The Registrar, Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, has berated Nigerian politicians who he said preferred to spend as much as N100m to buy nomination forms of their political parties than to equip health institutions with such money.
Oloyede made the comment while speaking during the presentation of medical equipment to the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital in Ilorin on Friday.
The presentation was part of JAMB’s ongoing presentation of medical equipment to 12 tertiary health institutions selected from the six zones in the country.
The items, which JAMB secured from the Project Cure of the United States of America, are being presented to the institutions under the “Tertiary Health Institutions Hospital Equipment Intervention Programme.”
Oloyede said, “Our politicians prefer to spend N100m to buy nomination forms of their various political parties instead of making donations to equip our health institutions.
“If they had done that, our people would have been praising and praying for them, but now after losing out, who would pray for them?”
Explaining the motive behind the donation of the medical equipment to the tertiary health institutions, the JAMB registrar said, “The intervention of the board in the area of health care delivery is to support government’s efforts aimed at addressing the huge medical infrastructural gap.
“It is no gainsaying that the COVID-19 pandemic provided the much-needed impetus for countries around the globe to do the needful by breaking barriers and tapping into available opportunities.
“For us in Nigeria, the pandemic served as a wake-up call that opened our consciousness to the need for adequately equipped public health institutions to complement our highly acknowledged skilled force of medical personnel.
“It is in pursuit of this noble goal that JAMB, in its wisdom, decided to enter into a partnership with a grant agency in the United States of America to equip 12 tertiary health institutions in Nigeria.
“This is premised on our fervent belief that we could address the deficits in this particular sector of our nation if every segment of the society contributes its quota no matter how little to confront the lack in the critical areas of our society, such as health, food and education.”
