Bogged down by a procedural problems, the school feeding scheme isn’t reaching the children who need it most.
DAVE LARSEN reports
CHILDREN from Ngongolo Community Primary School press around the bakkie.
Their eyes are vacant and few smile because it takes too much energy. The school is in the Guqa area of KwaZulu-Natal on the narrow dust road that leads from distant Greytown to Tugela Ferry. The area was the site of decades of faction fights and a large percentage of the children are orphaned. If any school needs the National Department of Health’s school feeding scheme, it is this school, yet for 10 months now there has been no food.
“The department says the school owes it R5 000,” explains the school’s catering supplier, who would not be named. “But when we try to investigate, nobody can tell us why. We have been trying for months now.”
He said he dealt with another school that the department also claimed owed it money, but that it was eventually found an error had been made. “We feed 12 000 children a week in 20 schools,” the supplier said. “The department already owes us more than R200 000 and we just can’t keep on feeding the children out of our own pockets.”
He said he had to stop supplying food to one school that didn’t receive money from the department for three months. “The school committee called me in and gave me a hard time, but I couldn’t do anything. The parents are all looking at us as suppliers to feed their children, and when the department doesn¹t pay us, what can we do?”
Suppliers to the schools feeding scheme in KwaZulu-Natal find themselves blamed for the poor running of the scheme but have no authority to change it. The scheme has, however, significantly improved since its chaotic early days after the 1994 elections when there were reports of widespread corruption. “The process is in place now for correct operation,” said the supplier. “It is just that it is laborious.”
“This process takes anything from two to six months,” said the supplier. “On one occasion we had to wait six months for R30 000 the department owed us.”
Not only is this system time consuming, but it places rural schools, with poor communication resources available to them, at the hub of the process. The suppliers have no authority to deal directly with the department. Because many rural schools barely have transport, poor access to postal services and no phones, they cannot cope with the administration required.
“We as the suppliers end up doing all the work. It costs us thousands of rands in phone calls and time.” The suppliers are then forced to add administrative costs they incur to the cost of supplying food to the schools. This means less food per child at the end of the day, and the amount of money allocated each child per day has not changed in four years. Each child still gets 50 cents worth of food.
Mr VA Ximba, headmaster of Emhlangana Public Primary School, said: “We need more food. After getting rice and samp there is a great need for juice and milk. We used to get vitamins, biscuits and milk, but not any more.” The supplier unloads bags of samp, beans and rice under the eaves of a hut near another school. “In the past, they used to get a whole bakkie load,” he says with a shrug. “But what can one do these days with 50 cents?”
Suppliers in the Pietermaritzburg region have formed a forum to have some say in the process. Forum chairperson, Jabu Ngcobo, said meetings were being held with the department to discuss suppliers’ problems.
— African Eye News Service, January 6, 2000.