# Introduction ducation, according to Sen cited in Elijah and Frederick (2015) the only way to build a nation is to provide quality and adequate educational infrastructure for its youth. It is through education that lives and people are shaped to become future political leaders, scientists, economics, artists and thinkers. Education in its general sense is a form learning in which knowledge, skills, and habits of a group of people are transferred from one generation to the next through teaching, training, and research. Education particularly basic education makes an important contribution to alleviating human suffering by improving people ability to take advantage of the opportunities that can improve their well-being (Economic Recovery Strategy 20-03-2007 in Ministry of Education, 2008). This initiative can easily be struck by poverty. Active participation in education by the children from families struck b y abject poverty is affected especially of the family cannot afford to provide food to the children. It is in view of the above that Governor Mallam Nasiru El-Rufa'I listed when the flagged it off at the Aliyu Makama Local Government Education Authority (LEA) Primary School, Barnawa were quite impressive. He said, the policy is aimed at boosting pupil's nutrition and health and encourage school attendance so that every child can have nice years of free, decent basic education no matter the income level of their parent. He further posited that the policy will also create 17,000 jobs for caterers plus thousands of their assistants; save a lot of time and money for parents; boost demand for food iteams; empower women food vendors; import new skills; established higher standards of hygiene and provide extra income to thousands (Mahmud, 2016). No doubt, the School Feeding Policy (SFP) can be used to address temporary hunger to make a huge contribution in the improvement in attendance and school achievement especially for children who do not have anything to eat before going to school, result to difficulty in concentrating and performing aptitude tasks. The long term objective of the SFP according to Khatete, Pendo and Oyabi (2013) is to assist in the promotion of Universal Primary Education to the socio-economically disadvantaged and nutritionally vulnerable children especially girls in pre-primary and primary schools in targeted areas. The short term objectives are to increase enrolment, prevent dropout, stabilized attendance and assist primary schools to improve the attention span and ultimately the learning capacity of students by relieving short term hunger. However, the opportunity cost of SFP in Kaduna state to a very large extent is unjustifiable considering the state and nature of primary schools and the general educational sector in the state. The primary schools in Kaduna is largely characterized by poor infrastructure; poor teachers welfare(where in some cases state owe 6-8 months salaries of teachers),absence of learning facilities and instructional aides, poor training and development schemes of teachers among others. It is in view of this that, the paper seeks to investigate why Kaduna state opted for school feeding against the other II. # Conceptual Clarification a) Opportunity Cost Opportunity cost is the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefit you could have received by taking an alternative action. Example within the context of the subject matter if a government decides to constructs roads, the opportunity cost is the alternative projects that might have been carried out instead (electricity supply, Hospital facilities, workers welfare etc).In both cases, a choice between two options must be made .It would be an easy decision if you knew the end outcome; however, the risk that you could achieve greater 'benefit 'with another option is the opportunity cost (Daniel, 2015). In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone, where a choice need to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives when one alternative is chosen .Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice". # b) Public Expenditure Public expenditure refers to government expenditure, that is, government spending. It is incurred by central, state and local governments of a country. According to Supriya (2011) public expenditure can be defined as,' the expenditure incurred by public authorities like Federal, State and Local Governments to satisfy the collective social wants of the people. He further maintain that, in developing countries, public expenditure policy not only accelerates economic growth and promote employment opportunities but also plays a useful role in reducing poverty and inequalities in income distribution. # c) School Feeding School feeding is a targeted social safety net that provide both educational and health benefits to the more vulnerable children, thereby increasing enrolment rate, reducing absenteeism and improving security at the household level (Meryers, Sampson, Weizman, Rogers et al cited in Elijah and Frederick (2015). The idea of free meal in primary schools arrives from the fact that, hunger is one of the most pervasive and damaging phenomena for millions of children today. Ithas far reaching effects on developlement of both individuals and nations. School feeding is a special arrangement made in school to provide children with food to supplement what they may have eaten at home to help them remain in school as a measure to reduce temporary hunger while in school (Khatete, Pendo, and Oyabi, 2013). Hunger according to Elijah and Frederrick (2015) negatively affects the brain development of children and impedes their chances of educational success later on. They further argued that, hunger, poverty and poor education are interdependent when children are hungry, chances that they would attend school are limited and without education, their