Buhari Committed to Rebuilding North-east Region Ravaged By Terrorists, Says Sylva

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

The Minister of State, Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, yesterday reassured that the current administration will rebuild the North-east region of the country devastated by Boko Haram attacks in the last decade.
Sylva spoke during the handing over of a Radiography Centre at the Modibbo Adama University Teaching Hospital (MAUTH), Yola, Adamawa State, funded under the oil and gas sector intervention programme.

He added that the completion of the projects was a demonstration of the federal government’s readiness to restore normalcy through the oil and gas sector interventions in providing the necessary infrastructure and services in the country.

A statement by the Senior Advised , Media and Communications to the minister, Horatius Egua, quoted the minister as  listing the critical areas as security, healthcare, education, agriculture, energy, climate action, human capital development and poverty alleviation.

The minister , who harped on the urgent need for collaborations between the government and the private sector said that it was only through such efforts  as demonstrated by the ministry of petroleum resources that the nation can fast-track the needed development across the broad spectrum of the country
“This is the kind of collaboration we need in our nation to get things moving. What I have seen here is commendable and I dare say that collaborations like this is the only way through which we can grow as a nation. There should be a handshake between the government and the private sector,” he advised.

The project according to Sylva forms part of the commitment of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration to redeem its pledge to the people of the North-east in accelerating the desperately needed rehabilitation, reconstruction, and rebuilding the region.

The minister noted that the upgrade of the MAUTH facility was intended to enhance the training of medical students, boost health care delivery as well as reducing the doctor-patient ratio in the state and neighbouring states in the region.

The commissioning of the hospital with state-of-the-art CT-Scan, x-ray and MRI, he said, will go a long way towards improving response time to all health-related matters and strengthen learning ability.

Sylva stressed that with the laboratory testing and case management in one location, there is a much shorter time between sample collection and infection confirmation, which ensures early initiation of treatment and thus mitigate the mortality rate in the state.