The Chief Executive Officer of the National Food Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO), George Abradu-Otoo, has moved to clear the air over what he described as a misconception in the media about a lingering food shortage in Ghana’s senior high schools — a controversy that rattled the country after CHASS threatened to shut down schools over the crisis.
The Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) had warned that senior high schools may be compelled to close down if the government does not provide financial support for the continuous feeding of students under the Free Senior High School programme.
Speaking during an engagement with school heads as part of a two-day working visit to assess food security and timely supply to schools in the Upper East Region, Abradu-Otoo clarified that “The complaints making the rounds in the media are specifically about perishable food items, which fall outside NAFCO’s mandate to supply”.
According to him, government policy empowers school heads to purchase perishable items independently for students’ consumption, with the understanding that government will reimburse them at a later date. However, he revealed that the reimbursement has been in arrears for some months, and it is this delay — not any failure on NAFCO’s part to supply food — that has been generating the controversy.
He assured that NAFCO has been consistent in fulfilling its core mandate of supplying non-perishable food items to senior high schools, and called for a clearer public understanding of the distinction between what NAFCO supplies and what falls under the schools’ own procurement responsibility.
