Watery Soup and hardened cotton like rice balls served under School Feeding Programme

School children in Oshumasi Anglican Basic School have rejected the meal prepared and served in the school under the Ghana School Feeding Programme due to the poor quality and unappetizing meal served by the cook.

In the said video, a soup supposed to be a groundnut soup prepared for the Oshumasi Anglican Basic School looks poorly prepared and watery which may lack the needed nutrients the pupils need should they eat it.  The soup could pass for junk food which is not good enough to be eaten by school children.

It is sad that, at a time that government is looking at revolutionizing the feeding program, such videos pop up to reveal that, we are not yet ready for the revolution.

As if this was not enough, the supposed rice balls cooked for the children, Ghana’s future leaders also looked like improperly prepared and unattractive.

The combination of the watery “concoction” soup and the rice balls which looked like white tuffs of hardened cotton balls made the pupils and teachers of the school lose their appetite for the day’s meal. The children of the school refused to eat the food since they could not even drink the so-called groundnut soup.

The School Feeding Program initiated by the New Patriotic Party under the Kuffour administration has received negative publicity via a video trending on social media in which the teachers of a school are making a passionate appeal to the authorities to do something about the poor food quality.

One would expect that the school feeding program would have been in its best state by now after several years of rolling out the program but this is not the case.

Currently, government records show that over 2.8 million pupils located in 9,495 deprived schools are benefiting from the programme whiles the programme has also employed more than 9,700 caterers and another 19,400 cooks to serve hot, well-prepared food that is nutritious and meets the health needs of our children in basic schools across the country. Are we serving the children these horrible meals because they are said to be in deprived schools or we are serving mother Ghana and performing our duties as cooks employed for the job?

Government has also made funds available for the smooth running of the program per a publication newsghana24 sighted on www.modernghana.com which indicated funding has been released for the feeding needs for the pupils.

One plan that the government intends to roll out from June 2019 is to take cooks and caterers through what it calls intensive training and capacity building which will go a long way to sharpen their cooking skills of the cooks and caterers. But one needs to ask, are the cooks and caterers professionally trained or mere political appointed persons.

The government may be blamed for some of the challenges facing the programme however, cooks and supervisors or feeding program officials must receive the greater portion of the bashing for failing to deal with bottlenecks relating to poor quality of meals over the years.

There have been complaints that some cooks cut back on the quantities of ingredients they use, the quality of the ingredients and use all manner of means to increase the quality of the food to be served each day with little or no concern for quality all in an attempt to probably make enough profit.

We have to sit up as a nation and begin to do things right from the scratch devoid of politics and mediocre. This trending video is a big insult to the entire nation. Ghana must sit up.