‘School Feeding Programme caterers not on strike’
The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) has discredited publications in sections of the media that caterers across the country working for the programme are on strike.
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Even though it admitted that it owed the caterers, the GSFP said it was untrue that they were on strike.
“Such stories are only a figment of the imagination of sections of the media and that cannot be true in any way,” it said.
The Public Relations Officer of the GSFP, Mr Siiba Alfa, made the denial in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday.
In the past two days, there have been reports in sections of the media that caterers under the GSFP have declared an indefinite strike as a result of the non-payment of money owed them.
Payments
Mr Alfa said the secretariat released GH¢26 million on January 6, 2016 for the payment of the services rendered by the caterers in the last term of the 2014/2015 academic year.
Even though he could not give details of GSFP’s indebtedness to the caterers, he said it had a few days of arrears to clear.
Dispute
He said at the moment the bone of contention between the GSFP and the caterers was the enrolment figures obtained from the Ghana Education Service (GES).
He said the caterers disputed the GES figures, contending that they did not tally with the number of pupils they (caterers) fed.
In view of that, Mr Alfa said, the caterers had been advised to liaise with the various headteachers and submit their figures for any anomalies to be rectified.
Some caterers who had gone to register their concerns at the time the Daily Graphic visited the national office of the GSFP also denied being on strike.
They, however, said that they did not have money to buy items to cook for the schoolchildren and were at the secretariat to make that, as well as other concerns, known.
The caterers, who wanted to remain anonymous, said it was unfair for the GSFP to ask them to liaise with headteachers to compile the list of pupils they catered for.
“Is it not rather the responsibility of the secretariat to liaise with us and the head teachers in order to come up with the correct figures?” one of them quizzed.
Mode of payment
They also expressed dissatisfaction with the electronic payment system that had been adopted, complaining that income tax and the operators’ deductions were made before they received their money, which one angry caterer described as meagre.