Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State during the maiden matriculation ceremony of the State University of Medical and Applied Sciences (SUMAS), Igbo-Eno, Enugu State, at the weekend, addressed the pioneer students in his capacity as founder and pioneer Visitor to the medical university.
Speaking, Gov. Ugwuanyi disclosed that his administration conceived the founding of the specialised university to provide more opportunities for all desiring youths in the country especially the youthful citizens of Enugu State to satisfy their choice of professional disciplines.
He pointed out the challenges that numerous applicants in Enugu State face gaining admission into tertiary institutions especially for professional and competitive courses such as Medicine, Pharmacy, Allied Health Sciences, Engineering, Law, etc.
According to him, thousands of qualified candidates, Governor Ugwuanyi said are left stranded without admission in the country bedeviled by socio-economic challenges and attendant implications.
The governor said it was against the backdrop of acute shortage of health personnel in the state and across the country, as well as the consequential effects of brain drain, that his administration decided to establish another state-owned university with a specialised brief on professional disciplines.
“As the records indicate, every year, thousands of candidates apply to study Medicine and Allied Health Sciences in the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) and Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT), respectively but a total of less than 1,000 are given admission into these programmes in both institutions.
“This leaves several thousands of well qualified candidates stranded without admission. The socio-economic implication of this is better imagined,” he said.
The governor went down memory lane to eulogise the first President of Nigeria and a foremost nationalist, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (The great Zik of Africa) and recalled his leadership role, patriotism and selflessness in founding the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, stressing that “the uniqueness of what Zik altruistically did for the nation and particularly for Nsukka by siting the university in Nsukka land remains a godly act, recreating Nsukka as a land and redefining the destinies of her people.
“It brought light into a place where there was darkness. It made Nsukka come into the map of the world when many Nigerian cities of today were hardly known to other Nigerians not to say Africa and beyond.”
Congratulating the “pioneer students” including their parents/sponsors for their landmark and historic achievement of being admitted into the brand-new university, Governor Ugwuanyi added that his administration had invested a lot and had provided all the needed infrastructure for the smooth take off of the university.
According to him: “There are six faculty buildings each with eight to 12 huge classrooms, laboratories and 36 offices.
“There are also two completed hostels each with 450 bed spaces (one for male and one for female), a medical centre that is well equipped to even provide tertiary medical services, the solar powered streetlights, and a teaching hospital which has reached an advanced state.
“I have also made adequate provisions to ensure that all the on-going projects (the teaching hospital, the ICT building, the road network, the perimeter fence and the main gate are completed.
“The entire university is provided with multiple numbers of industrial scale boreholes for efficient supply of water.
“In addition, the construction of 33KVA dedicated high voltage powerline from Nru-junction injection sub-station to the university has been approved for the university. This is to ensure steady power supply to the university.”
He, therefore, expressed optimism that with the facilities already provided and the crop of management staff chosen, the medical university will grow to be among the top universities in the country.
Governor Ugwuanyi went further to disclose that provisions for sustainable funding of the new university had been made, stating that “this is to put a safe guard against the consequences of producing poorly trained medical and allied personnel to serve the society.”
In his welcome address, the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. James Chukwuma Ogbonna, expressed profound gratitude to Governor Ugwuanyi for his vision and passion for human resource development that led to the establishment of the university.
Prof. Ogbonna hinted that the governor’s investment in the medical university will contribute in addressing the acute shortage of manpower in Medical and Allied Health Sciences, as “it has already created employment opportunities for our people, has already engendered a flurry of activities around her immediate community and will definitely contribute in large measure to the socio-economic development of Enugu State.”
Disclosing that the first set of 789 students had been admitted into the 23 programmes approved by the National Universities Commission (NUC), spread into six faculties, the Vice Chancellor-congratulated the matriculants, their parents and guardians, and urged the students to exhibit high sense of discipline and seriousness by attending lectures, studying very hard and participating in all the academic activities, etc.
