Presidency Says It’s Illegal to Charge Fees for Social Investment Schemes

Tobi Soniyi

The Office of the Vice President yesterday said no one should pay any fees to benefit in the N-Power or the Homegrown School Feeding programmes, and any such imposition or request for fees was uncalled for and illegal.

A statement by the Senior Special Assistance to the Vice President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Laolu Akande, said reports of such acts of extortion in some states where beneficiaries were asked to pay a ‘fee for registration’ had reached the presidency.

He said the presidency had given a firm instruction that such acts should stop.

Speaking from Awka, Anambra State capital earlier today, the Special Assistant on Homegrown School Feeding Programme in the Office of the Vice President, Mr. Dotun Adebayo, said primary school pupils in Anambra were excited as the feeding started in their schools.

Adebayo who led a team of federal and state officials to some of the schools on day one of the Homegrown School Feeding Programme implementation, said they witnessed the feeding in three schools in Akwa: Community Primary School, Awka South, Central School Ameobi, and Central School in Nibo.

“The pupils were excited and enjoyed the meals,” he stated, adding that the cooks in those three schools, among the total 774 already recruited and trained for the feeding programme, served ‘ Okpa’ a.k.a Moin-moin garnished with vegetables to the delight of the pupils who took the meals during their break time at about noonday.

All together in Anambra State, an estimated 76,690 pupils in 1,050 schools would be served every day of school.

The feeding programme caters to pupils from primary 1-3.

Having met the stated requirements for federal government funding for the Homegrown School Feeding, a sum of N53,687,900 had been released directly to cooks for the kick-off of the school feeding programme in Anambra, to last till the end of the current school term.

All the cooks were recruited from communities around the primary schools for the programme, verified and trained to provide the catering service in the 21 local government areas in the state.

The Homegrown School Feeding programme, which is one of the social investment plans of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, is driven through community participation where residents in the community are engaged as cooks to provide feeding services.

Also the programme leverages on the agricultural produce available within the communities.

“The programme will not only boost school enrollment and improve the nutritional status of the pupils, it would also stimulate local farming, while equally creating jobs including the 774 cooks now in gainful employment in Anambra State.”

While the 2016 Budget of Change made provision for funding of the feeding programme in 18 states, a total of 17 states have concluded the designing of the school feeding models through statelevel multi-sectorial capacity building workshops, based on federal government’s stipulated requirements.

Those states will proceed in the planning and would soon get to the implementation stage.

The 17 states are Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Ebonyi, Enugu, Sokoto, Kaduna, Borno, Zamfara, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Delta, Abia and Bauchi. Estimated figures from 15 of these states put the numbers of pupils to be feed at over 3.4 million.

Also the federal government has successfully conducted food safety and hygiene training for over 25,000 cooks in nine states (out of the 17).

According to the 2016 budget, provision was made for the feeding programme in 18 states of the federation.