Stop bad service

We all assumed that the austerity measures imposed by national treasury on the provincial department of education would bring permanent solutions to challenges such as dodgy service providers such as the ones who failed to deliver books to Limpopo schools, but the problem has even exacerbated to school nutrition feeding scheme programmes, which gave learners in the Sekhukhune district poisonous lunches earlier in the year.

The Limpopo department of education, provincial treasury, Limpopo department of health and director-general at the office of the premier should sit down and strategise to improve service delivery systems in the province to avoid the further poisoning of school children.

A provincial service providers’ conference should be held to engage all service providers and come up with a mandate on how to improve their services. It is embarrassing that when problems that could have been avoided keep on arising and all the provincial department of education does is run to the national department of basic education to seek solutions instead of creating solutions themselves.

The problem of the provincial government is that they react to problems instead of preventing them. The provincial government does not even diagnose the problem to find out the cause of the problem.

Diagnosing the problem is the work that should be provided by the provincial planning team.

Instead of dealing with the root cause of the problem head on, they react to it with punitive measures like cancelling contracts of service providers.

Before getting a tender to feed children at schools, a service provider should first obtain a certificate from the department of health that they have met all the standards of serving healthy nutritional food.

The service providers should be workshopped about the required accepted standards of serving food in schools prior to awarding them this contracts.

After being appointed, the provincial inspectors of education and treasury should come back to monitor the service providers, the same applies to the school governing bodies and the principals to demand weekly or monthly reports from service providers.

This will identify the number of children they are feeding at schools, the challenges they meet everyday so that they can be dealt with proactively.

The provincial treasury should go out to negotiate better prices with the food manufacturers.

To avoid further poisoning, the province should empower the unemployed young women from the villages where those schools are based by giving them these projects to serve school nutrition programme.

It is very opportunistic of the forum of Limpopo entrepreneurs to have that entitlement behaviour that the tenders should be given to them.

It is wrong.

They should come up with solid proposals that will help cut costs, and at the same time deliver better services.

They should not just sit down like hungry vultures and wait for some service provider to make a mistake and suddenly appear out of nowhere to demand that tenders should be given to them.

Mpholosane Sydney Modiba

Concerned citizen