ENHANCING SANITY IN ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH

 Yakubu Baba has worked hard to strengthen Nigeria’s capacity to respond to local and global health challenges, writes Bashir Ibrahim Hassan

If there is a list of government establishments in Nigeria that are strengthening the country’s capacity to respond to a variety of challenges confronting humanity, Environmental Health Officers Registration Council of Nigeria (EHORECON) is one of them. EHORECON is an agency under the Federal Ministry of Environment charged with the responsibility of regulating Environmental Health profession in Nigeria. At the head of the Council is Dr. Yakubu Mohammed Baba as Registrar/CEO.

Indeed, there is something unmistakably Nigerian about this man. Born in Azare, Bauchi State, the 48-year- old flaunts his identity through his credentials on the strength of having received his education, starting from primary, secondary and diploma level in Bauchi before heading for the neighbouring Gombe School of Health Technology for his Higher National Diploma. He later obtained a Master of Science (MSc) on Environmental Health Management from Ladoke Akintola University, Ogbomoso, Oyo State, after studying for a Bachelor of Science (BSc), Environmental Health, Houdegbe North American University, Cotonou, Benin Republic. He obtained another Master of Public Health (MPH) at Imo State University Owerri, and returned to the neighbouring Abia State to earn a PhD in Environmental Health and Safety at the Abia State University, Uturu.

It was, for him a dream come true, given that he has always itched too assume a challenging position “in order to meaningfully contribute to the improvement and achievement of organizational systems and objectives by working with team members, striving to attain excellence driven by innovation and creativity.”

Indeed, since he mounted the saddle, Dr Yakubu Baba has worked hard to strengthen Nigeria’s capacity to respond to local and global health challenges. For a start, the law governing the practice of environmental health in Nigeria dates back to 1958. In 2015, he worked towards its amendment, and upgraded the National Environmental Health Practice Regulation in collaboration with then Minister of Environment. The reworked regulation is what the practitioners are using today. 

Another significant achievement of the Council is the issuance of about 17 guidelines that cut across various aspects of the practice — from sanitation in aviation industry, guidelines for accreditation of programmes in the training institutions to school sanitation – to the opening up of the profession to the private sector.  

The Council has also opened a register and approved five practice areas in environmental health, namely:  inspection of premises; public health pest and vector control; waste collection; air quality monitoring and healthcare waste management. These are the areas that have been opened up for private sector to come and invest in. “We have issued guidelines where people can come and invest,” says Yakubu Mohammed Baba.

He has also effected the issue of the merging of licences. “When we started, all environmental health officers were using the single licensing protocol. But since the profession has grown, we have now de-merged our licensing,” he says.  “Those that have PhD and professors are called environmental health specialists, and we issue them license as such. By law, you cannot be signing some professional documents when you are not at some certain level. This was intended to bring sanity to the practice.”  

In 2021, the Council was able to host the first National Environmental Health Summit, and one of the outcomes of that summit was a road map for environmental health.  The essence of the road map is to move the profession of environmental health to global standards.

Joining EHORECON in 2005 as Senior Environmental Health Officer, Dr Baba acted as acting Registrar/CEO from 2020 to 2021 before his elevation to the apex of the Council. In his career, he has also held various positions in other establishment including Senior Environmental Health Officer, Assembly Service Commission – Abuja and Senior Environmental Health Officer, Federal

Staff Hospital, Abuja.

His ability to deliver on the terms of his appointments has been enhanced by exposure to a variety of professional training and programmes in different parts of the world — Dubai, United Arab Emirates; People’s Republic of China; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; South Korea, Malawi; USA, and the United Kingdom

He has given to his chosen profession as much as much as he has received, attesting to his intellectual standing and evidenced by his numerous technical publications in professional journals.

However, he acknowledges the persistence of challenges, one of which is how to, in compliance with the International Health Regulations, effectively deploy environmental health officers to mount what he calls “Health force” point of entries to Nigeria. He recalls that the first index case of COVID-19 came from somewhere into the country, underscoring the need to strengthen the nation’s port health services.  “All the measures that are put in place to prevent direct transmission of COVID-19 are all environmental health measures,” he says. These include social distancing, sanitization, basic hygiene measures that were not strictly enforced in Nigeria until the pandemic.