Upper East Regional Coordinator of the School Feeding Programme, Georgina Ayamba is fighting off assertions that recruitment under the programme has been politicised.
Madam Ayamba argued that although most of the caterers are known members of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), it cannot be the case that recruitment into the programme is based on party lines since there are rigorous processes the assemblies follow in engaging caterers on behalf of the Ministry of Gender to run the programme in beneficiary schools.
She stated that there are several other caterers working under the programme who are not members of the NPP hence, such assertions are baseless.
“You may say one particular party, the NPP caterers are dominating, but we cannot just say it’s only NPP caterers or NPP people who are there. Because we have other people who are not, they maybe sympathizers of NPP but they’re not card bearing members of NPP and they’re caterers”.
She added “The way caterers are engaged, they go through a series of interviews at the assembly and I know you’ll agree with me that it’s not only NPP people who are heading the assembly. Apart from the DCE, it’s not all the staff there that are NPP people”.
The School Feeding Programme, which was instituted in 2005 to increase enrolment and cater for the nutritional needs of children at the basic school level while ensuring that they enjoy their basic right to education regardless of their backgrounds, is suffering due to extreme partisanship.
Recruitment into the programme has been heavily politicised as each of the two main political parties replaces caterers with its members whenever power switches.
This has resulted in inefficiency and corruption in the management of the programme, defeating the purposes for which the programme was put in place.
But Madam Ayamba, who is also the Upper East Regional Women’s Organizer of the governing party, said such assertions are due to lack of understanding of how the programme is run.
