The attention of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) of the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development has been drawn to the above – captioned report in the Tuesday, October 4, 2022 edition of the LEADERSHIP newspaper. In the said report, the LEADERSHIP reported, inter alia, that “the rot in the federal government’s school feeding programme has been exposed after the Nasarawa State Governor Abdullahi (Sule) revealed that 349 nonexistent public primary schools were included in the scheme, for which money was disbursed and pocketed by officials”.
His excellency, Governor Sule, reportedly made these revelations when he received in audience members of the Project Task Team (PTT) of the National Home – Grown School Feeding Programme of the NSIP, who paid him a courtesy call at the Government House, Lafia, on Thursday, September 15, 2022 to brief him on the plans for the commencement of the second phase of the pupils’ enumeration exercise in the state.
In its coverage and reporting of the proceedings of the said meeting, however, the LEADERSHIP newspaper perhaps unwittingly created the wrong impression in the minds of its readers to the effect that the infraction in reference was committed at the level of the federal government, which could not have been further from the truth. It is, therefore, imperative that the Ministry responds and promptly corrects this manifestly wrong impression, with a view to setting the records straight as to the true situation of things regarding this particular issue.
The Federal Government’s National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) was launched by His Excellency, President Muhammadu Buhari, in 2016, and has remained under the guidance and effective supervision of the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development (FMHADMSD) following its creation in August 2019. The head of the State NSIP implementation team at the state level is a Focal Person directly appointed by His Excellency, the Governor.
In addition, the entire beneficiaries and participants across all programme clusters are bona fide indigenes of the state, even as payments to those participants and beneficiaries are also made directly into their individual bank accounts.
The NHGSFP itself is a Federal Government intervention designed for junior level pupils in Primary 1 to 3 of government – owned schools, who are essentially citizens of Nigeria by nationality, but also indigenes of their respective states. And the Programme design is such that whilst the FGN funds the Programme via the NSIP of the FMHADMSD, the implementation aspect is carried out entirely at the subnational level across all 36 participating states and the FCT, which are responsible for the management of primary education and also own the schools where the feeding takes place. The states are also directly responsible for the recruitment, selection and appointment of the cooks and aggregators in states where aggregators are used
The NHGSFP has grown steadily over the years as more states and beneficiary schools join the Programme, with a total of over 9.7 million being fed across the federation. This figure, however, continued to remain a statistic, more or less, prior to the formal launch of the enumeration exercise in 2021, with no central database of beneficiaries in existence containing the individual names and/or photographs of the targeted beneficiaries submitted by State Program Offices that serves to verify and back those numbers up.
The enumeration exercise itself is a joint and collaborative endeavour between the Federal Government, as represented by the Ministry, and the respective State governments of the beneficiary states, with the active collaboration and participation of the state offices of two key federal agencies, comprising the National Orientation Agency (NOA), charged primarily with sensitization and mobilisation, on the one hand, and the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), which provided the bulk of the Enumeration Officers (EOs) from the pool of Youth Corps members serving in those states, on the other.
The enumeration exercise has indeed been eye – opening and has also flagged several issues for the Ministry, which the NSIP team has duly noted and appropriately dealt with. The Ministry has now successfully created a credible database of beneficiary pupils that is steadily growing on a daily basis as enumeration continues with the resumption of the new school term across all participating States.
One such issue that was identified by the Ministry through its enumeration exercise was at the level of the distribution of the enumeration forms in readiness for the formal commencement of the enumeration during the first phase of the exercise in 2021 in Nasarawa State, where the Project Task Team led by the Ministry’s representative uncovered a total of 349 nonexistent schools from the then total of 1,203 beneficiary schools enrolled in the state, leaving a figure of 854 schools verified as authentic. The specific individuals, led by a state appointed officer, who were directly involved in acts around the unlawful conduct were indicted in a report submitted to the Ministry, and have since been suspended and withdrawn from participating in the programme implementation, and the force of law deployed to ensure that justice is served.
This reprehensible act was further worsened by the fact that Nasarawa State indeed has well over 1,200 public primary schools in the real sense that could easily have accounted for the total number of beneficiary schools on the initial list submitted by the state implementation team to the Ministry. But rather than spread the programme to reach all targeted pupils in the entire schools across the state, several duplicated and other outrightly nonexistent schools were surreptitiously smuggled into the scheme, thereby effectively denying other eligible pupils the opportunity to equally benefit from the feeding programme at their respective omitted schools.
Efforts are now being intensified by the new state implementation team, working in active collaboration with the NBS office in the state and the NSIP team of the Ministry, to spread the school feeding programme to cover all eligible schools in the State under the established procedure for enrolling new schools onto the scheme. This will be achieved by replacing the 349 nonexistent schools with those currently not benefitting under the scheme.
It is very important to emphasise, at this point, that the insertion of the 349 nonexistent schools into the list of benefitting schools in Nasarawa State was perpetrated solely by some programme officers at the state level, and it was the enumeration exercise embarked upon by the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, through the Project Task Team specifically deployed to the state for that purpose, that led to the eventual discovery. That much has been acknowledged and attested to at the September 15th meeting by His Excellency, Governor Abdullahi Sule, who went on to commend the enumeration team for the successes achieved during the first phase of the enumeration exercise and also used the opportunity to send a very clear warning to other state officials to steer away from committing such acts, going forward.
On its part, the Ministry also wishes to reaffirm its unwavering commitment to promote the effective implementation of the school feeding programme in all states and at all times, beginning with the provision of a creditable database of all participating schools and beneficiary pupils across the 36 participating states and the FCT. To this end, the Ministry is continually deploying multiple layers of the standard monitoring and evaluation (M&E) tools and other effective controls measures, in conjunction with the relevant law enforcement and anti-graft agencies, to check these and other similar infractions and also mete out the appropriate sanctions to offenders, going forward. An ongoing partnership with Law enforcement and Anti-graft partners is already yielding the desired results as the programme continues to promote and strengthen its compliance enforcement strategies across all the States.
The onerous task of effectively delivering impactful interventions to targeted beneficiaries across the country is, no doubt, a collective undertaking. The FMHADMSD, therefore, calls on members of the general public, especially at the community level, to join hands together and contribute to this collective endeavor by providing the necessary support towards the effective monitoring of the delivery of the school feeding programme.
– Engr Bindir is national coordinator of National Social Investment Programme
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