chances of breaking the poverty trap are significantly reduced. Amira (2014) categories School meal in to two: i. In-school meals Children are fed breakfast, lunch or both in school. Meals can be prepared at the school, in the community or be delivered from centralized kitchens. Some programs provide complete meals; others provide high energy biscuits or snacks. ii. Take-home ratios Entire families receive food provided their children attend school regularly. Like conditional cash transfers, the ratios' value compensates for the costs of sending the child to school. For particularly vulnerable students, such as girls or orphans, in-school meals can be combined with take -home ratios for greater impact. # d) Public Policy Public policy like other social science concept has no universally accepted definition. There are as many definitions as there are scholars in the field. In an attempt to do justice to the meaning of public policy, it is imperative to visualize many definitions and assesses their point of departure and convergences. According to Chowdhury, (2005) a recurrent problem in the social sciences is that many terms, such as "development and policy "have multiple meanings and depends on who is using the term and in what context as to its meaning. Among the many competing definitions of "public policy "some are very complex, while others are quite simple. Despite their variations, they all agree on a certain key aspect. According to Harris cited in Sambo et al (2005) public policy consists of the goals and assumptions that underlie what government does, a kind of guide for government action. He went further to argue that government are limited by scars recourses and by the ability to do everything at once. Consequently, policy making means that government, must make choice, that is decide to do one thing rather than another or to do a little of this and a lot of that. Dlakwa (2009) asserts that public policy consists of all the likes and dislikes of government that are put together in the form of statutes or codified into law. He further stressed that, the passage of these likes and dislikes into law inevitably segregates them from other issues that government feels compelled or not compelled to act upon informally or unofficial. On a similar note, Frderich (1963) also assert that public policy is a proposed course of a government # e) Theoretical framework This research will be anchored on Vrooms expectancy theory of motivation advanced by Victor H. Vroom (1964).According to this theory, the intensity of the tendency to perform in a particular manner is dependent on the intensity of an expectation that the performance will be followed by a definite outcome and on the appeal of the outcome to the individual. The relevance of this theory lays from the fact that, every employee in an organization has pre-determined goals to attain in a time frame. It is the possibilities of attaining his targets or goals that determine the level of his inputs or motivation in a work place. In a case where an employee dictates his inability to meet up worth his basic goals, the worker is subsequently de-motivated. According to Sapru (2013) expectancy theory focuses on performance variables. The theory argues that a person's motivation towards an action would be determined by the expectation towards an action would be determined by the expectation that the effort would culminate in a success. Expectancy is the perceived probability of satisfying a particular need of an individual based on past experience. In a more practical terms, expectatancy theory says that employees will be motivated to exert a high level of effort when they believe that effort will lead to a good performance appraisal, that a good appraisal will lead to organisational rewards such as a bounce, a salary increase, or a promotion; and that the reward s will satisfy the employees personal goals. The chain goes like this; individual effortindividual performance-organizational reward-personal goals. In this case ma lot of teachers 'in primary schools in Zaria and Sabon Gari local government see the performance-reward relationship (performance outcome)in their job as being weak .The reason is that an organization may reward a lot of things besides just performance. For example, the free meal scheme have a short term positive impact on the pupils' and the great expectation of having a meal in school is a significant motivation to the pupils 'and a plus to government or the educational sector in terms of enrolment, retention and completion. It is in relation to this that this paper has observed that most employers tend to ignore workers' needs in their effort to achieve cheap political points or effort to produce more at lower cost per unit. This may be possible in the short run, but in the long run, there are adverse effects leading to grievances, frusteration, and higher rate of labour turn-over which in the final analysis may not be in the interest of the employer. It is in view of this that Victor Vroom's expectancy theory has to be recognized and enforced. According to Ngu (2014) the expectancy theory implies that workers come to the organization with certain basic expectations or needs which they strive to achieve, and the more they achieve them, the more they are motivated to work and increase the output which in the final analysis leads to the achievement and maximization of the employer's objectives. It was the expectation of the research study that, the Kaduna State government would have consider making teacher comfortable and the learning environment conducive for learning before introducing the feeding program. Such would have gone a long way to revive the past glory of teachers and the long time retrogressive status of primary education in Kaduna State. # f) Review of Literature According to the UN World Food Program, in