School feeding schemes in the Eastern Cape have collapsed due to fraud and mismanagement, report Pat Sidley and Rod Amner
President Nelson Mandela’s flagship presidential project, the school feeding scheme, has ground to a halt in the Eastern Cape. Fraud and incompetence has consumed the province’s R114-million budget for the year in just four months.
All feeding in Eastern Cape schools has been suspended pending investigations and decisions on how to manage the problem. The Eastern Cape’s allocation of R113 882 360 for this year was the second largest provincial feeding scheme allocation. Only the Northern Province received more: R120 997 623. The money was intended to last until April next year.
The collapse in the Eastern Cape has deprived some 1,9- million children of food at school.
But this is not the only trouble the national feeding scheme has faced. This year’s R500-million budget, drawn from the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) Fund, was down 30 percent from last year. This means the number of children fed decreased from five million in some 13 000 schools to 3,3-million in some 8 900 schools. In some areas, the quality of food has also dropped.
The showpiece Primary School Nutrition Programme was a presidential lead project, one of the first “100-day” projects and a strong
political drawcard for the African National Congress (ANC)-led government. This placed pressure on its planners to deliver in haste without any clear sense of what was required or how to go about it, said Dianne Kloka, the national co-ordinator of the programme.
The target was to provide 25 percent of children’s daily energy requirements so they could get more from their education.
While the Eastern Cape situation is the most dire in the country, severe corruption was also discovered in the Eastern Transvaal and, said Kloka, there are indications that another two provinces may have the same problem.
She said the government had ordered a “rapid audit” of randomly-selected provinces to assess the problem. The Eastern Cape and Western Cape were chosen.
They have confirmed widespread fraud in the Eastern Cape and ordered a thorough audit of the province, due to be completed soon.
Several Grahamstown primary schools, which have had no food since the beginning of the third term, have reported lower attendance rates. School staff surveyed this week reported that lack of nutrition threatened children’s performance. Up to
50 percent of children did not bring lunch-boxes to school and depended on schools for a major portion of their nutritional needs.
Eastern Cape Ministry of Health and Welfare spokesman Khululekile Bata said: “The method of tendering out contracts used by the scheme left it open to large- scale robbery, swindling and fraud.”
Some contractors inflated the numbers of schoolchildren needing feeding, and some food deliveries were not made, or food arrived stale.
Phumlani Ximiya, regional co-ordinator of the National Progressive Primary Health Care Network (NPPHC), a non- governmental organisation (NGO) helping to evaluate the programme, said: “There was a lack of accountability in the programme and vast amounts of money seem to have disappeared into thin air.” People have boasted of making R28 000 in one week, he said, and contractors were “using the scheme to line their own pockets”.
According to Kloka, however, corruption was not the only agent at work. There has been no effective evaluation of which children most needed the programme, so an attempt was made to feed all children — this was more than the budget allowed for.
Different provinces had used different methods of evaluating the needs of children, Kloka said.
The amounts provinces had been allocated was arrived at by calculating how many people were below the bread- line and how far below it they were (called the “aggregate poverty gap method”).
In addition, the Department of Education’s database was not up to date and chronic understaffing made it difficult to monitor both how the programme was working and how the needs of children were being met.
Roy Page-Shipp, the RDP office’s national programme manager, said the nutrition programme has some perceived defects including that it was not community- driven and some of its developmental aspects had not worked very well.
His office regarded the first year as “a learning experience”. A new business plan from the Department of Health — which co-ordinates the national feeding programme — was expected to be handed to the RDP offices this week to set the programme back on track.
“It is part of the climate of the RDP that if you don’t get it right the first time, you get a second chance.” — Staff reporter, Ecna-DNA