Arewa Health: Funtua Blazes Trail

One area we Muslim Northerners have a great deficiency in, perhaps second only to our abysmal public education, is our almost comatose public health sector. Our hygiene and sanitation and immunisation and general healthcare are almost in shambles – perhaps owing to the fact that our elite (as they have done in education) have established […]

One area we Muslim Northerners have a great deficiency in, perhaps second only to our abysmal public education, is our almost comatose public health sector. Our hygiene and sanitation and immunisation and general healthcare are almost in shambles – perhaps owing to the fact that our elite (as they have done in education) have established their own private medical facilities and (from top to bottom) continue to troop abroad for the slightest ailment

For Arewa, as in education, as in healthcare. The poor are left to their own devices. No wonder they call rural dispensaries in Arewa “Sha-Ka-Tafi”; Indeed! It is so! When pictures of dilapidated classes are splashed on pages of newspapers, governments usually scramble their defensive modes, brandishing figures of billions spent on education, bla bla. Similarly, when news and current affairs and pictures of ramshackle public hospitals and clinics are highlighted, the same ‘billions spent’ are regurgitated.

But sometimes you get a silver lining – when communities come together to establish schools and hospitals for the benefit of their communities. We remember Zaria’s Muslim Hospital, for example. But one very important and significant intervention, which interestingly straddles both education and healthcare, is the Muslim Community College of Health Science and Technology, (MCCHST), Funtua, Katsina State, which held its maiden Convocation Ceremony last week.

Founded by a group of young people under the auspices of Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) Funtua/Malumfashi Area Council in 1999, the School was later to be transferred to the ownership of the community on account of the enormous progress the college recorded. A Board of Trustees under the chairmanship of Sarkin Maskan Katsina, District Head of Funtua was incorporated to take up the challenge of overseeing the affairs of the college.

According to Provost Umar Aminu, in 2003, The College got its permanent site through a donation by Funtua LGA. This paved the way for the school to get full accreditation in 2005 for Community Health Department. Bolstered by this, the college introduced Environmental Health Department, then affiliated to Shehu Idris College of Health Science, Makarfi, Kaduna State, before it was subsequently fully accredited in 2012. The College further introduced departments of Dental Surgery and Health Information Technicians in 2014, while Departments of Medical Laboratory and Biomedical Engineering were introduced in 2016 and 2017 respectively.

The School started with a population of 20 students in 1999, but currently has one thousand and two hundred (1,200) students studying various diploma and certificate courses. Some of the successes recorded in the College include the expansion of courses from only one to nine different in these years; increase in admission capacity from 20 to 1,200 students, and the construction of its permanent site, having transited from various borrowed and rented premises at various stages of its development. It now has state of the art laboratories, a Dental Clinic and a demonstration clinic for the students.

Academically, the College is not all talk – in Community Health it scored 100% consecutively for 5 years in national examinations, becoming the best in the country. Again, it scored the best result in Dental Surgery in 2017 and 2018. From inception to date, the school has graduated about 3,000 students, many of them at present manning health services at all levels of government. But there are many challenges: take, for example, Midwifery studies. Quoting a scholar, Prof Otolorin, the Provost lamented the situation that: “it will take Nigeria 50 years of training midwives in this current phase and without anyone retiring or dying before we [Nigeria] can achieve the WHO desired standard of having 1 midwife to 2000 population”.

Example of this sorry state: there are two hundred and thirty six (236) Schools of Nursing and Midwifery in the country, including those training post basic Nurses and Midwives. Out of these, according to information from the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the South East and South West geopolitical zones have about half of these while the North West, with almost the same population as the two zones, has only 10%. To bring the contrast closer, Lagos State has 14, Oyo 13, Enugu 14, but Kano with a population of over 15 million has only 5. Katsina itself has only 2.

Our pitiable lot reached the extent that there was so much scarcity of health workers in the North that retired midwives have to be mopped from the south and sent to our communities in the North, and in most instances with poor retention. What stops our wealthy people from investing in this health education venture to salvage the Ummah from this ugly scenario, lamented Funtua Provost? It is for this very reason that the people of Funtua, led by the College’s Board of Trustees, decided to venture in establishing the college and the future schools of Nursing and Midwifery to add to the courses now going on.

The College particularly honoured those who made it possible for the school to succeed and even excel in its core assignment of training health personnel for many states in the North; the honourees included the 20th Sultan of Sokoto and leader of the largest pre-colonial state in the history of Africa; the Emir of Katsina; the Emir of Daura; former Governor of Kano State and former Minister of Education, Sardaunan Kano  Ibrahim Shekarau who was very instrumental in making the initial financial contribution to kickstart the school; elder statesman and topmost businessman Alhaji Aminu Dantata who financed major projects in the school; late philanthropist and college benefactor Alhaji Bala Abdullahi Funtua; and Alhaji Mu’azu Isa Funtua, another philanthropist and benefactor. (It is always important to mention benefactors of such good causes to ginger similarly-minded people to do same and more).

The Convocation ceremony of the Funtua College was a revelation: the school surpassed and surprised itself by witnessing such an impressive turnout. Katsina Governor was there, and so was the Sultan himself – the spiritual and traditional and royal head of Northern and Nigerian Muslim communities (whose investiture as Grand Patron of the College was an important component of the event). And so were the Emirs of Kano, Birnin Gwari, Lere and others.

The Sultan, in his address, urged Northern Governors to rise to the challenge of filling this gap in public healthcare institutions and, as if in response, Katsina Governor Masari pledged to construct some of the buildings to house the proposed Nursing and Midwifery courses in the college, and challenged other communities to emulate the good example of Funtua people.

Guest Speaker Emir of Kano Muhammad Sanusi II painted a sorry picture of our situation – reeling horrible statistics in poverty, education, healthcare, drug abuse, unemployment, and such other pointers to our sorry state, and sorry local government! But he added that schools as this Funtua Community College will go a long way in addressing part of these maladies.

FROM THE COLUMNIST: In sha Allah from next week and until the February Elections, this Column will start a series titled “MY VOTE IS…” where readers will state FOR and AGAINST what issues will determine how they will vote. No issue is too big or too small. For example, for this Columnist MY VOTE IS… “FOR anyone who will build a Kaduna-Kano Modern Rail Line” and MY VOTE IS… “AGAINST any Cabal, Real or Imagined.” Readers may email their FOR or AGAINST in no more than 100 words apiece. Some readers will replicate these opinions on social media for wider reach.