APC'S FREE PRIMARY SCHOOL FEEDING PROJECT IS A MISPLACED PRIORITY!

ZION B-BC   NEWSLETTER.  

A Publication of the Zion Faith Bible-Believing Church, Kpeyegyi, Abuja Nigeria. [VOL. 5. NO 149. 19th June, 2016.} “…ONLY The Truth, Will Set You   Free! (John.8:32).

APC'S FREE PRIMARY SCHOOL FEEDING PROJECT IS A MISPLACED PRIORITY!

The All Progressives Congress (APC), has put the cart before the horse in its education policy by introducing free primary school feeding instead of catching pupils young through a reading culture of well-studded school libraries and compulsory computer literacy for early exposure of the future leaders to global civilization! Apart from the provision of basic amenities of life, through an opportunity to secure adequate means of livelihood as well as adequate opportunity to secure suitable employment, health, medical and safety guarantees which must be safeguarded and not endangered, as entrenched in Nigeria's 1999 Constitution, so also should Government direct its policy towards ensuring  that education opportunities was equally adequate! According to Chapter II 18- (3), Government shall strive to eradicate illiteracy; and to this end Government shall as and when practicable provide - (a) free, compulsory and universal primary education; (b) free secondary education; (c) free university education; and (d) free adult literacy programme. The good intentions of the ruling party is not in doubt but such "laudable" policy would neither amount nor translate to anything without incisive and detailed feasibility reports or blue prints that would analyze the entire project from incubation to fruition through expert administrators!

From all of our researches, the following are the available information:
1. Federal Government intends to feed only pupils of primaries one to three of some 18 unidentified States without others in Primaries 4-6!
2. It is yet to be disclosed whether the children would be served free breakfast or lunch.
3. We are aware that pupils in most primary pupils in Nigeria spend between five to six study hours daily, Monday through Friday; but we are yet to know how many hours would be spent to feed a population of 850 pupils of a rural school or 2.500 of a city school and by how many caterers per school on daily basis!
4. It is yet to be ascertained whether caterers would carry prepared "nutritious" meals to the schools or would prepare such meals within school premises under the watchful eyes of appointed nutritionists and official supervisors because Government was yet to publish any feasibility documents in respect of this gagantuous project that would gulp at least billions of naira annually at such an austere period of a lean purse and deficit budget!

More Than One Billion Naira Daily On Eggs Alone?
The Minister of Information and Culture would not seize to amaze Nigerians with contrary outbursts in respect of very serious government policies; below are excerpts of some of his outbursts on the daily free meals:
(a) "Deregulation of Petroleum Downstream Sector would improve on the School Feeding Programme first through the employment of 500.000 unemployed graduates.
(b) "Second, employment of 100.000 non-graduates, technicians and artisans;
(c) "Third is one- meal-a-day programme targeting 5.5 million pupils all over Nigeria. This is the most exciting of all our programmes. Even if we are going to give these children one egg a day - it means we will need 5.5 million eggs and in one calendar year of 200 days, we will need over a billion eggs"!
From the information at our disposal one standard egg, even in the rural area costs N30 naira, while the Federal Government intends to spend the sum of N70 naira per pupil per day which translate to N165,000,000million and N385,000,000 million naira respectively on daily basis! Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State who had embarked on the free primary school feeding claimed that the pet programme would save parents a sum of N3.7billion naira annually while his Osun State counterpart claimed that a total of  N2.2 billion naira would be disbursed annually for the feeding programme which is also on stream in his State!
Feelers from the All Progressives Congress (APC), Social Welfare Change Camp, has revealed that the Acting President, 'Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday 9th June, 2016, launched the much publicized National Home Grown School Feeding And Health Programme (HGSFHP), at the Aso Rock Villa, Abuja, with several State Governors in attendance. The project was one of the several campaign promises of the ruling party to feed millions of primary school children with highly nutritional foods that would enhance their learning capabilities, battle hunger among the less privileged families, attract and entice out of school children back, and make learning more conducive and comfortable! Professor Osinbajo was quoted to have said at the occasion that the Federal Government School Feeding Programme, among other benefits, would create 1.4 million jobs, increase food production by 530.000 metric tons annually and attract fresh investments of up to N980 billion naira.

