Ondo School Feeding Programme: Cooks Suspend Meals Over Unpaid Stipends

The Home Grown School Feeding Programme, to which Vice President Yemi Osinbajo paid a monitoring visit in Ondo State last month has been stopped.

This according to the cooks handling the meals is because of the nonpayment of their stipends as agreed between them and the state.

Reports gathered has it that the vendors have been on duty since February when the programme was launched in the state, but failed to appear with the meals at the various schools, to the disappointment of the pupils and their parents.

No meals have reportedly been served the children in the last two weeks because the cooks had not received any alert from the Federal Government.

Each meal is served for N70 per pupil by over 1500 cooks.

The Ondo State government had said about N4.2 billion was projected for the programme in the 2018 budget of the state government as counterpart funds for the project.

The cooks have blamed their inability to feed the children on the non-payment of the funds into their accounts by the government for the period cooking was suspended.

Issues of low quality of meals and poor monitoring of the cooks had been identified during the exercise.

However, the Commissioner of Information, Yemi Olowolabi said the halt is because of discrepancies in the BVNs of the cooks, he added the it had made it impossible to wire the funds to them electronically.

“Because as a government programme, payment is not made in cash, all the vendors were asked to submit their bank details so that monies can be paid into their accounts,” he explained.

“But the issues we have had so far has been that a lot of them submitted account numbers whose BVN numbers are at variance with their bank details.

“We have been making efforts to regularise everything, and soon we should be done with it and get back to work by next week.”