School children feeding programme not a scam — FG tells Nigerians

Sadiya Umar Farouq 

President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has defended its plan to feed school children at home, insisting that the programme is not a scam as alleged by Nigerians.

Many Nigerians on and off social media have been condemning the policy, insisting that it was a huge scam.


On Wednesday, the Nigerian Patriots (NP) called the feeding scheme a fraud and insisted that those benefitting must be punished.

Days earlier, a former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Bode George, has chided the Buhari government over the programme.




“Pumping money into school feeding programme while the schools are not open is a little absurd. It is a redundant, unworkable palliative. In a nation where there is no standard numbering of houses, how do you get the food to the beneficiaries? This is more than laughable. It is tragic”, George declared.

But the minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouq, on Thursday defended the government’s decision to spend N679million on the programme.



Speaking in Lagos at the flag-off of food items distribution under the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) at the St. Francis Primary School in Maryland, Farouq said feeding children at home is an internationally accepted practice to check food insecurity and malnutrition.

The minister said, “The idea of take-home rations is not unique to Nigeria, neither is it a scam. It is a globally accepted means of continuing to have access to nutrition and nutritionally-rich foods, despite disruptions to the traditional channels of school feeding,” The Nation quoted her as saying.

Titilola Adeyemi-Doro, Special Assistant to the President on NHGSFP, said 37,589 households were selected out of 112,767 pupils benefiting from the school feeding programme in Lagos.


The official explained that the team “engaged the community to formulate the definition of being poor and not being able to provide for their wards”.

She said priority was given to “women, widow-headed households, households headed by persons with a disability, households whom the head has lost his or her job and have no or little income among other criteria”.