Virtual events recently organised to mark the 7th African Day of School Feeding on February 28 and March 1, 2022 provided opportunities for appraising the implementation of the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP) and the entire package of the social intervention agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari. Since its recognition by the African Union in 2016, the day has been an annual high-level convening moment led by the AU with support from other development partners.
In June 2016, the World Bank Group approved a $500 million International Development Association credit to support economic development in Nigeria. The federal government provided an additional $1.3 billion to create the social security initiatives that came to be known as the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP). The scheme is a social welfare initiative created by the federal government to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources to vulnerable populations including children, youth, and women with a view to addressing poverty and to help increase economic development. Besides the HGSFP, other schemes of the NSIP include the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP), N-Power, National Social Safety Net Programme (NASSCO), and the National Cash Transfer Programme (N-CTP) otherwise called ‘Trader Moni’.
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Through the provision of meals to 5.5 million pupils in Nigeria’s public basic schools daily, the HGSFP is intended to increase school enrolment and address malnutrition in children. Under the GEEP, government launched Trader Moni to enable 1.66 million businesses of petty traders, market women, artisans and MSMEs, enterprising youth, farmers and agricultural workers to access loans of between N10,000 and N100,000. While N-Power which is a youth employment programme provides individuals aged 18-35 with opportunities to acquire skills and develop themselves with a monthly stipend of N30,000, the N-CTP gives targeted cash transfers of N5,000 monthly to households with the ultimate goal of alleviating poverty.
From 2016 to 2019 alone, the federal government appropriated N500 billion in its annual budget to fund the investment programmes. This is why it is important for Nigerians to know the extent to which these programmes have improved school enrolment, attendance and academic performance, tackled malnutrition in children, addressed poverty, boosted entrepreneurial activities in communities, or reduced unemployment in the country.
From inception, the implementation of the NSIP has never been free from damaging criticisms. We recall that Nigeria’s First Lady, Hajiya Aisha Buhari, was the first to raise alarm in May 2019 by alleging that the programmes had failed “woefully” because the monies invested were not reaching the intended beneficiaries. Corrupt practices in states offices where officials allegedly engage in racketeering, shortchanging and harassment of beneficiaries have remained the bane of the scheme. Some government officials manipulate the programme to favour those who have no business benefitting from it; turning the intended beneficiaries into victims.
An elaborate story by the Daily Trust in December 2018 revealed how the HGSFP was turned into a conduit for siphoning public funds. The report showed that school pupils were generally served with poor quality food, and that in some states, including Benue, Taraba and Plateau, food vendors consistently got paid for supposedly feeding pupils in schools that never existed in the first place. Yet, cooks engaged for the school feeding programme complained of being short-changed in payment.
The distribution mode of the conditional cash transfer has remained questionable. Six years after the NSIP took off, not a few have complained about the procedures for selection of the beneficiaries, the criteria for cash transfers and the mechanisms for monitoring the transfers. For example, in November 2018, the Senate set up an ad hoc investigative committee in response to allegations of politicization of the intervention schemes. The public protests that exposed palliatives’ conspiracies and the raids that rocked storage facilities across the country during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 were also serious indications of mismanagement of the intervention programmes.
There is no doubt that NSIP is a laudable programme of this government and the scale of the investment is unprecedented. Also, despite the problems, millions of Nigerians have benefitted from one or more of these interventions. However, it is time to review, reform and revamp the programmes so that they can continue to serve the noble objectives for which they were initiated, even beyond the tenure of this administration.
Therefore, as a first step towards reform, we urge the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, which manages the schemes, to publish a detailed register of the beneficiaries in a manner not unlike the Voters’ Register. This way, civil society organisations, the media and others can monitor changes across the entire process, from the number of beneficiaries to the mode of transfers to each beneficiary in the register. More importantly, the scandal is not in the funds but in the number of beneficiaries. The payment of N5,000 to 40,000 poor families from the 200 million population would certainly not go far to reduce poverty in the country. Thus, what is required of the government is a massive economic development plan that goes well beyond small handouts to the lucky few.
