The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has approved the employment of more medical doctors to various hospitals across the country.
Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole on Wednesday told State House Correspondents after the FEC meeting that the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria would coordinate the exercise with his ministry.
He said: “At today’s meeting, Council considered a memorandum from the Federal Ministry of Health to centrally coordinate, place and fund the placement of house officers in accredited health institutions across the country.
“By this singular act, the suffering of thousands of Nigerian young doctors will be put to an end. This new programme will be centrally coordinated by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria with effect from 2018.”
Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, disclosed that a new roadmap to restructure the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) sector for better service delivery has been unveiled.
He said when fully implemented, it would generate about 2.5million job opportunities.
His words: “We thank God that at last the ICT roadmap 2017 to 2020 has been approved for implementation by the government. This roadmap is essentially a framework for development of ICT in Nigeria generally.
“It is also one of the pillars of Economic Recovery and Growth Plan and it aims among others to ensure the creation through ICT of 2.5 million jobs between now and year 2020.
“Another aim is to ensure broadband penetration to all parts of Nigeria, particularly to ensure that by year 2020 we will have penetration level of 30 per cent.
“We believe that the contents of the ICT roadmap would assist in harnessing innate skills and opportunities available to Nigerians. We know that our youths are very intelligent, very dynamic and they would utilize the implementation of the ICT roadmap to ensure that jobs are created and to really get Nigeria digitized.
“This policy when properly implemented will contribute to growing the Nigerian economy such that even with government revenue it could increase the GDP to about 20 per cent by 2020. As of this year, the contribution of ICT to Nigeria’s GDP is a little above 10 per cent.
“Finally, we believe ICT will also contribute in making businesses easy and service delivery easy because of the e-government and e-commerce components of it.”
