Glowing With Pride

Text of the Speech by His Excellency, Dr. Abdullahi Adamu, (Sarkin Yakin Keffi and A’are Obateru of the Source) Executive Governor of Nasarawa State at the official Launch of the Nigerian School feeding Programme, Laminga, Nasarawa State on Tuesday, September 27, 2005.

We are gathered here as witnesses to the birth of a new national initiative in our educational development. This occasion is a watershed in our national life. Yet it is more than a watershed because a watershed separates one phase of human progress from another. This occasion does more than separate one phase of our educational development from another. It is also a milestone. But it is more than a milestone because a milestone marks an important point in human progress. This occasion is more than an important point on the map of our national progress. The national school feeding programme is about our children and the future of our dear country. Its formal launching marks an indelible first step in a new national journey consistent with President Olusegun Obasanjo’s promise to make Nigeria a great, modern nation. This occasion is truly historic. It is a historic step.

Let me borrow from the slogan of Globacom and say to you, the government and people of Nasarawa State glow with pride today for one very good reason. The choice of our state to midwife this important new national initiative fills us with a sense of humility and fulfillment. The success of this programme will make our state a reference point in the history of our educational development. Perhaps, Nasarawa State is the guinea pig in the new national initiative. But we are happy to be the guinea pig. Other states will learn from our mistakes but that is the beauty of being a pioneer. A pioneer is a model. He opens up himself as a source of inspiration to others. We owe every aspect of human progress and development to pioneers, courageous men and women who are willing to make the necessary sacrifices that mankind may progress.

I am particularly delighted to welcome His Excellency, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, to this very important national event. He is the initiator and the moving spirit behind the national school feeding programme. This day belongs to him. We share in his glory. He has once again, through that singular gift of foresight that has consistently marked him out as a visionary, sowed the tiny seed that will revolutionise our educational development in the near future. This is a new feather in your cap, Mr. President.

I heartily welcome their Excellencies, my brother governors, honourable ministers, members of the national and state assemblies, members of the diplomatic corps, representatives of multilateral organizations, international donor agencies, honourable commissioners, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, to this truly memorable occasion. Our presence here in Laminga primary school is my humble way of paying my debt of gratitude to those dedicated teachers who taught me and hundreds of other children when this was a primary boarding school. The light they kindled will shine for all time.

Some occasions come before their time; some come ahead of their time and others at the right time. This one has come at the right time. The national school feeding programme is part of the new challenge facing our educational system. A vital aspect of that challenge is to evolve an educational system capable of producing roundly educated young men and women; a system of education that equips the leaders of tomorrow with the right tools for tomorrow’s leadership. We speak here of a sound physical health, formidable intellect and moral integrity. Our handsome investments in education at all levels of government in the country would be a monumental waste if, in the end, the products of our educational institutions are neither healthy in body nor in mind.

The national school feeding programme is a vital component of the new national focus on education. It may easily turn out to be the most ambitious project in our educational sector under taken by state governments recent times. The pilot scheme has a short but eventful history. In April last year, President Obasanjo inaugurated the presidential committee on dairy and fruit juice development in Nigeria with Tetra-Pak (West Africa) providing technical support. I am privileged to be the chairman of the committee. The committee submitted its preliminary report to the president two months later on June 23. It was at this point that the president requested the committee to accelerate work on the school feeding component of its terms of reference. He went further. He challenged Nasarawa State to begin a pilot scheme of the school feeding programme.

We accepted the challenge for three very good reasons. Firstly, a presidential challenge is a presidential order. It carries no option of refusal. Secondly, we knew that in taking up the presidential challenge, we would have the president solidly behind us. When you have the president behind you, you can move mountains. Chief Obasanjo’s little known name is commitment. When he commits himself to something, it is total. And that reminds me of an argument between a pig and a chicken. The chicken said it loved their master more than the pig because it contributed eggs for his breakfast. The pig said it loved their master more because the chicken made only a contribution to their master’s breakfast. On the other hand, the pig argued, it was totally committed to feeding their master because it dies so their master could eat bacon at breakfast. That is the difference between commitment and contribution.

Thirdly, the school feeding programme is one programme whose time has come in the country. The government and people of Nasarawa State did not need to be persuaded to support it. An idea whose time has come does not need to be dressed up like a doll. It is an instant sell. A national school feeding programme had long been a missing link in our educational system. Now, it has been found. As I told the national stake holders workshop on school feeding in Lafia last month, "the reform agenda of the Obasanjo administration would be incomplete if it did not ginger us to take the health of our children much more seriously than we do now."

Nigeria has never had a formal national school feeding programme. Some of the regional governments introduced limited programme of providing milk or beans to primary or secondary school students. The ministry of education in the then Northern Region, for instance, distributed powdered milk to secondary school students. The milk was donated by foreign donor agencies. This was not a well articulated school feeding programme. It was abandoned soon after independence. It is also difficult to measure its impact on the physical and mental development of the children who benefited from it.

