Premier promises enough food supply in KZN schools before end of this week
|Published
Durban — KwaZulu-Natal Premier Nomusa-Dube and members of the executive council conducted an oversight visit to monitor the roll out of the National School Nutrition Programme at various schools in the Pinetown District on Tuesday.
This comes after many schools were left without food, and some received rotten food after schools reopened in KZN last month.
The visit assessed the state of readiness in the implementation of the feeding programme as thousands of pupils returned to school this week after the extended weekend.
Dube-Ncube said the government has developed a monitoring and reporting tool which would be used by the teams on the ground to collate and feed information to a central point in real-time to ensure quick analysis of the situation and rapid interventions where necessary.
“We have decided that we must go and visit the schools in various districts in our province together with the MECs to monitor the food-nutrition programme. We want to make sure that we get first-hand information on what is going on,” she said.
“The main purpose is to ensure that children are fed nutritious food and that there is enough quantities for all the children as per the government policies of ensuring that kids are supported with nutrition so that even if kids are coming from poor families, they be able to concentrate.”
Dube-Ncube said the government would continue with its investigation to establish what went wrong with Pacina Retail, which was tasked to deliver food to the province’s schools.
“As far as we know, the contractors are not continuing with the tender because their communication last week conceded that they failed to deliver what was expected… The Department of Education had written a formal letter to them indicating that they wish to terminate the agreement and, till then, we will be working on the terms of those terminations,” Dube-Ncube said.
“Our legal teams have established various streams to work on this matter. We have a finance working stream, communications, legal and evaluating teams and all these teams are working towards ensuring that everyone of these boxes are ticked,” she added.
Dube-Ncube said the legal team was working on the legalities of the contract. They would not only be looking at the termination of the contract, but also whether it was breached.
She said kids were fed enough food on Tuesday, and the government would ensure that by the end of this week, all schools in KZN have more than enough food supply.
“For now, there is not enough food to last the whole week, but there is a programme in the Education Department that makes the schools not get too much of supplies because of theft and all other things that happened,” Dube Ncube said.
“Those are things that we are looking at, but in the reports we are compiling, we will then be able to see the challenges and also find out how do we ensure that we immediately deal with those challenges, but in certain schools we have already heard there was a shortage of supplies and their services have gone to get more supplies,” said Dube-Ncube.
KwaZulu-Natal DA spokesperson on Education, Imran Keeka, said the sudden decision by Pacina leaves many unanswered questions.
“The withdrawal by the company must also not stop any inquiry by the Special Investigating Unit into how this tender was awarded. Above all, there must be accountability for what ensued and those found culpable must face the might of the law.
“With the confirmation of the departure of this company, KZN’s Department of Education will have to scramble to fill the gap. (It) may choose to revert to previous suppliers, and the DA expects MEC Mbali Frazer to come clean over this,” said Keeka
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