ABU to feed students

In a bid to support students to keep them attentive in classes and stay healthy by eating balanced diets, Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, Professor Ibrahim Garba says the institution is putting in place a programme to subsidise the feeding plan of students of the institution.
He lamented that many students skip breakfast because they can’t afford it, and this affects their wellbeing and academic performance.
He said in an interview over the weekend, that, “every higher institution in the world has some form of catering that ensures students have balanced diet at an affordable price. That was what we enjoyed during our own time and somehow it stopped, over the years. Does it mean that what we enjoyed during our own time, we deprive our own children? The students now hardly get balanced diet. I teach students and see most of them sleep in the morning during the first lesson because they haven’t taken breakfast. They do not concentrate; and in learning if you miss the morning period, you miss a lot.”
“Many students cannot afford breakfast which they see as luxury. They call it 0-1-0 which means they will skip breakfast and dinner. Some do not eat enough dinner and in the morning they skip breakfast.
“How do you expect a child at that age to persevere and learn? Even during our time, it was not that the country had unlimited amount of money, but government found it very important to offer subsidy for students’ meals. Now, they said the population has increased but the resources have also increased tremendously. If you do the calculations, in the 1970s and early ‘80s it took 50 kobo per day to feed a student which was equivalent to a dollar.
“Today, the dollar is about N200 which you can use to feed a student. If the student go to any eatery with N200, it might not be sufficient for him. If you require N200 to feed a student per meal, you don’t need N200 times ten to feed ten students. It is an idea we just abandoned, nobody was thinking about it at all. Our dining halls are there locked up. The people you invited to do catering jobs in the university were not subjected to any regulation because you can’t do that.

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So, what we are saying is that we must think about students’ feeding and in which ever form it comes, there must be subsidy. ABU has graduated nearly 800,000 people in Nigeria and they constitute the alumni of the university. People who studied abroad will tell you that every year; you must contribute to your university.”
According to him, “the ABU alumni association is starting an online project to meet all the alumnus to contribute to a N50 billion fund.
“If you translate how much each alumnus will contribute, it isn’t too much and people are willing. There is sufficient number of philanthropists in the society that would want to contribute to feeding students out of public good. We all go on Hajj and we see the Arabs feeding millions of people. So, we are going to tap into the alumni fund to feed the students.

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