Giving Ambition A New Meaning
By Rachel Ogbu
Monday, May 12, 2008
Babcock University wants to be a role model through ambitious but purposeful projects
Babcock University in Ogun State wants to establish a unique health and medical college. The new structure is designed to have a 750-bed world-class teaching hospital that would provide state-of-the-art medical care facilities, which will in turn provide clinical exposure to students and professors in the college. The institution will be made up of a 250-bed children hospital, a 200-bed women's hospital and a 300-bed general care ward and a centre of excellence in emergency and trauma care.
To achieve this goal, the university gathered some prominent Nigerians from across the nation at the Civic Centre Lagos on May 1, for the launching of a N32 billion fund. Olasubomi Balogun, chairman, Capital Raising Campaign Advisory Board, said the dream of the university was to raise the capital within the next four years to build a college that will include schools of medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing and public health.
Money raised from the event which was tagged "Touch of the Future Year 2008 to 2012 Capital Raising Campaign," will also be used to set up an African Bio-Medical Research Centre that would concentrate on research into the diseases that affect Africans, such as mutated strains of malaria, sickle cell anaemia, fibroid in women, human immuno virus, HIV and autism. The university is hoping to consign to history, the era where only the rich could have access to quality medical care. "When someone told us that $250 million is rather ambitious, those of us in the Capital Raising Campaign Advisory Board responded that we have been impressed about the wide ramifications and benefits of this ambitious programme as well as the unique way it is being embarked upon," Balogun said.
The university also announced that schools of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing and public health would be named after donors, who helped to build the research laboratories, classrooms, conference centres and faculty offices. Donors had an opportunity to also put their names on the Babcock University Medical Institution, which comprises the children hospital, women hospital and adult hospital, if they donated at least 25 percent of the total construction cost. Names of donors would be engraved on bronze plates and attached to the equipment they donated.
Raji Fashola, governor of Lagos State who was represented by Ben Akabueze, commissioner for budget and economic planning in Lagos State, said the initiative to build a teaching hospital was a laudable project. "As an advocate of quality education, I could not agree less with the idea of setting up this laudable project. It has been one of our hard core priorities in Lagos to improve education," he said. Fashola also expressed regret that after decades as an independent country, several years of independence Nigerian human development index has remained one of the lowest in the world.
Kayode Makinde, president and vice-chancellor of the university expressed gratitude to those who attended the event and promised that the projects being planned would be the best in Africa. "With all sense of modesty, Babcock University has pioneered a number of initiatives in the Nigerian higher education sector since we came on board in 1999. Our vision is to extend this role modelling to the area of medical education and healthcare delivery," Makinde said.
|
