…tasks private sector
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Sterling Bank Plc, Mr. Abubakar Suleiman, has called on players in the private sector to provide vigorous support to the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination exercise so that more people could get vaccinated and drive a speedier reopening of the economy.
He made the call while addressing participants at a seminar in Lagos. The seminar, themed: “Closing the gap in Covid- 19 Vaccination,” was organised by Sterling Bank in collaboration with the Healthcare Federation of Nigeria (HFN), Tremendoc and Helium Health, among others. Suleiman, who spoke on the sub-theme: “Economics of a Successful Covid -19 Vaccine Intervention,” remarked that those who will benefit significantly from the opening of the economy must pay for those who cannot afford to pay to be vaccinated so that the economy can function again.
According to him, “the money, which the government must put out, is not for vaccination per se even though that is what it is buying. It is to ensure that the economy does not go back into a lockdown with its attendant social crisis in forms of massive unemployment and security challenges. Then, suddenly we are able to find one or two billion dollars when we could not find one million dollars because we did not do the vaccination.” He said: “For Sterling Bank as a corporate, we have remained committed to the vaccination exercise by participating in every single path of the fight against Covid-19.
“We participated in activating the testing centres and some of the first experiments that Biobank did. We have actively participated in fixing isolation centres and in contributing to CACOVID. One of our most important feats is our set up of a Health Workers’ Fund for the health care experts at the forefront of tackling the coronavirus.” Suleiman said the Nigerian government was not just fighting a pandemic but also trying to restore the economy back to normalcy. “What has really struck me as an observer is that there are talks about the possibility of having a third wave of the Covid-19 but unfortunately our people do not realise that we are fighting an invisible enemy,” he added.