The Education Sector in Nigeria had no doubt suffered tremendous set backs in the area of funding by previous administrations which treated the acquisition of knowledge with so much disdain and levity through a platform that produced mediocres, even at the tertiary level to the extent that most Nigerian graduates were unemployable due to inadequate tertiary knowledge, educational and mental capabilities!
The result of deliberate discrepancies of short-funding had over the years birthed thousands of restive illiterate youths in virtually all the six geo-political zones of the country who possess distorted or concocted world views on every topic or subject under the sun!
1. Boko Haram's ideology posits that Western education was harmful and detrimental to their religion.
2. The Niger Delta Avengers believed that the destruction of critical government infrastructures would be the only avenue to attract the leaders attention for a truce and peace dialogue!
3. Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), posit that it was only through outright secession of the South-East Geo-Political Zone from the rest of Nigeria that peace could be ascertained!
4. All misguided militants of the Niger Delta Region believe that there would be peace only if they had 100% resource control of all crude oil extracted from the region without amending the nation's Constitution!
5. All detractors of the APC Change Government constitute themselves to ignorant arm-chair critics of every government policy and insisted that the Party had failed in its first year of administration but are very clueless on the way forward in view of global recession caused by international crude oil price fall since 2014!
According to the United Nations (UN) 2015 statistics, Nigeria has over 10 million out-of -school children, a figure that is regarded as the highest in the world  - with the Northern States accounting for majority of the outrageous number! Whether the information in respect of the HGSFHP launch was true or false, was yet to be seen, felt or confirmed by all stake holders - schools authorities, parents, pupils, farmers associations caterers or event managers of the targeted States! As stated earlier, only 5.5 million pupils of 18 out of the 36 States of the Federation, would benefit from the "Father Christmas" largesse while others would watch from a distance and just "lick their tongues" or petition their Governors who have failed to pay workers salaries for the past five to twelve months in most cases, except their own salaries including all manner of allowances and those of their political jobber partners/cronies, for redress and inclusion!
HGSFHP in all intent and purpose constitutes a misplaced priority that is bound to create more disaster that would aggravate the flagging economy as a drain pipe! Meaningful and sound education for the grassroot children is what is needed to groom these endangered species who from now on must take their rightful place as future leaders in this multi-cultural and multi-ethnic egalitarian society which had drifted gradually into an abyss of the educationally backward nations!
The Word of God says: "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." (Proverbs. 22:6). The biblical emphasis is on training of the boy and girl child and not on institutional luring with ephemeral things like food instead of a more enduring divine gift of acquiring information, inspiration, education, reformation and transformation into the 'crème' de la crème’ of the society instead the dregs, misinformed and misguided! Parents could be gainfully employed or financially empowered by government to continue to feed their wards - a duty they have fulfilled from time immemorial no matter how poor they were!
FREE SCHOOL FEEDING IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SERIOUS LEARNING AND THE KIND OF EDUCATION NEEDED FOR GRASSROOT CHILDREN! IT IS A BIG DISTRACTION BECAUSE MUCH PRECIOUS QUALITY TIME FOR ASSIMILATION WOULD BE LOST TO THE MUNDANE! WE NEED WIZKIDS NOT DULLARDS WHOSE ONLY INSPIRATION FOR ATTENDING CLASSES WOULD BE HINGED ON ONE-FREE-MEAL PER DAY! Governments have no business in feeding pupils but since APC made such a blunder of electioneering campaign commitment, all it needed do was to back-pedal and explain the impossibility of fulfillment to the electorate and reveal palliatives that would be more economically viable to the pupils as suggested in the first paragraph! Every primary school should be equipped with text books on all subjects - which could be borrowed on agreeable terms by pupils to enhance their studies while computer education should also be made compulsory with the provision of the sufficient hardware and educationally enhancing software from primary one! This would form the legacy for equitable spread of quality education from the primary to the tertiary and the immense benefits would be unquantifiable to all and sundry as these youngsters would acquire and cultivate not only the art of reading but also of studying  from that tender and formative ages to become learned and patriotic future leaders who would show gratitude to the country that had properly educated them and not those we now witness in Boko Haram of the North East, the crude oil pipeline vandals of the South-South and secession agitators of the South-East States of Nigeria! Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo in 2015, was reported to have toyed with the idea of feeding at least 25 million children in a programme christened, "Home Grown School Feeding Programme," aimed at "improving their nutritional intake" but failed before it could take off for the enormous infrastructural financing and outrageous logistics involved! President Buhari should not create a fresh avenue for massive corruption across the nation by turning the laudable caring youth programme into a GREEK GIFT that would turn out be the undoing of his party! WOULD APC SPEND THE ENTIRE N5 BILLION INTERVENTION FUND ON THIS FRIVOLOUS AND CONTROVERSIAL PROGRAMME ALONE? A WORD IS SUFFICIENT FOR THE WISE!

Please look forward to more divine revelation in the next edition of Zion B-BC Newsletter as you share this with friends and remain blessed in the Lord. [For weekly access, to this newsletter, log on to:  facebook.com/zionfaithbible.believingchurch or http://www.zfbbc1.blogspot.com, https://www.google.com/+zionfaithbiblebelievingchurch.

If you have not accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour, don’t miss this great opportunity as you pray this prayer: Lord Jesus; I confess that I am a sinner who needs to be saved through the grace of the New Testament of your Blood, shed on the Cross at Calvary; I renounce every sin in my life and accept you as my Lord and Saviour. Please forgive me and write my name in the Book of Life. Amen. If you prayed this prayer, you have been admitted into the family of sons and daughters of God, who are born-again. Congratulations.

I am, yours sincerely, Dr. David B.A. Olufon, Resident Pastor and Editor. 08130669886, 08098194390.  08080243066   g-mail- dvdolufon@gmail.com.