The Chairman of Dangote Foundation, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has donated students’ hostel that can accommodate 2,160 students to the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria in Kaduna State.
The hostel, built at a cost of N1.2 billion, consists of 10 blocks of fully equipped complex.
Speaking at the inauguration of the project at the ABU Phase II site, Dangote said that the hostel was built to meet the accommodation needs of the university, recalling that when he visited the institution as Guest Speaker of the 2016 convocation ceremony, the university authority complained of accommodation constraints.
Dangote appealed to businessmen and wealthy Nigerians to ensure that “we continue to intervene in most of these universities, government cannot do all these things alone, there are so many other needs”.
He canvassed for an increase of one percent of corporate tax so that companies can pay additional money mainly for infrastructure in the universities.
“We have to make sure that we give back to Nigeria to show our gratitude because without Nigeria I won’t be where I am today, so we must continue to give back to the society,” he said.
Earlier in his remarks, the Vice-Chancellor of the ABU, Prof. Ibrahim Garba, expressed gratitude to Dangote for the gigantic intervention and appealed to other wealthy individuals to generously emulate his good spirit.
He noted that the ABU is a mega-institution with the largest carrying capacity above any Nigerian university and still unable to absorb the teeming population of candidates soliciting the university as first place of choice.
“This need has compelled us to continue to open-up and restructure the space to provide more opportunities for leaning in a number of ways.
The report by the Nigerian Television Authority on Monday on Monday quoted Garba as saying that some of the new initiatives of the university included the establishment of Distance Learning Centres in four undergraduate programmes as BSc. Business Administration, Economics, Public Administration and Nursing Science.
He added that two postgraduate programmes in Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and Post Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) with over 4,000 students already enrolled.
GIK/APA