Buhari confers award on ace Nigerian surgeon, scientists

• As FG reviews national science, technology policy
President Muhammadu Buhari, yesterday, conferred the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) Award for years 2020 and 2021 on three Nigerians who distinguished themselves in the fields of medicine and science.

This came as Federal Government reviewed the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy 2012, with a view to improving impact of the sector to the nation’s economic development.

Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Ogbonnaya Onu, made the disclosure when the committee on review of operational guidelines on Energy Research Centres submitted their report to the ministry in Abuja, yesterday.

Onu noted that the review will determine the roadmap on development of STI and how it will affects every sector of economic and national life.

While conferring the award on the recipients: Dr. Oluyinka Olurotimi Olutoye, Medicine (2020); the late Prof. Charles Ejike Chidume, Science (2020) and Prof. Godwin O. Samuel Ekhaguere, Science (2021), the President said he was very proud to welcome the new laureates to the prestigious league of highly honoured citizens.

He said the nation would continue to celebrate and trumpet the scholars’ achievements as a shining example worthy of emulation by upcoming young men and women in the country.

Minister of Special Duties and Intergovernmental Affairs, George Akume, said the three emerged winners, following a selection process from over 1,200 applications received by the NNOM Governing Board.

Olutoye is credited with leading a team that performed groundbreaking surgical procedures on foetuses before they were born.

In 2016, in a feat that has been hailed as the first by an African, he performed a surgical procedure on a foetus with sacrococcygeal teratoma, which is a tumour that develops before birth and grows from a baby’s tailbone.

The works of Chidume, a globally renowned professor of mathematics, encompass several fields including Nonlinear Functional Analysis, Nonlinear Operator Theory and Differential Equations, Nonlinear Optimisation.

Ekhaguere is a professor of mathematical physics. He created and pioneered the theory of Quantum Stochastic Differential Inclusion (QSDIs) that has greatly improved the entire science community’s understanding of pathological quantum systems whose governing equation involves discontinuous coefficient.