Abstract
Notwithstanding the challenges experienced in holding the 65th Conference of WACS in Bamako, Mali, we must express our gratitude to the LOC of Bamako 2025 for the wonderful work they did in organizing a peaceful and well conducted conference.
The incapacitation of the WACS President-elect created a constitutional challenge in Bamako which the Council and AGM must resolve to have a president to lead the College after the conference.
The 32nd EXCO of the College accomplished a lot of milestones within the two years of its existence. Clinical examination was extended to Enugu, a new examination centre was opened in Cameroun, fledging young examination centres in Banjul, Freetown and Liberia were sustained. College sources of funding were reengineered with increased contributions from non-examination sources while maintaining exam contribution. Examinations returned to profitability and overall, College finances were tremendously increased.
The construction of WACS skills and simulation centre in Abuja and the Accra office of the College were initiated during this period. Renovation of real estate properties in Morris Street Lagos guaranteed increased inflow of funds. BOT membership in Ghana and Nigeria were formalized. College-wide training-of-trainers and curriculum review with emphasis on competency acquisition and assessment were implemented. Subspecialisation commenced fully in all the faculties as well as post fellowship training in Surgical Oncology. A renewed emphasis was placed on skills training with different curricular designed for basic laparoscopic, mid level and advanced level skills and simulation programs. In collaborations with Universities, in-residency PhD degree training was started. College research capacity was greatly increased with registration on Gov.org and grants applications to facilitate training in surgical sciences.
It was indeed a two-year of intense activity and I express my gratitude to all the fellows who made all the achievement possible.
Keywords: Address, AGM, president
Members of the EXCO of WACS,
Past Presidents of WACS and other members of Council
Distinguished Victor Anoma Ngu lecturer, Prof. Dupe Ademola-Popoola
Chairman and Members of the LOC
Fellows, Members and Diplomates of the WACS
I most sincerely welcome you all to the 65th AGM of our college, held in Bamako, the capital of Mali. I appreciate all the challenges you experienced in coming to Mali: the security concerns, the astronomical cost of travelling and for a good number of us and the stress of having to stay in Bamako without our luggage for several days. While this cannot be denied, we must also accept that the LOC has made tremendous efforts to ensure that this conference lived up to expectations. So far, we have enjoyed free movement within the city, the anxiety level for most of us has significantly reduced and we have had on the whole had hitch-free scientific and social interactions. I wish to commend Prof. Adegne Togo and the entire LOC for a wonderful job they have done so far.
Transition Programme
Fellows, members and diplomates of WACS, this AGM is being held in a college election year. The tenure of the 32nd EXCO of the college will come to an end tomorrow. Yet, sitting to my left hand is the VP2 and not the VP1/president-elect, who should take over the affairs of the college tomorrow. The president-elect informed me sometime in January that she would not be able to be physically present in Bamako to be installed as the 33rd president of the college. She has since arrival at this conference sent another letter to confirm that position. Our constitution made no provision for this situation. The council deliberated extensively on this situation on Sunday and came up with proposals which will be presented today, to be discussed and ratified by this AGM. I am sure this AGM will have a fruitful discussion on it and come up with a decision that will serve the long-term interest of our dear college.
My Score Card in Two Years
Fellows of WACS, this is the last AGM I will be stewarding as your president. Time flies indeed, and one is amazed at what has, can and could have been done in two years. I am sure that many of you have already scored my performance, but I need to put things down to reassure myself that I have not wasted two years for the college. This is notwithstanding the fact that self-assessment most often yields a higher income than reality. I hope my assessment of my EXCO in the last two years will be different from cartoonist impression of an Ex-Nigerian president’s assessment of himself.
This EXCO came into office in the post-COVID era with new thoughts on how to run organisations. We maximised the use of virtual platforms in delivery of our activities, including trainings, examinations, and meetings. This greatly helped our operations, including coping with the rapidly rising economic and financial challenges and managing the security issues in our region. This new approach also enabled us to implement the key principle of making our college more inclusive. We opened up new contacts for the college in Capo Vade; we extended college clinical examinations to Enugu, accredited new training centres in Cameroun and sustained the new examination centres in Freetown, Monrovia, and Banjul, and this April, the primary examination will take place for the first time in Cameroun. I believe it is now time to pause and reappraise the approach and consolidate what has been achieved so that we do not lose what is dear and important in making WACS solid a college. There is no doubt that part of the allure of the college is the massive number of surgeons that aggregate together in conferences and examinations (we are missing that now in our programmes). We need to encourage more physical presence in-country activities by WACS chapters as captured in our strategic plan to increase the interaction between members and allow fellows from every nation to feel the impact of the college more. The next EXCO may wish to consider these.
