Some food vendors under the federal government Home Grown School Feeding Programme in Kaura and Zangon Kataf local government areas of Kaduna state have lamented over consistent inadequacy eggs supplied for pupils under the programme.
In the menu, they said, primary one to three pupil get moi moi on Monday, rice and beans on Tuesday, beans on Wednesday, rice and egg on Thursday and biscuit and juice on Friday.
But the vendors told News Agency of Nigeria Thursday that the eggs were always in short supply, sometimes below 50 per cent.
They called on the federal government to address the problem with the supply chain to ensure that adequate quantity was supplied.
One of the food vendors, Mrs Rifkatu Yashim, who supplies food to LEA Primary School B, Unguwan Rimi, said although every child was supposed to get an egg on Thursdays, most often the eggs do not go round the pupils because of the shortage in the number supplied.
“In fact, the last eggs we got before the school went on break was 16 pieces for over 225 pupils in the school, and this has been going on for a while; sometimes we get 25 eggs and sometimes 20.
“So, what we do is to give one egg to a child and when we get another supply the following week, we give to those that did not get the previous week,” she said.
Another vendor, Mrs. Alice Levi, who feeds some of the pupils at LGEA Angwan Keta Primary School, Tum, Kaura LGA, said: “I feed 50 pupils but usually get less than the required number.
“The situation is so bad that a week before schools went on vacation, we were given just 40 pieces of eggs to give to about 200 pupils in primary one to three.”
In his reaction, Mr Bature Bonat, the School-Based Management Committee Chairman, Kaura LGA, confirmed the development and described it as ‘very unfortunate’.
Bonat told NAN that the issue of eggs’ supply has remained a very big challenge to the implementation of the school feeding programme.
“We are expected to get about 500 crates of eggs for the entire schools in the LGA, but for a very long time the supply kept decreasing to as low as 180 crates.
“In fact, I collected the supply for the LGA a week before schools went on vacation and it was 300 crates instead of the required 500 crates.
“I reported to the Local Government Education Secretary (ES), but nobody seems to know where the shortage is coming from.
“Sometimes the suppliers claimed that they do not know the exact number of pupils enrolled in the programme in the LGA,” he added.
However, the supplier, Mr Eric Osademe, told NAN that he always supplied the quantity based on the amount he received from the state’s Egg Aggregator.
Osademe, who is the Public Relations Officer, Poultry Association of Nigeria (PAN) Kaduna state chapter, said: “What I am asked to supply is what I supplied and is usually 400 crates.
“It is only one time that I supplied 200 crates to the LGA because we were asked to supply half of what we usually supply to the various LGAs across the state.”
