This week, the office of the Vice President announced the release of over N375 million to feed a total of 677, 476 primary school pupils in five states in continuation of the National School Feeding initiative introduced by the Federal Government.

The APC had promised to launch this initiative during the 2015 campaign that saw the election of President Buhari and Professor Osinbajo into Aso Rock. The administration proceeded to launch the programme in June last year with a promise to reach about 5.5m Nigerians in the first year of its operation. The programme, when fully realised, will provide a nutritious hot meal a day to over 24 million primary school children by the end of 2020.

Just four days after the launch, on the 13th of June, 2016, in unsurprising fashion, predicted the failure of the programme.  The Federal government had requested counterpart funding from each State for up to 40 percent.

It was in his response to this requirement that the Ekiti State Governor doomed the scheme to fail. In his words:

“Apart from the fact that Ekiti State lacked the financial wherewithal to provide counterpart fund for such a programme, it is the duty of President Muhammadu Buhari and his APC that won election on the basis of their promise to give free meal to school pupils to fulfill the promise without placing any burden on other tiers of government. Nigerians should come to term with the reality that the federal government is already looking for a ready alibi for the impending failure of the school feeding programme. The federal government knows that 80 per cent of the States lack the financial will to be able to contribute the 40 per cent counterpart fund for the programme and the time the programme eventually fails, Nigerians will be told that it failed because States did not key into it.”

With the seemingly unwavering determination with which the Federal Government has now pushed the programme to at least five States within the first month since the programme’s launch, we are now wondering if Governor Fayose still thinks this is a programme set up to fail.