In Benue, a private library set to change lives

A US-based medical doctor donates an ultra-modern library to a Makurdi a community where he grew up.

Passionate about making the lives of society’s downtrodden useful, a philanthropic organization, Tanimu Foundation, has again impacted positively on the North Bank community of Makurdi in Benue State with its various form of human development to take indigent youths off the street.

The founder of Tanimu Foundation and a medical practitioner based in United States of America (USA), Dr. Sabo Tanimu, this time, repeated his kind gesture with a donation of an ultra-modern library to the community.

Over the years, Tanimu’s philanthropic organisation had contributed immensely to better the lives of the have-nots in the slummy community by of giving back to the locality where he had his formative years in order to enhance the people’s total well-being.

At the recent commissioning of the donated library for public use in Makurdi, Dr. Tanimu said the facility among other essentials also contained medical books, items for people interested in coming to the United States and books to prepare them for the united license medical examination.

He said the plight of the people, especially the youths had motivated him over the years to institute a scholarship for higher education, constructed a state of the art vocational training centre in North Bank where training in fashion and designs are carried out.

“The North Bank community has been ravaged by some of the worst social vices in Benue State. These activities are unfortunately carried out by our youths. Some of the menaces include drug use, cultism, lower level of education, unemployment, unwanted pregnancies, to mention a few.

“I strongly believe that minds that are positively engaged would be most likely devoid of violence and criminality,” he said.

The medical practitioner emphasised that the most vital and time tested agent of change in any community was education, noting that it is the vehicle of change that can transform a family unit from a state of poverty and despair to prosperity.

To this end, he further stressed that one of the main objectives of the foundation is piloting the transformation change of the community via education, hence, the donation of the library equipped with the state-of-the-art facilities to the community in tandem with the core belief of the foundation to make knowledge accessible to the teeming members of the community.

Conducting our correspondent around the library facility, the Foundation’s Director of Finance and Project Development, Kalid Yusuf Omeje, posited that the medical practitioner gesture to the North Bank community where he grew up was motivated by the high rate of unemployment, poor literacy, gang activities, drug usage, unwanted pregnancies and such menaces ravaging the area.

Omeje said that the facility is powered by solar energy and has a conference room equipped with a projector, an electronic research/reference room among others, adding that books are not easily accessed in Benue State for medical practitioners and so, doctors and nurses could find the library useful.

“It is open to Benue State University (BSU) medical college to enable them study for examinations to take their practice abroad,” Omeje stressed.

A youth corps member serving as Librarian in the facility, Ebenezer Nwokeforo, explained that all ages were allowed into the complex and that more than 50 people, especially kids visits the library between 8:00am and 1:00pm daily while during the evening hours, at least 35 adults come to carry out various researches in their areas of interest.

He said the adults were mainly lecturers from the Federal University of Agriculture, Benue State University, both in Makurdi and undergraduates in dire need of materials for their researches.

Nwokeforo noted that children were given priority because the founder has much interest in their reading development, a reason why the kids section was created in the library.

According to him, when workers in the facility go out and see children hawking on the streets, they encouraged them to come into the library and read while they also take them on English Language to improve their reading ability.

The corps member however disclosed that all services in the library are rendered free of charge.

On his part, the Senior Special Assistant to the Benue Governor on Community Relation, Abubakar Dankeji, opined that the establishment of the library would bridge the gap occasioned by the seemingly failure of the state owned library.

Meanwhile, the foundation currently has its scholarship beneficiaries in many secondary and tertiary institutions across the country just as it has carried out several free health care activities and dug solar boreholes in some communities including North Bank.