Examinations constitute the bulk of the college finances. On assumption of office, we promised to return our examination finances to positive balance. I am proud to announce that despite all challenges, this EXCO was able to conduct every examination (4) completed within these two years with positive balance sheet. Our strategic plan identified diversification of our revenue sources as a task that needs to be vigorously pursued to assure future stability of the college. I can tell this AGM that in the two years of our services, we not only increased the overall revenue of this college (see the five years balance sheet), we also reduced the percentage contribution from examination fees by four points, contribution from admission fees doubled from 7% to 15%, and we increased contribution from other sources, annual dues, accreditation fees, etc., by 1–4% age points. As directed by council and AGM in Freetown, we moved all our idle funds away from poor-yielding saving account that returns 5–6% per annum to high-yielding mutual funds and commercial papers with returns between 18% and 24%. This we did to save the value of our idle funds while we take time to deploy them to projects and long-term investments. I thank the unwavering diligence of this EXCO especially the treasurer and the SG and my astute F and GPC for making these feet possible.
At inception of office, our land in Wuye, Abuja was under threat of revocation by government and our prime property in ridge area in Accra was a prime target for land grabbers as undeveloped and unclaimed land. I made a promise to AGM to take effective possession of these properties by making sure that we commenced development of those properties. In August 2024, construction of the WACS Accra office was commenced, and we were just out of the foundation when another family brought a court case to challenge our ownership of the property. Construction at that site has been temporarily suspended to make sure that an injunction is not brought on us at a stage that will cost the college a lot of money. We have fully mobilised our Lawyer in Accra, and a rebuttal of the claims of the interloper has been entered on our behalf. We will resume work at the site as soon as a clear picture of the case is evident. After a long and laborious road, construction of the WACS Simulation Centre at Abuja commenced in December 2024 and has progressed rapidly. We will be out of the foundation level by the end of this February. My special thanks and gratitude to the chairman of our properties committee, Prof. KDT Yawe, members of his team, and Prof. Afua Hesse and members of the Ghana endowment funds committee for their resilience in the development of our properties.
Within the year 2024, we concluded the issue of updating BOT members for Nigeria, and today, this AGM will ratify the five names approved by council as BOT members for Ghana. With this, we would have completely achieved what we promised on BOTs at inception of our service. It is now time to focus on how to entrench college presence in other countries of the region, especially Francophone countries. I think this should start with formal request for allocation of land in these counties. The newly created chapter chairmen should prioritise this within their tenures.
In the last two years, the college organised two critical training that have altered our approach to surgical manpower training. The 2023 training focussed on orientation of college officials and completion of our college prospectus which has been in limbo since 2019. This prospectus is now available on our website, acting as appropriate advert for our college and its training programmes. In July 2024, we initiated the training of trainers for the whole college which is now being cascaded down the rank and file by the faculties. The college is now poised for new curricular that stress competency-based training and assessment. Each of faculties has developed one or more subspecialty programmes, and some of them have actually commenced implementation of new subspecialties trainings. This has fulfilled our promise to entrench subspecialty training throughout the college. Early in 2023, we initiated the programme for online deployment of training curricula. I commend the Faculty of Anaesthesia for making the most progress with this programme which is at the point of IT design and deployment. This is in addition to the existing one in paediatric surgery championed through the PAPSEP collaboration with KidsOR and RCSI.