We, therefore, did not available resources or experience to tap from in initiating the pilot scheme. We set up a committee as well as a programme management team to work out the modalities for the take off of the pilot scheme. The committee and the management team were made up of educational and nutritional experts. They set to work and soon produced a blue print for the pilot scheme. The primary objectives of the state’s school feeding programme as enunciated by the committee and accepted by the government are to:

We chose primary school pupils and students in junior secondary schools as the primary beneficiaries of the programme because this is the most vulnerable group in human resource development. Children in this target group constitute the foundation of our educational system. Scientists tell us that by the age of five, children have laid their mental groundwork – perceptions, emotions, desires and feelings. By the age of ten their capacity for basic learning has been determined; and by the age of 15, their body size and general health has been greatly influenced by the quality of their feeding and nutrition. According to the national policy on education, children within this age bracket are the foundation upon which "the rest of the education system is built upon..." If this foundation is weakened by acts of omission, the entire educational edifice stands the risk of crumbling with dire consequences for the future development of our dear country.

Nutrition is vital for the survival and early development of children. Nutritional experts have determined that iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A deficiencies badly affect the health of our children, particularly those in the rural areas. Malnourished children have a low resistance to infection; they are more likely to die from common childhood ailments. It is important to note that the damage done to children by poor nutrition cannot, in most cases, be reversed later in life. The only way we can prevent such an irreversible damage is to invest in child nutrition. This is a social and moral imperative for those of us who have been entrusted with the weal of our people.

It should be noted at this point that the school feeding programme does not envisage the serving of formal meals such as eba, tuwo, pounded yam or rice to the children. It is mind boggling to even contemplate that option. Our purpose is a feeding programme designed to specifically prevent and correct nutrient deficiencies among pre-school and school-going children. To remedy these deficiencies and free our children from the grips of wasting diseases such as kwashiorkor, experts recommended a nutritional liquid feed that will effectively balance the consumption of staple foods like maize, millet, rice, cassava and other starchy foods with high carbohydrate content with Nutri-Sip. A 250 ml of ultra high temperature treated Nutri-Sip contains 30 trace elements that meet the daily requirements of growing children. This is a very simple nutritional approach to the crippling problems of under-nourishment but it is consistent with similar programmes in at least 61 countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, the United States of America and South Africa. More than 450,000 children in our public schools are to benefit from the scheme.

The liquid feed has tremendous advantages over other forms of feeding. It does not require refrigeration. It is, therefore, suitable for storage and administration in the rural areas. It is also portable and clean. Most importantly, it is healthy because it is a full meal with all the known nutrients added to it.

Nutri-Sip is not produced in Nigeria at the moment. We import it. We sought the permission of Mr. President to exempt it from the list of banned goods and grant us import duty waiver on it. He very graciously granted our request. Under our agreement with Tetra-Pak, Good Hope International Beverages are the contract suppliers of Nutri-Sip. We have so far ordered and paid for ten million units of Nutri-Sip. Out of this, we have taken delivery of 8 million units currently in our stores in Keffi, Lafia and Akwanga from where they are taken by special delivery trucks for distribution to schools in the pilot scheme. We need more storage facilities. We are now renovating warehouses across the state for this purpose.

The school feeding programme is a capital intensive project. It will, certainly, face avoidable problems if it is import-dependent. We believe that local production of the feed supplement is the only guarantee for the survival of the programme. We have already taken steps towards the local production of the feed in line with our objective of fully domesticating the programme. We signed a memorandum of understanding with our technical partners, Tetra-Pak, in November last year for the supply of Nutri-Sip. An important element of the MOU with Tetra-Pak requires that efforts should be made at the earliest possible time to ensure local production of feed, using our local agricultural produce. I am pleased to report to this distinguished audience that we have made tremendous progress in this regard. One of the partners of Tetra-Pak, Solea, based in St Louis in the United States of America conducted laboratory tests of powder samples of millet, maize, sorghum, cocoa and cassava. Its tests showed that cassava, cocoa and yellow maize are suitable raw materials for the formulation of the nutritional feed. The company has now formulated cassava into a basic, flavoured prototype liquid food. We are satisfied with it. We are now taking steps to begin its local production. UNIDO and UNDP have expressed interest in helping us to up grade existing plants locally. We intend to begin local production of the liquid between now and the first quarter of next year.

We welcome the local and foreign entrepreneurs who have shown interest in investing in the local production of the liquid feed. We welcome them as worthy partners in the success of this important programme. The state government will provide investors with the necessary facilities and assistance for a smooth take off their factories.

