Only the Federal Government knows what it wants to achieve by its rigid commitment to the execution of the programme at this time. But let it be reminded that Nigerians are quite clear in their minds that this feeding exercise is not about the school children. It is all about the greed of the executors of the programme.
About their crass desire to fritter away scarce resources at a time of desperate need. There is far more to this exercise than meets the eye and rather than mobilising the security as well as civil society agencies to help monitor the distribution of the food items, as the Federal Government has said it would, it is the government itself that Nigerians need to probe closely to find out why the prosecution of this feeding programme is so important to it at this most inopportune a time as any
For one, the school feeding programme was designed to provide cooked, nutritiously balanced meals to pupils during school session. But Nigerian public and private schools have been shut since March 23 and the pupils sent home.
Rather than save what they have for when the schools will reopen, Sadiya Umar Farouq, Minister of the Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development Ministry and other officials of her ministry chose to go on a fool’s errand of chasing these children of no known address to their homes. This would be done through vendors that would take the food items to designated points for delivery to the parents of these children.
What is the sense in taking the food to the children in their homes where their parents have not abdicated their responsibilities as parents?
In the end, a close investigation of the exercise will no doubt reveal that most of the food would have been delivered at the wrong address to the wrong people and that much if not most of the money earmarked for purchasing the food items was expended on ‘logistics’, transporting and distributing the food to ghosts.
Is this too cynical or pessimistic? Certainly no. Not as cynical or pessimistic as the mindsets that chose to defraud mere children of what we were told was designed to make their lives a bit easier.
Hajiya Sadiya Farouq, it seems, is unable to steer clear of needless and avoidable controversies. If anything, she appears to have honed her capacity for taking one disastrous decision after another. Before now, it was her ministry’s ghastly handling of the COVID-19 palliative distribution that exercised Nigerians for a period.
While the dust raised by that is yet to settle, she has moved on to distributing food meant for school children to their parents. There is nothing nearly salutary about this drainpipe that will deplete Nigeria’s treasury to the tune of about N679 million daily or N13.5 billion monthly in the heat of a health crisis that has destroyed our revenue balance and left the government with begging bowls, as it goes about seeking assistance to fight the pandemic from both private businesses and individuals.
At the best of times, Nigerians were sceptical of the school feeding arrangement which they thought was a scam. The determination to feed children at home with their parents at a time of a global pandemic that demands caution – to go ahead with this plan with all the confusion that comes with it can only point in one direction: corruption.
There is no reason why anyone should believe the explanation of Abuja that the feeding programme will not gulp up to the amount reported in the media. The action of the government lacks logic and integrity and ultimately belies any claim to transparency.
