Re – FG Increases School Feeding Cost To N100/Child, Spends N1bn DAILY -By Constance Ogban

– FG increases School Feeding Cost To spend N1bn Daily —Adesanya-Davies Warns

– Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouq NEEDS Special Economic Adviser —Adesanya-Davies

A frontline presidential aspirant, the only Amazon in the 2023 race on the platform of the PDP and an academic and technocrat Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies berates the Nigeria Federal Government especially the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouq; who says, “FG increases school feeding cost to N100/child, spends N1bn daily” in Northern Nigeria in a report by Okechukwu Nnodim, Punch, 24 February 2022.

First, may I note and emphasise that, ” It’s time we begin to think outside-the-box, the government is spending too much-giving people what to eat rather than helping them to fend for themselves by providing enabling environment and the needed infrastructure for the people to use their personal initiatives. Nothing for the fathers, nothing for the mothers. No jobs for the brothers and sisters, just food for the children.

There is an old Chinese/ Navajo proverb which we must often remind themselves of: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” as such, ‘It’s better to teach how to get food than give food to someone,’ they say. We need to begin to explore ideas that are creative and unusual and that are not limited or controlled by rules or tradition to solve life puzzles- One must have to think outside the box.

The Federal Government said, “It has increased the cost of feeding a primary school pupil from N70 to N100 and will be spending about N1bn daily to feed an estimated 10 million children benefiting from the scheme across the country. “Haba! Please, just listen to your self Madam Sadiya Farouq. How do we account for this! This is a slap on the face of Nigerians and you may need to go and have a chat with Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iwealla, as a Special Economic Adviser for counsel,” Amb. Prof. Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies advises.

That FG increases school feeding cost to N100/child, spends N1bn daily was disclosed in Abuja on Wednesday during a two-day national consultative meeting on public food procurement in the context of Nigeria’s National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme. Through the NHGSFP, under the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, the government provides a meal daily for pupils in year one to three in government-owned primary schools.

Speaking on the sidelines of the event, the National Coordinator, National Social Investments Programme, Umar Bindir, said the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), had approved the increase. He said, “When we started in 2016, that was before COVID-19, we had experienced difficulty with the implementation of the N70/child. We had made presentations as the (humanitarian) minister passionately made submissions to Mr. President.

He added, “And Mr. President has graciously approved that we should raise the feeding (cost) from N70 to N100 per child. And the implementation of this programme has now commenced.” Bandir said the Minister of Finance was giving the humanitarian ministry the right cooperation to ensure that the new feeding cost would be implemented on time.

Commenting on concerns observed in the school feeding programme, the NSIP coordinator stated that some stakeholders involved in the implementation of the NHGSFP were not abiding by some of the stipulated terms.
He said, “There are issues where the formulae for the menu in many cases are not consistently adhered to, and so on and so forth. However, these are things that are natural when you have a big programme of this nature covering 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

“We are feeding over 10 million children nationwide and you are bound to experience one or two hiccups here and there. But we are strengthening our monitoring and evaluation system and digitising the processes of delivery.” Bindir added, “We are also ensuring that payments to cooks continue to go directly to the cooks and we are now engaging even non-governmental organisations to participate in the verification and monitoring of the process.”

However, Adesanya-Davies alludes, “According to IMF data, Nigeria has among the lowest revenues globally, with government revenue between 2015 and 2019 at 7.9 per cent of GDP, compared with a Sub-Saharan African average of 12.7 per cent and a global average of 29.8 per cent.”

We would recall sometimes, “Speaking before a joint sitting of the Senate and the House of Representatives, President Buhari said: “Some have expressed concern over our resort to borrowing to finance our fiscal gaps and they are right to be concerned.” Again, “Although there has been a lot of criticisms over Nigeria’s mounting debt, the President said the country is in so much debt due to borrowing to survive two recessions. He explained that part of what necessitated the borrowings was the economic recession that hit the country, adding that the nation does not have a debt sustainability problem, but a revenue challenge.

He further explained that his government has endeavoured to use the loans to finance critical development projects and programmes aimed at improving Nigeria’s economic environment and ensuring effective delivery of public services to our people. For President Buhari, the loans acquired have been and will continue to be focused on: Completion of major road and rail projects, effective implementation of power sector projects, provision of potable water, construction of irrigation infrastructure and dams across the country and critical health projects such as the strengthening of national emergency medical services and ambulance system, procurement of vaccines, polio eradication and upgrading Primary Health Care Centres across the six geopolitical zones.

But may I again put it on record, “BUT experts have expressed dismay over non-compliance with full implementation of national budgets in line with existing appropriation laws. They say the implementation of the proposed N16.39 trillion 2022 budget may not be different given the fact that several past budgets never realised up to 80 per cent implementation threshold.”

Speaking on the issue, the Director, Institute of Fiscal Studies, Godwin Ighedosa, said: ‘’It is sad that subsequent governments have always refused to follow appropriation laws while implementing the budgets. Monies are not supposed to be diverted from one ministry to another but to be used for what purpose they are meant for in the various MDAs.” He called on the government to diversify the economy into ICT areas, transportation and embark on a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model to fund developmental projects.

A former lecturer, Dr. Liman Umar, said the government should, as a matter of fact, rely more on PPP in funding its yearly budgets. He said: “Using the PPP model will help attract local and foreign investors into the economy and jobs would be created with taxes paid to boost government revenues that could be used to pay outstanding debts.”

An economist, Tope Fasua, faulted the lack of innovation in government and taking the easy way out of economic underdevelopment by relying heavily on crude oil sales and borrowing to fund annual budgets. Fasua added that, Nigeria is still trapped under the yoke of heavy borrowings. “The budget has not gone out of the vicious circle of crude oil being the main source of revenue for this country. We are still talking about crude oil, how many barrels we can sell and how many barrels we can produce.”

“Nigerians are waiting for the day there would be out-of-the-box thinking as far as our budget is concerned where we will be able to see new thinking about revenue expectations of our budgets. We have not got to that point.

The way we are going now, the fear is that will we may never get out of the budget deficit circle. Nigeria is the second-lowest country in terms of per capita budget, meaning the federal budget is divided by the population, will amount to little. We are not better than Congo.”

The fact we need to understand is that the government is spending too much-giving people what to eat rather than helping them to fend for themselves by providing enabling environment and the needed infrastructure for the people to use their personal initiatives.

Again, for the economy to move forward, the government must fix the security problems to create the environment for increased real sector activities, review the foreign exchange policy regime to reduce distortions, eliminate arbitrage opportunities, minimise uncertainties, reduce exchange rate volatility and mitigate investment risks and align CBN financing of deficit strictly to the provisions of the CBN Act.

Moreover, the only way for the government to reduce borrowing to fund the budget is for it to make the productive sector working. Economic analysts has said that, the current budget signalled the government was not about to make any major policy shift as spending would remain elevated to deal with a deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country.

The security forces have been struggling to contain Islamist insurgencies in the Northeast, a spate of mass abductions and deadly bandit attacks in the Northwest, conflicts between farmers and herders in many areas and a general surge in crime. And now we read in the News headlines, “FG Increases School Feeding Cost To N100/Child, Spends N1bn DAILY”. N1bn DAILY!? Nigeria we hail thee!