Chairman, Aliko Dangote Foundation, Aliko Dangote, has urged all operators in the private sector to commit one percent of their profits to fund the health sector challenges in Nigeria.
Dangote noted that such an allocation, which would be a separate payment from the corporate tax usually paid to the government would improve needed funding to boost the nation’s ailing health sector, as Nigeria continues to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This, according to him, would help ensure that the vaccine for treating the pandemic gets to the end-users in the country and across Africa, through viable partnership and collaborations.
The renowned entrepreneur made these suggestions during the virtual Bloomberg New Economic Forum (NEF), at a session titled, ‘Cross-Sector Mobilisation in Times of Crisis: Public Health Perspective’.
Other speakers alongside Dangote, who made their remarks at the Bloomberg NEF session hosted by the Dangote group, included, founder and chief executive of Flagship Pioneering and co-founder and chairman of Moderna, Dr. Noubar Afeyan, and co-founder and chief strategist at Partners in Health Care, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, USA, Dr Paul Farmer.
Responding to a question on if funding was one of the main barriers to actually dealing with health crisis effectively, Dangote replied, “Yes, I agree with you. It is more to do with funding. Like what we are doing in Nigeria as a foundation (Aliko Dangote Foundation), we are trying to sponsor a bill to our Congress where we want them to impose a tax. This is a separate tax, not a corporate tax, of maybe about one per cent of all our profits, in the private sector, so that they will fund health.
“And I think it is the only way; we cannot just leave government alone. Government alone cannot fund health.”
In his remarks on the COVID-19 pandemic and its ravaging impact on African health and economic sectors and the role played by the private sector, Dangote noted that, “For us here in Nigeria, mostly in Africa, the COVID-19 is really an eye-opener because when you look at it, we have two impacts. One is the human impact, the other one is the economy.”