The Upper East Regional Communications Director of the governing New Patriotic Party, Peter Ayinbisah, has dismissed growing concerns by parents of senior high school students that there are shortages of foodstuffs in the various senior high schools in the country.
Earlier this week, the National Council of Parent-Teacher Associations released a statement detailing numerous challenges bedeviling pre-tertiary schools, including a shortage of foodstuffs in Senior High Schools.
Commenting on the issue on the Daybreak Upper East Show, Mr. Ayinbisah said there is enough foodstuff in store to feed the students.
According to him, while there may not be many varieties of foodstuffs, schools have enough food to feed the students.
He said, “If you come to talk about the food situation in the secondary schools, the stuffs that we do not have in the schools and the centers include sugar, sardines, and mackerel. These three items are not available in this region. The supply of food to the schools has been designed to the extent that, for convenience, every region, they have created their centers. In the Bawku area, it’s Zebilla Senior High School that is their center; if you come to the central region, it’s BOGISS; you go to the west, it’s NAVASCO. Go to the centers and check whether we have food or we don’t have food. We have plenty of oil sitting in schools today. It might not be up to the eighteen food items admittedly, but we have what we need to be able to feed the students. Because I have witnessed the supply of some food items, maize, beans, groundnut, oil, etc. The practice is that it’s not possible to have all the eighteen items at a point.”
However, the Regional Communications Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress, Jonathan Abdullah Salifu, disagrees with the position of Mr. Ayinbisah, stating that in some schools, students are compelled to eat a single variety of food consecutively for some number of days.
He said, “BIGBOSS, where my brother Peter is working as a bursar, the students have almost always been fed with rice, beans, and jollof for a very long time because that is what they have in store. You have heard parents on the radio express how their children have been fed. They have to support their children with food almost every week. This is not the kind of system we want.”
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Samuel Adagom|Bolgatanga|
