Better way to use with security vote

By Bob Etemiku

The only raw material with which we can build a man or woman is a boy or a girl. That aphorism is true. Our children are our bundles of joy. They are our tomorrow and that perhaps is the reason we go to great lengths to protect them for the assurance that our tomorrow is not in any way subsidised or mortgaged. A parent may starve, wear a 10-year-old shirt and trek 20 kilometres just to give a beloved child the necessities of life. In an ideal situation, a parent may not be able to afford to give a child the best clothes or provide decent shelter, or even afford to send the child to school, but at least the child would eat.

While writing the last sentence, the thought just struck me that this is not often so. In many homes, it is the father or mother who eats the biggest piece of meat or fish or takes the milk, drinks from the bottled water and eats the corn flakes, perhaps not realising that it is the child who needs the proteins and vitamins in these foods. By age 40, our body metabolism slows down considerably, and a regular intake of foods like meat and eggs only increases our waistline. It is a growing child that needs the nutrients embedded in these foods.

A child’s brain, and indeed our brains feed from what we eat. Recent key findings of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on levels and trends in child malnutrition reveals that one-third of all stunted children reside in Africa. The report goes on to say that the number of overweight children under five years in Africa has nearly doubled since 1990. In-between an overweight and a stunted child is the fact that most children in Africa either do not get a balanced meal or are children of a class of parents whose source of wealth is questionable.

Therefore when the present government promised in its campaigns to embark on a feeding programme for primary and secondary school pupils in Nigeria, two things happened. Undecided voters immediately made up their minds in favour of the presidential candidate and the political party making this kind of promise. The other thing that happened was that most of us who had benefitted from this kind of school-children feeding in the 1980s were transported down memory lane.

Under the Unity Part of Nigeria (UPN) government of Professor Ambrose Folorunsho Alli as executive governor of Bendel State, school children were fed in the state at least once daily. As a child, I had free uniforms, free books, mathematical set and an extra pencil. When we left a class and moved to the next, we would find our school books already waiting for us on our desks. Another child would find the ones we had left behind on his desk. Of course, at any Independence Day celebration, most primary and secondary school children were given a bowl of rice and a piece of meat. I was a direct beneficiary of some of these things that sound like fantasy, and I remember with a lot of pain that what I experienced as a child seemed to have been flushed down the drain in today’s Nigeria.

The argument that is often given for the seeming inability of government to continue to feed school children is that the Nigerian population has exploded. In the early 80s, we were not up to 180 million people and therefore the cost of governance would be expected to be high. But that is an unreasonable excuse for any responsible person who is really interested in the upkeep of their children, no matter their number.

Government records have it that Nigeria earned $18.14 billion in 2011; $18.16 billion in 2012; $15.19 billion in 2013; $8.01 billion in 2014, and $2.17 billion in 2015. The three tiers of government share an average of $3billion every year, and have done so for the past five years. Each tier of government has been allocated its statutory entitlement. Now from these monies, Nigeria earmarked and paid out N2.14 trillion from the excess crude account (ECA) to make payments on fuel subsidy to petroleum products marketers between 2011 and 2014. I am not good with numbers, but nobody can convince me that a trillion naira will not feed all the children in public primary and secondary schools for more than a decade from today.

What really is happening is that we are a people and a government of misplaced priorities. Most of our revenue goes to areas of least value to human development. Take for instance the kind of monies that go into the maintenance of Nigeria’s refineries, the payment of subsidy and the security vote allocated to governors monthly. If my assumptions are anything to go by, most state governors collect about N500 million monthly to guarantee peace, orderliness and security of the ordinary person Nigeria. These monies cannot be accounted for, mostly because they are disbursed discreetly to informers around a spy network. But daily, Nigerians sleep with only one eye shut; kidnapping has become a lucrative profession. With more money for security in the hands of persons in authority, we get less and less secure. Shouldn’t we be thinking of an outright abolition of these security votes and use the monies for the upkeep of our children?

One of the reasons there is insecurity in Nigeria is that there is a lot of injustice in the land. Therefore, instead of voting a lot of monies for the protection of a few government officials who would come and go, we suggest that those monies be used to tackle issues which lead to insecurity. A child who is fed in school, and taken care of by the state is less likely to take up arms against his fatherland.

Feeding children in school develops them physically and mentally, and prepares them for the future. According to the World Food Programme (WFP) School Feeding in 2014, 27 countries have a school feeding programme tied to their local agricultural policies. There is Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Kenya and there is even The Gambia and Niger Republic. Nigeria, the giant of Africa, is not among the lot.

 

• Etemiku is communications manager with the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice, ANEEJ.

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