FURTHER honours came for Nigeria in South Africa where a 20-year-old Nigerian, Ehinomen Iyayi, became the youngest medical doctor in that country.
The feat came when Nigeria’s image took fresh battering from Transparency International (TI) which rated the country third on the global corruption index sending signals that Nigerians remained scammers.
The brilliant Iyayi took home five of the six academic prizes at this year’s graduation of South Africa’s premier medical school, according to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
At the 23rd graduation ceremony of the Medical University of South Africa (MEDUNSA) on Tuesday in Pretoria, the young Iyayi did Nigeria proud before thousands of that country’s professional and academic community including Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
He received five distinctions in paediatrics, internal medicine, family medicine, general surgery and psychiatry, amid standing ovation by the guests.
He also came top of the 608 graduands, 59 per cent of whom were women.
Iyayi who emigrated with his parents, Alex and Florence Iyayi, from Nigeria to South Africa in 1994, completed his school certificate in Pretoria’s Hillview High School at the age of 14 with seven distinctions.
By his achievement, he has become the youngest medical student in South Africa and also the youngest student to have been accepted into MEDUNSA.
When at the age of two, Iyayi started to count, construct sentences and do other things children of his age normally cannot do, his parents decided to enrol him at a primary school and he has never looked back.
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