How a working democracy can ensure state accountability in school feeding programme failures

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the National School Nutrition Scheme (NSNP), a crucial poverty alleviation mechanism, was suspended. A 2020 court judgment held that the suspension infringed several children’s rights because it increased child hunger and exacerbated food insecurity in poor households. In recent weeks, the NSNP has been floundering in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and the Eastern Cape. However, given the heightened awareness of the crucial role of the NSNP, civil society, the media and even the scrutiny by the national and provincial legislatures are ensuring there is pressure on the state to account for the most recent system failures. 

Initiated in 1994, the NSNP is a state-funded feeding scheme designed to help our most vulnerable children by providing nutritious school meals to pupils in quintile 1 to 3 public schools – the poorest 60% of schools in our country – as well as to certain quintile 4 and 5 schools. Currently, the NSNP provides meals to about 9.6 million pupils across South Africa and is deservingly hailed as one of the state’s most effective “pro-poor” initiatives implemented to achieve substantive equality in schools by alleviating hunger. 

Studies worldwide illustrate that school feeding programmes can also improve school enrolment, learner performance and enhance learners’ cognitive abilities by providing better nutrition. Well-nourished children simply learn better and the NSNP plays a critical role as it supplements the nutrition of half of all children in the country. 

In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the NSNP came to a grinding halt when school meals were no longer offered as children studied remotely, leaving millions hungry at home. In response, public interest organisations SECTION27, Equal Education, the Equal Education Law Centre, together with the school governing bodies of Vhulaudzi Secondary School and Mashao High School, took the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and eight members of the executive council (MECs) to court for their failure to provide school meals. In its judgment, the court held that both the minister of basic education and MECs have a constitutional and statutory duty to provide basic nutrition in terms of section 28(1)(c) and section 29(1)(a) of the Constitution, which protects children’s rights to basic nutrition and basic education respectively. The court therefore affirmed that the NSNP is an essential component of these rights and placed the responsibility to provide meals to learners every school day solely at the feet of the DBE and its provincial departments.

These entities are now floundering in this obligation in the two provinces. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: KZN schools send hungry pupils home as National School Nutrition Programme fails to deliver

In KZN, learners returned to school to begin the second semester, only to be left hungry as about 500 schools across the province were not able to properly deliver meals after the Easter break. The fiasco stems from the KZN department of education’s (KZN DoE) recent decision to centralise the procurement of goods needed for the provision of NSNP meals. 

In January 2023, the KZN DoE awarded a tender to Pacina Retail (PTY) Ltd, which was appointed to be the sole supplier of goods for the school meal programme in the province and would also be responsible for delivering pre-packaged goods at particular collection points. This was a marked departure from the department’s previous procurement system, which used a range of individual service providers that procured goods from retailers, warehouses and cash-and-carries, and supplied these to individual schools. When Pacina Retail failed to deliver any goods on the first day of the second school term, it marked the start of two disastrous weeks of poor service delivery, culminating in the withdrawal of Pacina Retail as a service provider on 26 April 2023.

Since then, and in response to a public outcry, the KZN DoE has taken measures to ensure the resumption of daily meals at schools. In a meeting held by the national Portfolio Committee on Basic Education on 2 May 2023, the KZN DoE assured that it had returned to its previous method of procurement and that the majority of schools were now able to provide an NSNP meal to learners.

In the wake of this saga, reports of the KZN DoE’s failure to provide NSNP meals were found on online and TV news platforms, radio shows, Facebook and Twitter, with statements emanating from civil society as well as entities such as the KZN Service Providers Forum, teachers’ unions, the National Association of School Governing Bodies in KZN, the KZN Nutrition Business Forum and political parties. Local municipalities, such as Umngeni and uMlalazi, also reported the challenges on their Facebook pages and intervened to assist schools with meals. SECTION27 had also written to the DBE requesting information on the reasons for the failure to deliver the NSNP to KZN schools.

Importantly, the KZN DoE’s failure also attracted parliamentary attention and prompted the KZN legislature’s education portfolio committee to conduct unannounced oversight visits to schools in different education districts to determine whether the NSNP had resumed.  

It is imperative that the different structures call for a national investigation into the dysfunctional provisioning of the NSNP.

Persisting problem