Eastern Cape SACP Calls For Action To Remove Feeding Scheme from Private Companies

25 July 2003

The Eastern Cape Province of the South African Communist Party (SACP) is
pleased that the school feeding programme seems to be back on track in the
Eastern Cape.

The SACP is very critical of the private companies which have been holding these school children to ransom simply because they want to ensure that they get their slice of profit first before the nutrition needs of school children. This is immoral. The SACP calls on these companies to be compassionate and to ensure that they do not use their power and profit interests at the expense of children from poor and working class communities. If these companies continue with this behaviour in the future, the SACP will not hesitate to call on and mobilise poor and working class communities to take direct action against these companies.

The SACP also calls on the Eastern Cape government to ensure that the payment of these private companies is not delayed now and in the future. This will go to the heart of ensuring that service delivery is improved and that the Eastern Cape government implements Batho Pele in practice.

Beyond this immediate crisis, the SACP believes that the school feeding programme must be taken away from private companies and must not be subjected to the logic of profit maximisation. Therefore the SACP calls for a fundamental review to ensure that service providers for the school feeding scheme are drawn from community-owned enterprises which are co-operatives. These community-based co-operative enterprises will not be driven by profit as the private companies are. They will be drawn from members of the community and they will be able to gorw local economies. Currently this is not the case. Instead private companies from outside local communities benefit from the scheme without significant community reinvestment -essentially the scheme is about transferring resources from the state to the rich instead of to the poor.

The SACP calls on the Eastern Cape government to also provide resources for the training of these co-operatives. Finally, the SACP calls on communities to use their power to mobilise themselves in co-operatives and to call for improvement in the school feeding programme.

CONTACT

Mandla Makhuphula

Eastern Cape Provincial Secretary

South African Communist Party

Tel - 040 635 0463; Cell - 084 446 7918

Email - sacpec@sn.apc.org