One of the problems that faced physicians including surgeons in our region in recent times is the coordinated demand by academic regulatory bodies in Africa for physicians in academia to also acquire research doctorate degrees in addition to their Fellowship qualifications. While this issue started in Nigeria, CAMES the regulatory body in Francophone countries has equally demanded that from Francophone physicians. The last two years witnessed concerted effort on our part to forge collaborations with universities to provide that option for our fellows and trainees. We have signed MOUs with three institutions to enable actualisation of the PhD degree for those interested. Many more institutions in Nigeria are already offering this opportunity for trainees to acquire their PhDs while undergoing residency training. Yesterday, those of us who were at the presidential plenary session were informed of the collaboration of our college with the NOUN which will allow our trainees to benefit from grant-funded MSc and PhD degrees in surgical sciences. We are already in talks with institutions in Ghana to enable us to implement similar MOUs and offer trainees in Ghana an opportunity for PhDs while in residency training.
A key programme of this EXCO was the development of the surgical skills and simulation programme. While physical construction of the permanent WACS skills and simulation centre has commenced, we also initiated preparation of programmes and personnel for the skills courses. Most of the faculties were able to develop curricula for their medium- and high-level surgical skills training programmes in addition to BSS programmes. Through our collaboration with Intuitive Foundation, we introduced the minimal access component of BSS into all our centres of training. In this conference, Intuitive Foundation sponsored 20 of our BSS centre coordinators to a TOT workshop on how to use local materials to design skills training programmes and modules. With this training, our college is now poised to expand BSS training centres and to extend this training to all faculties of the college. It is my prayer that the incoming EXCO will work more on the medium- and high-end surgical skills programmes to initiate them even as we await the completion of the permanent skills and simulation centre. I especially thank Profs. Jiburum and Abdur-Rahman for their concerted effort to move our programme on surgical skills simulation forward.
We managed to further advance our international relations and collaboration within this regime. We maintained and expanded our relationship with the American College of Surgeons leading to the work on the leadership course which we are about to introduce into our college, we re-established relationship with the English College, the fruit of which is the initiation of the Galeski Fellowship that will bolster our annual surgical outreach programme and help us to restructure preconference outreach programmes. We maintained relations with the Queen’s University team, in Canada and cultivated new ones with the SSO, University of Yenepoya, India and NICRAT, all geared to facilitate our surgical oncology training programme. Our successful navigation through the intricacies of commencement of post-fellowship and within residency specialisation in different areas of surgical oncology training has been highly commended by fellows and our governments. Our surgical oncology training programme will formally take off this March 2025 with the full support of our partner institutions. The relationship with our parent body WAHO is becoming increasingly more formalised and has enabled us to cultivate cordial relationship with other regional and national bodies within the region and Africa.
I promised fellows that we will advance college engagement in research during my tenure. We indeed made concerted efforts in the last two years to ensure that college institutes a research culture in our programmes and activities. We successfully registered the college as a recognised research grant recipient institution. My special thanks go to Dr Iloanusi Nneka of Faculty of Radiology for meeting this mandate given to her. Those of us who participated in the presidential plenary session were updated on the collaborative grant-funded training opportunity for our residents through the Strengthening Surgical Scientists Capacity for NCD-Lifespan Research (SSSCAR) programme. With this, trainees of our college can now have funds to pursue their masters and PhD programmes with grant support.
My Gratitude to All
I will not end this address without thanking every fellow of this college who has contributed through active participation in college affairs in shaping the progress of the college in the last two years. I must mention specifically all members of council and its committees. Your readiness to be part of the activities of the college at any given time ensures sustenance of the team spirit needed to address the few areas that we could touch in two years. I thank particularly the members of the F and GPC. I could not have asked for a more informed and insightful group of individuals for the F and GPC. This college will never forget those who served her.
I must also single out the faculty officials for the wonderful and persistent work that keeps the college wheel of progress rolling. As the federating units of the college, it is your ability to respond to the demands of fellows and come up with new ideas on how to do things that has sustained our relevance in the scheme of things on surgical workforce training and education. I pray that the wealth of experience you have garnered in leading your faculties will not be lost as some of you are due to leave office after this conference. Please make sure that these experiences are transferred to incoming officials in your individual faculties. I owe a lot to all the past presidents who have been my guide in navigating through some of the uncharted territories in college affairs in the last two years. I pray the good lord to keep each of you alive and healthy for many more years for the interest and benefit of the college. My EXCO has been wonderful, and I salute the courage and forthrightness of each member. I thank God for making it possible for us to work together as a team.
Long live WACS
Prof. Ezeome Emmanuel R
32nd PWACS
Conflicts of interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
Funding Statement
Nil.