’s health sector.
The former Governor of Kano State also expressed hope that he would not visit abroad for medical treatment when the time comes.
Daily Review understands that the presidential hopeful said this on Sunday night while addressing people at the People’s Townhall 2023 powered by Channels Television.
Speaking on his plans for the nation’s health care system, Kwankwaso said the sector is one of the major sectors his administration will deal with its challenges.
“I will do everything under the sun not to go anywhere [abroad] for any medication.
“The failures we have today, the one we said we are going to correct, affects all sectors, including health and I am happy to inform you that our package starts with education as we did in Kano. We built five institutions under the ministry of health – two nursing schools, two midwifery schools and a health technology college,” the presidential hopeful said.
He recalled how his government in Kano State sent men and women abroad on scholarships to read medicines.
Kwankwaso said: “We improved all our general hospitals in Kano.
“We have been to these hospitals, seen all the equipment there [foreign hospitals] and there is no one that Nigeria cannot purchase. So, there is not much difference with what we have here in our hospitals.”
Kwankwaso said his administration would bring in manpower to man the equipment in Nigerian hospitals just as Nigerians relocated abroad to work as medical personnel. He vowed to remove all the bottlenecks preventing Nigerian medical personnel from excelling, recalling that as the governor of Kano State, one of the best graduating medical students from a university in the state could not get a place for horsemanship and had to come to him to help her out.
“You need to know someone to get horsemanship but we will remove all those bottlenecks,” he said. Kwankwaso also assured Nigerians that the education sector would be his government’s top priority, adding that more resources would be committed to funding education at all levels.
While lamenting the high number of out-of-school children in the country, he said his blueprint would take children out of the street and build more schools across the country. He also vowed to tackle corruption headlong and invest in the energy sector to revitalize the manufacturing sector of the economy.
