FOR many political office-holders, delivering on promises made upon occupying the golden stool is not only an arduous task, it determines the operations of the time-tested principle of recall. Once when an office-holder forgets or neglects the pact he made with the electorate, amnesia results consequent upon which the people determine their destinies by their voting power.

A Yoruba maxim says “when a man wakes up hungry early in the morning, under the pangs of an unsparing empty stomach, approaches a food seller to buy food on credit, he would appeal to all earthly authorities to bear him witness that he would pay before the setting of the sun.” Hunger is an essential part of nature. It hastens a man’s appetite both for food and other great things of life. Hunger can be of the stomach or of the mind depending on the state of needs.

My first contact with the pernicious acts of hunger was during my reading of “The Reluctant Rebel” written by Lt. Fola Oyewole on the Nigerian Civil War. The Army Officer who was initially arrested as part of the group that planned and hatched “Operation Damisa” the January 15, 1966 putsch was detained in the Eastern part of Nigeria at the outbreak of the civil war. He was forced to fight on the Biafran side against his will and under Colonel Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu.

Things were moving fine until the arrest, trial and execution by firing squad of that highly cerebral Colonel Victor Banjo alongside Majors Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Alelenwa and Agbam in Enugu. Oyewole alongside others like Major Wale Ademoyega who were Yoruba officers fighting on Biafran side were consequently withdrawn from the war front, returned to prison and sentenced to hunger that went for days. Oyewole initially did not realise the sentence until a Biafran prison warder told him to “manage,” a euphemism which he was later to learn meant that he had to be without food in detention.

Speaking about hunger, it was Mother Theresa who, while calling attention of the world community to the plight of the poor in Calcultta, India, insisted that the poor should no longer be neglected, abandoned and despised as the wealthy are wont to do. The nun pleaded that hunger had many dimensions and had remained, since history, mankind’s long-term enemy. Hunger is the enemy of knowledge. It is the enemy of education. It is also the foe of civilization. A hungry man can neither take nor understand instructions.

What Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the unstoppable Governor of the State of Osun is doing with providing free, daily meals to primary school pupils in the state’s public primary school classes one to four is very instructive. For seven-and-half years, the preceding PDP administration led by Brigadier Olagunsoye Oyinlola (Rtd) played politics and monkeyed around with the school meals project. Feeding less than 10,000 pupils across the state at a cost of N3 million per school day, our people got the short end of the stick, a pure, raw deal to put it mildly.

Today, Governor Aregbesola has turned around the concept and made it a reality by providing meals freely to 254,000 pupils in Primary One to Four in all public schools across the state. To actualise this, the employment generating capacity of the scheme was enhanced as 3,000 caterers were empowered, trained and kitted to cook sumptuous meals for the children.

The project is developing on an impactful trend as poultry farmers across the state whose pens had hitherto gone empty were re-stocked to produce broilers at twelve weeks to service the O-Meal scheme. Every week since the Aregbesola administration began the O-Meal (School Feeding) programme, the state has been able to locally source 15,000 whole chickens from local poultry farmers in Osun who rear the broilers and sell directly to the O-meal officials to be used in preparing food for the primary school pupils. Things have never been so bright for poultry farmers in the State of Osun as they are also producing 254,000 eggs weekly which the government had been sourcing to service the pupils.

In the same breadth, catfish farmers are already producing 400 tonnes of catfish (clarias gariepinus) which the state has been using to serve the pupils under the O-Meal scheme just as 35 heads of cattle are slaughtered weekly to produce beef for the children.

Observers have been wondering why Governor Aregbesola has gone this whole length to feed the children of ordinary members of the society who attend public primary schools in the State of Osun. The reason is not far-fetched. Enrolment figures jumped geometrically since the inception of the programme. Juju maestro, Evangelist Ebenezer Obey sang that “when food is no longer in the contentions of the poor, the bag of poverty is exhausted”.

The imperishable words of the former President Dwight D. Eisenhower who told a stunned world during the maddening armed race that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed” clearly comes to mind. Whatever assets the society acquires without thinking of what will happen to our children and their future will constitute a worthless and crass liability against the future.

Whatever a society does that leaves the youthful and endangered generation behind will not last and is doomed to fail. Good food for our pupils in public primary schools will enhance their learning capacity and capabilities, guarantee the society against the scourge of truancy, achieve improved literacy rate, contribute to national manpower development, improve productivity, reduce the burden of dependency ratio, assure improved autonomous savings buy households, ease the challenges of learning while also assuring that the pupils develop resistance to and immunity from debility and consequent mortality.

Governor Aregbesola ought to be commended for seizing the initiative and turning the programme which suffered notorious abuse and obtuse manipulations under the last PDP administration into a worthy achievement for which others now go green with envy. Attempts made to run it down have been largely unsuccessful.

O-Meal is another first and will continue to serve the interest of the masses of our people to the shame of those who exploited them for 90 reckless months of wanton ravage and plundering that shall never come this way again.

Osun pupils in public elementary schools who now enjoy O-Meals as one of the benefits of a government voted for by their parents are relishing the joy of democracy, good governance and government unusual. Things cannot be the same as they were anymore. Aregbesola has demonstrated his love for the people by the O-Meal scheme to which he has committed huge public resources for the benefit of members of the public. That, to me, is good governance as opposed to self-aggrandizement of the past.

While seeking the people’s mandate in 2007, Aregbesola unfolded his Six-Point Integral Action Plan one of which was Banishing Hunger. He has, apart from Osun Rural Enterprise and Agricultural Programme (OREAP), taken another bold step to lock the doors of our children’s stomach against hunger through the O-Meal scheme.

O-Meal is a demonstration of Aregbesola’s love for the people. He has not and can never abandon them. He has moved along with them in the task of making Osun the best place on earth to live. And the people are saying “YES!”

School children are now eager to learn. Ivan Pavlov, the Russian Psychologist while teaching the world his discovery about Operant Conditioning concluded that human beings have the tendency of going to a place where their desires are met. Enrolment in Osun public schools are mounting. The teachers are motivated to teach while the pupils are eager to learn. Thanks to visionary leadership provided by Ogbeni Aregbesola against all odds.


Source; http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=123304:fayemiwo-o-meal-as-osun-sucker-punch-against-child-hunger&catid=38:columnists&Itemid=615