By Julius Peter Ochen
It’s a sunny Saturday morning, 15th day of December 2063. I am presenting a lecture on African traditional education at Gulu University. My phone rings. It’s Franco, an elderly Uganda’s Ambassador to Jordan. “My old friend” he started. “The country has gone to the dogs”. I am quiet. “The President has ascended to the Bill. There are no more public schools, learning centres and health facilities in Uganda,” He dropped the news. I paused fleetingly. This was after the President had ascended to numerous disgusting grimy horrifying Bills including Assisted Suicide Bill (2058) – permission to die with professionals’ assistance. Right to be Forgotten Bill (2060) – have all information about you erased as if you never ever lived on earth. The Last Sex Bill (2060) – man has the right to have the last sex with his dead wife before it’s buried.
It all started in the running up of Parliament’s second recess of 2061, when Lugazi City West legislator, Hon. Zirimenya Zzikosoka moved a motion seeking leave of Parliament to present a private member bill to discharge government off management of all public schools and learning centres, arguing that declining learning and adaptation in the country was due to irreparable inefficiency in institutional management by government. That government responsibility in education should sojourn at developing curriculums and providing regulatory services. Adding that strong school inspection departments should rather be established and facilitated at sub county level to manage education in the country. He also presented how much the government would save by allowing the private sector to provide learnings. Parliament found it fair and just. Hon Zziri’s proposed Bill was however quickly picked up by the Cabinet, which added health care service delivery to the list of services to be privatized.
I rang Franco back after 10 minutes. “The country is finally in the hands of generations UNICEF worried about in their 2017 report: children with incomplete developed brains. The generations have now come of age. They have elected their own President and Parliament.” I quickly referred him to an artifact I wrote 40 years ago arguing that school feeding program is now an emergency. Thanks to google, it doesn’t forget.
These and many more bad governance decisions may still find us alive, and we will have to take responsibility for failure to act, when we could.
In 1979, Kenya launched a national school feeding program that would provide a daily ratio of 150 grams of cereal, 40 grams of pulses, 5 grams of oil and 2 grams of salt per child per day. This was intended to bridge nutritional gaps, especially proteins, a critical requirement for growth and development of brains during the first 10 formative years of children. Several other national policies, action plans and strategies were vigorously adopted to reinforce the national school feeding program over the years, amongst others includes The National Food Nutrition Security Policy (2011) and The National Nutrition Action Plan (2012-2017). To-date, Kenya is providing a school feeding program to more than 4 million learners on a $40M budget. No wonder, Save the Children regional report (2015) revealed that Ugandan doctors are not any better than Kenyan nurses. The difference is in the level of mental development due to access to dietary feedings.
Back home, the Uganda Education Act 2008, gave the responsibility of ensuring that children received appropriate feedings while at school to parents and guardians who had already failed. All attempts to place a portion of that responsibility on the government botched. Even when UNICEF reported in 2017 that malnutrition threatens to destroy a generation of children in Uganda, – more than one third of all young children – 2.4 million – are stunted physically and mentally, the government remained unbothered. Damage caused by stunting is irreversible.
The number must have now grown to 6 million children and some of them are now voters and leaders. In 20 years’ time, they will determine who will lead Uganda if not themselves. They will be teachers to our children or our own doctors, engineers, drivers, politicians and all the other positions that will ensure we pay for our negligence. Some will marry our daughters, so that the problem is delivered to our households.
Even the WFP (2020) School Feeding Strategy to deliver an integrated package of health and nutrition services through multi-sectoral and multi-actorial responses has not received required support from the government. This was after several policies, strategies and action plans such as National Orphans and other vulnerable children policy, the School Health Policy, the draft School Feeding Policy Guidelines etc did not attract funding from the consolidated fund.
We either act now or act now.
The author is a free-lance free thinker public policy analyst.
@OchenJP