We are also pleased to note that some state governments have expressed interest in our pilot scheme. We will share our experience with all such states because we do not want to be an island in this programme. We want every state in the federation to join it so that together we can produce generations of healthy children and, consequently, healthy adults.

The international community has shown a keen interest in our pilot scheme. Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, GAIN, Helen Keller International, the African Union, NEPAD and the University of Toronto in Canada, are some of the organisation that have shown considerable interest in the scheme. We welcome all such interests which we hope will be translated into a needed helping hand in the form of financial or technical assistance. We need all the help we can get to ensure the success of the programme now and for all time. We must, at this stage, publicly acknowledge the full technical and technocratic support we received from Tetra-Pak in the pilot scheme. The company has gone far beyond the call of business relationships. It is totally committed to the success of the programme in our state. As soon as we signed a memorandum of understanding with the company, it deployed some of its senior personnel to the project. It seconded a senior programme manager and the sub-Saharan regional director to work with the committee on the implementation strategy of the scheme. We thank them for their support. We also acknowledge with gratitude the moral support of various individuals as well as local and international non-governmental organisations towards the success of the pilot scheme.

The national school feeding programme has enormous potentials for impacting favourably on our agricultural development, employment generation and commerce and thus contribute to poverty reduction in our country. We envisage that when the programme is fully implemented nation-wide, we will be feeding 27 million children annually. We can easily imagine what this means in terms of factory demands for cassava and other agricultural produce as raw materials for the production of the liquid feed. Our farmers would be challenged to produce more of these raw materials. The more they produce, the more they earn. Similarly, the factories that produce the liquid feed will offer employment and training opportunities to our young men and women. The company will contribute to our economy by way of income and other taxes paid to government. We feed our children to develop our country.

The success of a new programme such as this depends on the support of the people. The members of the committee undertook and commendably discharged the responsibility of creating public awareness as well as sensitizing parents, teachers and pupils to the programme. The committee worked through traditional rulers, parents/teachers associations, non-governmental organisations and community-based groups to achieve this objective. We regard the school feeding programme as essentially community based. Government is the facilitator and, if you like, the prime mover but the public itself must be involved ultimately in its funding and management. Parents/teachers associations across the state are showing a keen interest in the programme and have expressed their willingness to contribute to its funding. We believe this is the right public response to the programme. We will continue to encourage individuals and groups to be part of the programme.

As I said earlier, the pilot scheme has a short but eventful history. It took off only in June this year. We began by de-worming the children in the designated schools with Albendazole, a broad spectrum worm expeller, to free them from worms and related intestinal infections. We created a personal health data, such as weight, height and arm circumference for each child at the beginning of the programme. Our monitors will cross check the personal health data of each child at periodic intervals to help us determine how each child is responding to the nutritional feed. Their academic performances will also be periodically assessed to see what effect improved nutrition has on their mental and intellectual development. A strict monitoring of the programme is essential to its success. Our clinical trials have so far shown that the children are responding positively to the programme.

The state government hosted a national stake holders' workshop on the national school feeding programme in Lafia on August 29. It was convened by the federal government to work out a practicable blueprint for the implementation of the programme nation wide. The workshop was attended by experts in various fields. This programme is too important to be left to individual states to implement in their different ways. We do take cognizance of our cultural diversities, including traditional diets. But if we must implement this programme successfully nationwide, there is need for some degree of uniformity in its conception and implementation. This is entirely without prejudice to our diversity. Standardization will check incidence of contamination and food poisoning. We have good reasons to believe that the experts have worked out how the programme can best be implemented throughout the country. As I told the workshop in my opening address, Nasarawa State has shown that the school feeding programme is do-able.

I see no reason why this programme should not succeed nation wide. We have a president who is unequivocally committed to it. Chief Obasanjo is the chairman of the African Union, chairman of the Commonwealth and the ambassador for the school feeding to the United Nations Food Programme. His presence with us here brings with it the attention of the international community to Laminga in particular and Nasarawa State in general. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.

The school feeding programme is a joint responsibility of states and local governments. We have already given it legal backing. The enabling law passed by the sate assembly spells out in clear terms the contributions and the responsibilities of each tier of government to the programme. This is important to ensure that the programme does not become a victim of the whims and caprices of actors in the executive branch of government at state or local government levels.

Mr. President, today, we witness the birth of a new baby. It is your baby. Its birth demonstrates once again that the only magic to social transformation and national development is a worthy idea backed by a good and practicable plan of action and implemented with total commitment. Today, you open a new chapter in your blue book of comprehensive national development. Mr. President, I am now pleased to report that we have carried out your Presidential order to develop the pilot scheme of the national school feeding programme in Nasarawa as a precursor to the national scheme. I congratulate you, Sir. It is now my pleasure to formally invite you to perform the ceremony for which we are gathered here – the launching of the national school feeding programme.

Mr. President, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for honouring us with your presence.