The Federal Government’s pledge to reintroduce free meals in primary schools is a laudable decision because of the phenomenal impact it is likely to have, not just on the country’s educational system, but also on the economy. It is a programme that has attracted widespread endorsement in other parts of the world due to its inherent benefits. But because of the complexities of implementation and the peculiarities of the Nigerian environment, there is the need for painstaking planning, especially in the area of statistics gathering, before its take-off, to avert the fate that befell its precursor during the Olusegun Obasanjo administration.
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo made the solemn declaration at a recent Annual Accountants Conference in Abuja that the government would soon embark on the programme because of its job creation potential. According to him, the programme could create about 1.14 million jobs in addition to enhancing the country’s capacity for food production. In a country where unemployment is fast assuming the nature of a time bomb, creating 1.14 million jobs will definitely ease the economic pressure significantly on a good number of families.
Beyond that, however, the introduction of free feeding in schools will go a long way in improving the nutritional value of the children’s daily meal intake as well as triggering a significant upswing in school enrolment figures. These are two important areas in which Nigeria has largely been found wanting, especially when benchmarked against other countries. A 2013 Brookings Institution report says hunger, malnutrition, and chronic fatigue are huge hurdles to learning in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to figures from the United Nations Children Fund, no fewer than 10 million children of school age are currently roaming the streets in Nigeria, making her the country with the highest number of out-of-school children in the world. Such children grow up to become a menace to the society, engaging in armed robbery, kidnapping and other anti-social acts.
Again, despite the country’s oil wealth, over 100 million Nigerians are classified as poor, living below the United Nations threshold of US$2 per day; and children, in the main, bear the larger brunt of the poverty burden. A UNICEF report released last month said over 1.7 million Nigerian children under the age of five were acutely malnourished, resulting in nearly a thousand deaths daily from malnutrition-related causes. The Nigerian figure represents 10 per cent of malnourished children globally. A meal a day at school may not be an absolute solution to malnutrition problem in the country, but it will cut down significantly on the number of victims.
In Brazil where the school feeding programme was first established in 1950, targeting the children of the needy, it has become a universal right under the law. It now guarantees access to meals by children from the nursery and kindergarten through to primary, secondary schools and beyond. India, with its huge population, has not been fazed by the challenges of providing a free meal a day at school. A Supreme Court order in 2001, made it mandatory for every government school to provide every pupil with cooked meals under the Mid-Day Meals Scheme. Canada is said to be the only G8 country without a national school-based feeding programme.
In implementing such a laudable programme, the Federal Government must guard against corruption, which is capable of derailing this initiative designed to touch the lives of Nigerian kids positively. Efforts should be made to ensure that the number of children is not inflated, while also ensuring that the food served is capable of providing nourishment to the kids. If possible the biometric data of the prospective beneficiaries should be taken to provide the correct data to work with. This is not one programme the government should rush into and rush out because of factors not taken into consideration before take-off.
When Obasanjo launched the free meal programme in 2005, at the Science Primary School, Kuje, near Abuja, the aim was to provide it nationwide, covering 25 million children of school age. About 2.5 million children, 10 per cent of the total number of participants, in 12 different states, were targeted in the pilot programme. The programme also attracted the interest of UNIDO which set up two schools, one in Kaduna and the other in Ikaram/Ibaram in Ondo State. Unfortunately, only a few states bought into it, one of which is Osun, which is still fighting to keep it alive in the face of harsh economic realities.
This programme offers the government a unique opportunity to spare a thought for the learning needs of the poorest and most marginalised children in the society. Any investment in children is an investment for the future, since the children are the future of any nation. A free meal for a Nigerian child will be opening a new chapter in a country which the Economist Intelligence Unit described in 2013 as the worst place for a child to be born in the whole world. The over-arching goal of ensuring that no child in our public schools is hungry should not be lost to corruption and bureaucracy.
