When school time = meal time

It did not exactly make my mouth to salivate but the school food menu recently introduced for public primary schools all over Kaduna State did set me thinking about my secondary school’s food menu in the 1970s. According to Daily Trust on Saturday’s story titled “For Kaduna pupils, school time is meal time,” the pupils are served yam and egg sauce on Mondays, rice and beans on Tuesdays, beans pottage on Wednesdays, moi moi with vegetables on Thursdays while biscuits with juice are served on Fridays. 

I congratulate Kaduna State pupils on their good fortune and I salute the Kaduna State Government for storming into this area while the Federal Government, which sensationally promised to provide milk to each public school pupil, is yet to roll out its program, its error-filled budget stuck at the National Assembly. I am glad that I did not see pap in this menu. In our old school, the watery millet pap called koko, together with five pieces of bean cakes [kosai] was served as morning meal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.  

For reasons that I still do not understand, koko made most students to fall asleep. All the science teachers that had their lessons after breakfast on Tuesdays and Thursdays [who were mostly Indian women] struggled to keep us awake and they used everything from canes to chalk and meter rulers to hit students’ heads and wake them up.

I notice that Kaduna pupils are served rice and beans on Tuesdays. That was also our menu on Tuesday afternoon. The problem here was that locally grown beans were badly infested with weevils. Some mischievous students sneaked up to the food time table on the notice board and on the menu item “rice, beans and groundnut oil” they added, “and insects.”

The expected advantages of the school feeding program such as Governor Nasiru El-Rufa’i listed when he flagged it off at the Aliyu Makama LEA Primary School, Barnawa were quite impressive. He said it is aimed at boosting pupils’ nutrition and health and encourage school attendance so that every child “can have nine years of free, decent basic education no matter the income level of their parent.” The program will also create 17,000 jobs for caterers plus thousands of their assistants; save a lot of time and money for parents; boost demand for food items; empower women food vendors; impart new skills; establish higher standards of hygiene and provide extra income to households. Phew. 

The part about boosting children’s health through good nutrition reminds me of a book I once read on the Second World War where an American journalist saw the first British prisoners of war [POWs] captured by the Germans in Belgium and Holland in 1940. He said it was clear that in the inter-war years 1918 to 1939, the Brits were careless with the nutrition of their children and a whole generation grew up that had no stamina to stand up to German kids who were well groomed for war. No wonder Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbeh wants all kids to drink milk every day.

The Kaduna feeding program’s most immediate purpose appears to be to boost school enrolment. In this goal it has already succeeded, probably beyond expectations. El-Rufa’i said since the program started pupil enrolment in Kaduna’s public schools has jumped by 64% to 1.8 million. There could be a small problem with the feeding’s timing. Daily Trust on Saturday’s reporter found that the food vendors arrive at the schools at 8.30am and serve the pupils when they come out on break at 9 to 10am. The reporter also said the pupils were more eager to talk about the food than about the school curriculum. The suspicion is that many of them go to school just for the food. By serving it early, are they not being given enough opportunity to escape back into town? At least a child is expected to eat something before leaving home for school, in which case it makes sense to push the feeding hour to noon. Even if a pupil runs away after that, he must have learnt something.

The huge boost in school attendance quickly raises the question: are other facilities in place to accommodate such an astronomical boost in enrolment within such a short time? Number of classrooms; number of teachers; teachers’ quality and welfare; furniture and teaching aids were already in short supply, not only in Kaduna State but all over the country. How will the schools cope with this infusion of new pupils? I attended a seminar organised by the defunct National Primary Education Commission [NPEC] in 1996 at which it advocated school feeding in order to boost school enrolment and retention. Kano State Government tried it during Governor Kwankwaso’s first coming in 1999-2003 and President Obasanjo also launched a pilot scheme late in his tenure. A school feeding program is always very popular but it always comes with teething financial and logistic problems. The Kaduna State Government has said that it will sustain it despite the reported N300 million weekly bill, partly because it expects the Federal Government to reimburse it for 60% of the amount.

The question could however be asked if, of all the problems afflicting public schools in this country, feeding pupils is the most urgent one. An enormous boost in enrolment without a corresponding boost in facilities sounds like going for quantity above quality. Even though I entirely agree with Governor El-Rufa’i that every kid deserves a chance to go to school, the kind of pupils and students being churned out by public schools all over this country these days could hardly contribute to national development efforts, especially in this age of knowledge. 

Most old timers will say that public schools in this country were much more effective 30, 40 and 50 years ago and they produced quality graduates that gave Nigeria its little head start in development. Incidentally, public schools had no feeding programs in those days, except in boarding schools. During my primary school days, the old Gwandu Local Education Authority tried a pilot feeding scheme for only one day in 1970. It ended in chaos. Although some women were hired and they came to the school’s football field early in the morning to start cooking, it took the whole day to serve the food and all the pupils played for many hours while awaiting our turn to get the wasa wasa, ie cooked rice with vegetable oil. Apart from that, the only other occasions that we were fed in primary school was when we got packets of high protein milk powder. 

That milk was brought to Nigeria by UNICEF soon after the Civil War, essentially for victims of kwashiorkor and marasmus in the defunct Biafra. Some of it found its way to our areas. The milk was highly concentrated, several times more than today’s full cream Peak powdered milk. One packet was poured into a pot with several pails of water and we all lined up to get a cup full.

So, if Nigerian public schools of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s are believed to have imparted knowledge to children more effectively than today’s public schools and free feeding was not one of their elements, at least the Federal Government should consult surviving teachers and school administrators  from that era before it rolls out a nationwide school feeding program. I however congratulate Governor Nasiru El-Rufa’i and the Kaduna State Government for serving themselves up as the guinea pigs of this great national experiment.