ABIANS, WEEP NO MORE; HELP IS ON THE WAY (A Text Of My Governorship Manifesto)- By Dr. Alex Otti. (Continued from last week)
MY SOCIAL CONTRACT WITH ABIANS: THE DRIVERS
As a labour party government, we are pro people by default, we shall dedicate the crux of our programs to building a healthy, productive and safe society for all through partnerships and people participation. Our social agenda will be anchored on the following:
Education, Health, Women and Youth Development, Empowerment, Social status for the Retirees, the Elderly and the Vulnerable, Environmental Sustainability, Security, Ethical Reorientation, and Social Harmony.
EDUCATION
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” Nelson Mandela
- The present and future of Abia depend on the quality and scope of education we provide for our population. We will intentionally prepare our citizens to be skilled participants in the global village, where science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are used as productive tools for work and play .
We will:
- Restore the past glory of the teaching profession by recruiting qualified teachers for rural and urban primary and secondary schools. Special attention would be paid to teachers with certificates in education who have competencies in sciences, technology, and mathematics.
- Constitute a team of experts to review and restructure the state’s education. Curricula to make them fit for purpose of driving the knowledge economy of the 21st century.
- Set up a quality assusrance agency in the ministry of education, which will be responsible for mentoring, evaluating and harmonising the quality of education inputs in both private and public schools, to ensure conformity to set standards.
- Motivate teachers by providing relevant trainning support, prompt and competitive reward systems.
- Improve school enrolment through working with the churches and community leaders, to reduce the number of out-of-school children in Abia state. The target is to make Abia, the state with the lowest number of out-of-school children in the country.
- Provide free education for Abia residents, to ensure that every child obtains basic education from primary school to junior secondary school.
- Mainstream the ‘adopt a school’ program across Abia, to involve our people who have capacity to assist.
- Rebuild dilapidated school infrastructure in primary and post primary institutions across the state. We will seek collaboration with old student bodies, to drive this.
- Install broadband internet facilities in all schools in the state.
- Partner with local and international ICT institutes to set up coding and programming centres for secondary school leavers specifically.
- Recruit special instructors for ICT classes in all the model and special schools in the state.
- Revive and set up new and robust technical and craft schools in all the LGAs in the state, to train students in craft and technical areas in line with their core skills and interests.
- Explore avenues of further partnerships with faith-based organizations, to improve quality of education.
- Adequately fund our state tertiary and special institution, to increase their capacities and meet their obligations to staff and students.
- Provide support for students from vulnerable backgrounds.
- Provide financial support for need-based research initiatives in the tertiary institutions.
- Revive and fund adult literacy programmes, starting with the urban centres.
- Revive and adequately fund special education centres, like schools for the vulnerable.
- Revive school sports programmes and effective support system gor school athletes. This will be designed to serve as talent hunt events across the state.
HEALTHCARE
Our commitment and programmes in the health sector shall be built around ensuring that everyone living in the state, no matter their social/ economic status, gets access to quality healthcare when they need it. From rural to urban centres, our administration shall build systems that shall guarantee that residents have access to the right services when they approach any of our health facilities. We shall also pay attention to ways of preventing diseases that arise from unhealthy lifestyles, by creating enlightenment programmes on multiple channels.
We shall:
- Create a public health sector policy framework that effectively guarantees adequate funding for primary, secondary and tertiary health facilities in the state.
- Earmark fund in the state’s annual budget to provide adequate infrastructure for health facilities, including access roads, running water, diagnostic equipment as dictated by the capacity of health institutions, present and emerging needs.
- Establish the health facility Accreditation and Mentoring agency, responsible for ensuring that all health facilities, public and private, meet minimum standard requirements as a basis for granting operation permits.
- Review welfare packages and incentives for workers in the sector, to ensure that remunerations, training, and conditions of service are competitive enough to attract the best hands.
- Hire and motivate competent professionals, to drive our vision for the sector.
- Create the Abia Health Insurance Scheme, to ensure affordable healthcare for greater number of Abians in an economically viable and sustainable way.
- Initiate campaigns that will encourage life style changes, to reduce the high incident of life threatening ailments like,cancer,diabetes,and hypertension.
- Partner with national and international agencies with interest in effective health care delivery especially in the rural areas.
- Create platforms of partnership with health care professionals of Abia origin in the diaspora. The partnership here will be structured to offer support to our health facilities in the areas of equipment,drug supply and involvement in our community based health programs-especially for the elderly and pregnant woman; create platforms of partnership with health care professionals of Abia origin in the diaspora.
- Provide ambulances and emergency medical facilities for health institutions in the state, to enable them respond promptly to emergency cases on a 24/7 bases.
- Establish state of the art, well equipped, modern tertiary health care facilities in the state in identified villages, resourced by some of the best medical personnel in the diaspora and locally, to position the state to take advantage of the over 1.6billion dollar medical tourism industry in Nigeria.
YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AND SPORTS
- Our population density is favourably skewed towards the younger generation, which is good for our economic reforms plans. To fully take advantage of this situation, we will actively equip the youths with the requisite skills to drive our development and growth agenda.Therefore, we will:
- Strenghten all government institutions with responsibilities for impacting the welfare of the youths, to include education,commerce,industry,and technology.
- Make deliberate policies to include qualified youths in leadership positions in government.
- Support the setting up of youth- specific venture capital fund of up to 5billion naira,in partnership with the private sector and international venture capital firms, to provide funding for technology and other start-ups in the innovative industry.
- Formalize the apprenticeship scheme as an organised frame work for developing participating youths into educated entrepreneurs, who are equipped with skill sets to function competitively in the global markets.
- Redevelop the Nsulu games village as a destination for sports excellence, furnished with modern sports equipment and resources to groom world class sports men and women.
- Set up ICT hubs with enabling bandwidths, uninterrupted power supply and tech labs, to harvest the huge talents for gainful employment.
- Mainstream school inter house sports and inter community sports competitions, as an opportunity to identify talents for special attention and grooming.
- Provide matching grants for communities, to develop sports arenas in their various communities for recreation and competitions.
- Open up the entertainment ecosystem in the state through adequate investments,partnerships and programs to promote talented youths in music movies,comedy and other ventures related to the business of entertainment.
WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
- Empowerment for Abia women is key to achieving all our socio-economic development programs this among other reasons, is because over seventy percent of teachers in our primary and secondary schools, were early formal learning are incubated, are women. Women also constitute about 64 percent of our total population. Therefore, the social and economic welfare of women will be our key priority. We will:
- Provide special support for women co operative societies, especially those involved in agriculture and general trading. Interfacing with them through relevant arms of government, to identify areas of partnership and support.
- Actively support gender balance at all levels of leadership in the state. It will be the policy of our government to intentionslly headhunt qualified women,to give them a voice on the table where key government decisions are made.
- Revitalize al lwelfare establishment programs to support women in difficulties or facing unjust treatment at home or in their communities.
- Create specific empowerment programs to help women owned small and medium scale businesses access funding from NGOs, DFIs, and other partners
- Work with relevant agencies to eliminate unacceptable practices against women and the girl child, including gender driven violence, underage marriages and deliberate denial of opportunities to women.
- Adopt and ratify all international and national conventions on protecting the rights of women and children, especially when there are no contradictions between such laws and our moral values .
- Partner with agro research institute across Nigeria and within the state to support our women farmers with enhanced productivity, using superior farming methods and improved seedlings.
To be continued next week on Freepressnews.com.ng
Dr. Alex Otti, (OFR) is the governorship candidate of the Labour Party for Abia State of Nigeria in the on-coming general elections in 2023.