A lawmaker representing Surulere Constituency 1 at the Lagos State House of Assembly, Hon. Desmond Olusola Elliot, held a health insurance scheme for the elderly in the constituency on Sunday.
The scheme covered 700 senior citizens with free drugs for hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, physiotherapy, laboratory services, and anti-malaria.
The scheme was held in collaboration with Toptree Medical Centre at the council secretariat.
Also at the event, 500 post-secondary school students were given free UTME forms.
The UTME form distribution, according to the lawmaker, is to encourage enrolment in tertiary education and raise the literacy bar.
Honourable Elliot said the gesture was part of activities to celebrate his birthday.
He said, “Well, the focus of today is on our elderly in Surulere. For the past two years, we have been doing a health insurance scheme.
We started with 300 elderly people, and last year we did 500.
This year we are moving up to 1000, but for today we have counted about 700.
What is the idea? We are to help the elderly because, mostly, they don’t suffer from malaria and typhoid as much as diabetes, high blood pressure, and others.
So the health insurance scheme is to have coverage that will cover diabetes management and physiotherapy, among others.
We have about seven illnesses that are common among the elderly.
The second one is that we are giving out 500 UTME forms for those who have WASC.
However, coming here, we are seeing more people, and we will accommodate them as well.
All these are just to celebrate my birthday and to say thank you to God for sparing my life and my family because my wife and I just survived a major fire incident about 10 days ago.
However, we will not relent in giving back to the constituents that have called us to serve them.
We appreciate God that everybody came out alive and everything is fine, and to God be the glory. I thanked God for Hon. Faud Laguda for coming out victorious in the Surulere Federal House of Representatives by-election that was held yesterday.
We can assure residents of Surulere that his representation will be top-notch.
Our Chief of Staff, who is our leader in Surulere, has not left us, and he is still with us to give us adequate guidance and to help us through.
Basically, we are adding even more in terms of the dividend of democracy to our people.
If you recall, two weeks ago we were here when we gave out food items to over 700 widows and two cars to the youths.
The next one we will be having is the Femi Gbajabiamila under-16 football competition.
The theme of the competition is preaching against drug abuse, rape, and cultism.
We will be going to each school around Surulere. I will be going with celebrities as well.
This will be mixed with the football competition.
This effort is for us to also reach out to the younger generation.
We are letting them know that we are still with them; we are letting them know their vices, which they should not engage themselves with.”
Reacting to the victory recorded by the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Saturday’s Surulere Federal Constituency 1 bye-election, he said, “We thank God for our party, the APC, and our candidate, Hon. Fuad Laguda, for coming to our tops.
I also thank the electorate for trusting our party with their votes. We promise the constituents that they should be expecting top-notch representation.
The situation in the country is critical, and it is bad for everyone, but as resilient people as Nigerians, we will keep hope alive.
I want to urge Nigerians to hang in there because very soon we will get to the end of the tunnel.”