By Abdulgafar Oladimeji.
Kano state government has appropriated the spending of 17 percent of the 2021 appropriation bill on the health sector, the state commissioner of finance, Dr Lawan Abdulwahab has disclosed.
The commissioner made the disclosure on Tuesday, while addressing a team of nutrition advocates under the aegis of Civil Society Scalling- Up Nutrition in Nigeria, CS-SUNN, who paid an advocacy visit to his office at Audu Bako secretariat, he said “ Kano state has surpassed the Abuja declaration for 15 percent on health, Kano is at 17.5 percent.”
He further expressed that the state government has further resolve and made commitments not to retreat from its massive spending on the health sector.
Kano To Give 553 HIV/AIDS Patients Free Health Care Services
He explained that though the challengers centre around scarce resources, he said “ the population is growing at a rapid rate, we now have more people competing for meager resources.
Abdulwahab warned that an appraisal of the number of stunted children in Kano is a threat to the future of the state, “ as a medical doctor, I can state clearly with 37 percent stunted children in Kano, there is a problem, a stunted child is a problem to himself and to the society, If a child does not get what he or she wants at the right time , that child becomes a burden.
“I foresee a problem if we don’t tackle the baseline and do all we can to tackle the problem, honestly, if not, by the time we retire, we will live without an innovative population to inherit the society from us, what is then the future of the society we have so much labored to have built.”
The chairman National Steering Committee, CS-SUNN, Innocent Ekene appealed to the ministry to holistically support the fight against malnutrition through cash backings for approvals
He posit that the absence of support from the state finance ministry in the fight against malnutrition would render the whole exercise fruitless.
