Addressing world leaders at the recently concluded G20 summit in Brazil, President Tinubu acknowledged that there are growing socio-economic problems in Nigeria that his administration has been unable to resolve.
President Bola Tinubu has stated that Nigeria has many problems, including the challenge of providing food for pupils to allow them concentrate in class.
Then President Muhammadu Buhari had launched the National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) in Nigeria to provide free meals for children in public primary schools. But the initiative was marred by corruption and irregularities, leading to the suspension of the programme.
In 2020, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) shocked Nigerians with the revelation that it had traced to private accounts N2.67 billion which was earmarked for the school feeding programme.
The programme was executed by the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, supervised by Sadiya Umar Farouk, who was once quoted as saying that her ministry spent N600 billion on feeding school children during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Addressing world leaders at the recently concluded G20 summit in Brazil, President Tinubu acknowledged that there are growing socio-economic problems in Nigeria that his administration has been unable to resolve.
He said insecurity and climate problems are major bane to food production in the country.
He said: “I am from Nigeria. It's better to give it a true picture of what is going on. In Africa, we have terrorism challenges, insecurity challenges, that is preventing farmers to even go to their farm. We have problems in Sudan, displacing people.
“We have problem of climate change, flooding, destroying crops, and we have problems of protectionism. We have problems. It's very important to make it clear and louder here. We have problems of out-of-school children. We have problem of funding free education or give our children one meal a day in a classroom to even make them pay attention to schooling.”