Vice-President, Professor, Yemi Osinbajo,
Tobi Soniyi in Abuja
The Vice-President, Professor, Yemi Osinbajo, has said the Buhari administration will put in place effective primary healthcare centres across the country so as to ensure access to healthcare for all Nigerians.
Osinbajo said government would also collaborate with international agencies to end HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country.
A statement issued yesterday by the Senior Special Assistant-Media and Publicity to the Vice-President, Laolu Akande, said Osinbajo spoke yesterday while receiving a delegation of the United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, led by its Executive Director, Mr. Michel Sidibe at the Presidential Villa.
The vice president described access to healthcare as a poverty issue which we must be put it in that perspective.
He explained that it was for the same reasons that the Buhari administration put “half a trillion Naira in the 2016 budget, the largest single budgetary item of any government ever on social investments programmes,” that address poverty.
Akande said the vice president was referring to the six social investment plans of the Buhari presidency which he listed as: Creation of 500,000 teaching jobs for unemployed graduates; 370,000 youths to be taken through vocational training and skills acquisition and would be paid while doing so; conditional cash transfer programme where one million extremely poor Nigerians would be paid N5000 per month in 2016; homegrown school feeding programme where the federal government provides one-meal-a-day to primary school pupils across the country; free education for tertiary education students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; and, one-time N60,000 loan to market women, artisans and traders through a micro credit scheme using the Bank of Industry.
He said all the programmes had been provided for in the 2016 budget.
The statement said the federal government would ramp up funding for healthcare in the country and work with the UN to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS while expanding treatment for patients and spurring local manufacture of the anti retroviral drugs. The three major issues the UNAIDS director tabled before him at the meeting.
Earlier, Sidibe had said there was a good opportunity for Nigeria, which is the second largest HIV endemic country in the world to beat the disease.
He said already there was a decline in new HIV infections in the country and that about 800,000 people in the country were undergoing treatment.
According to him, ending HIV infection in Nigeria will send a positive message across the world.
However, he noted that there were still 50,000 babies born yearly in the country with HIV infection, a situation he said “is unnecessary.”
About The Nigerian Blogger
0 comments :
Post a Comment