developing countries almost 60 million children go to school hungry every day, about 40% of them are in Africa. In the poorest countries, school feeding policy is emerging as a common social safety net response to the crisis. In 2008, 20 governments looked to school feeding programs as a safety net response to protect the poorest. The UN World Food Program assisted some 22 million children with school feeding in 70 countries, and the World Bank Group launched a Global Food Crisis Respond to the food and fuel crisis, including by scaling up school feeding program (WFP Report, 2010). School meal program help in reducing the risk of school withdraw ,low attendance; poor concentration and improve the school child performance; however, Amira (2014) posited that major differences exist in the provision, composition, effective application and stability throughout school systems and in accordaning to the economic status of different countries. Acoording to Oyefede cited in Isa et al (2012), there are as many types of programs as there are countries, but they can be classified into two main group based on their modalities: ? In-school feeding, where children are fed in the school which can be divided into two categories namely; a)program that provides meals b)Program that provide s high energy biscuits or Snacks. ? Take home rations where families are given food if their children attend school. All public schools in Unite Kingdom offer school launches everyday of the week, where approximately 45% of primary and secondary school pupils are provided with meal for children nowadays more than food provided at school (Michele and Jonathan 2009).in addition, school meals are part of a means -tested program; such that 18% of the pupil population from less privileged backgrounds is eligible to receive school meals for free (Amira, 2014). The USA has been serving breakfast to school children across the nation since the pilot program began in 1966.Today,the School Breakfast Program (SBP),a federal and state reimbursement program for each breakfast served that meet federal requirements, has provided breakfast for more than 8.5 million children nationwide (Levinger,1992, cited in Amira, 2014). The Kenya school feeding program started in 1980 for most urban schools and by 1995 a national policy articulated that school meal are compulsory in all primary schools in Kenya. In 2003 both the WFP and the Ministry of Education collaborated in an effective program aiming at expansion and refinement of the food program in rural schools in particular (Langinger, cited in Amira2014). India also said to have a long tradition of school feeding program, largly by the state government with some external assistance. India Supreme Court directed the state governments to introduce school feeding program in all government and government assisted primary schools. This was the result of a petition from the People Union for Liberties large coalition of organizations and individuals that led to the Right to food campaign (Akandi and Alayande, 2011). In Brazil, the school feeding program is in the country's constitution, and is part of the government's Zero Hungry Program (ZHP),covering nearly 37 million children each year, the program is among the largest in the world. Its implementation are managed by the disbursement of the financial recourses for school meals in each municipality (Akanbi and Alayande, cited in Khalid and Sherif, 2012). The Nigeria government is yet to make school feeding a national policy despite the obvious hunger and nutritional deficiencies among pupils in primary school. Even though, school feeding might not necessarily be the immediate focus of government in Nigeria base on the nature and character of educational sector especially in primary schools in both urban and rural areas. It is amazing that most of the state own primary schools are in a state of decadence, with poor teachers' welfare and incessant industrial conflict as a result of teachers neglect by the government. Thus, many parents and stakeholders in the educational concern of Nigeria see school feeding policy as couinter productive, as teachers who constitute the engine room are not motivated to take the job as a vocation. The unique system of free meal in primary school introduced by Governor Mallam Nasiru El-Rufai is a good model for other states with exception of Osun state were the policy have been consistent for sometime. Howerver, and in spite of the lunches provided have to meet one third of the pupil's daily nutritional reuirements, school meal services in Zaria and Sabon Gari Local Government Areas of Kaduna State do not always have a good reputation among pupils, parents, teachers or the communities stakeholders. The most common complaints are long queues, cramped, late arrival of the meal, lack of dinning Hall, overcrowded dinning areas. It is in relation to this that the paper agrees with Amira (2014) were he argued that, an unfriendly eating environment has a major consequences of eating behaviour ,including an increase in plate waste overcrowded and noisy lunch rooms. The Kaduna state feeding policy most immediate purpose appears to boost school enrolment. In this goal it has already succeeded, probably beyond expectations. Governor El-Rufa'i said since the program started, pupil's enrolment in Kaduna Public Schools has jumped by 64% to 1.8 million. There could be a small problem with the feeding timing. DailyTrust on Saturday's reporter found that the food vendors arrived at the school at 8:30 am and serve the pupils when they came out on break at 9:00an to 10:00am.The reporters also said the pupils were more eager to talk about food than about school curriculum. The suspicion is that many of them go to school just for the food (Mahmud,2016).It has equally reported by Vanguard (15 th March, 2016) that Kaduna State Government, yesterday, expressed concern over the desertion of schools by primary pupils after taking the free meal offered them. The pupils have developed the habit of leaving school immediately after the free meal under the guise of going to drink water. Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Dr.Shehu Adamu, told newsmen in Kaduna that government was disturbed by this situation. It is further argued that, the boost in school attendance quickly raises the question; are other facilities in place to accommodate such an astronomical boost in enrolment with in such a short time? Number of classrooms, numbers of teachers, teachres' quality and welfare; furniture and teaching aids were already in short supply, not only in Kaduna State but all over the country (Daily Trust, 2016). On weekly basis, school feeding policy cost around 300 million which is around the cost educating children in some developing countries. When compared with deworming, free school uniform or teachers incentives, feeding program may not be the most cost effective way for policymakers to raise enrolment. But when viewed as a social transfer-as another way to help poor families feed their children and get them to school, feeding program can be very useful. Drawing a lesson from the foregoing discussion, it can be deduced that the SFP introduced by the Kaduna State Government is a mere politics on the psyche of the masses hiding under the guise of improving education quality in the state. Boosting education need should take a holistic approach taking its root from the budget proposal to a level of implementation. This argument is in consistent with Jideofor (2016) who argued that: Promoting education and health: The Bauchi 2016) says "?The issue of feeding school children by the State government is a misplacement of perioruity; the continuity of the policy is not certain because they will not have the political will to sustain the feeding is not the way to make children come to school, when you attract children with food ,when the food is no longer there, they will run away from school. Government should have concentrated on other areas like training the teachers and getting people supervise the schools..." # g) Analyzing the Opportunity Cost Like any other public primary school teachers in Nigeria, various research exploring Kaduna state teachers working condition shows that, teachers are poorly taken care of and are dissatisfied with their living and working conditions. The key reasons for this are not far fetch: ? Poor salaries and irregular payment of teachers' salaries # ? Poor infrastructures ? Lack of teachers training and development ? Inadequate fringe benefits # ? Poor supervision ? Lack of instructional materials This paper critically observed that these conditions are responsible for low teacher morale and the difficulty in attracting and retaining qualify youths into the teaching profession. It is in line with this, the papercritique the rationale behind Kaduna State government for making sensitive and critical aspect of the primary school educational sector an opportunity cost to Free Feeding Policy. It is observed that according to Mahmud (2016) Kaduna state spend a weekly bill of 300 million on school feeding pregame. This implies that the State government spend about 4 billion every school term. This amount can be channel into one or two of the problems identified above. Additionally, such huge amount can be injected into; renovation and furnishing of primary schools, enhanced teacher training and confort, close monitoring and inspection of schools and teachers, provition of free uniforms, provition of books and working tools, increase in daily spending from #33 to #180 per primary pupil for three meals, free, compulsory basic education for all. The above point of view is in consonance with Iiunor cited in Emmanuel atal (2005) said "training is one tool which management uses to develop the effectiveness of human resources in many organizations. The effective development of human resources of the educational system is one vital contribution to the future, long term growth and survival of education". This call our attention that, the success of educational system in Kaduna state depends mainly on the quality of teachers, and their training because of the explosion brought about by technological innovation. In the same vein, teachers are engine room of any educational system and indeed the nation and whose morale is low is not likely to perform as expected. A hungry teacher cannot be committed neither does it seat and watch pupils eating their meal with a smelling face. Hence, when teachers are not properly motivated, their level of job performance may be low and the core objectives of the school may not be accomplished. In an attempt to establish the relevance of staff motivation Ngu (2014) argued that: Workers motivation as a pre-requisite for human relation. It is an essential ingredient inhuman relation. In fact, it is part and parcel of human relations. It is nevertheless synonymous with human relations because while it is possible to have workers motivation without necessarily embracing the wide spectrum of human relations? Although the achievement of the later does not necessarily mean the achievement of the former; it enhances the chance of attaining good human relations both within and outside the organization, and is therefore worth pursuing. This is so because habitually aggrieved or disgruntled and frustrated workers cannot be expected to present or exhibit a good image of their organization. If anything such workers tend to portray a bad image of their organization. It can be deduced from the above submission that, employee's motivation has a great role to play in enhancing the workers to project the image of institution or organization in a good light while the objectives of the institution is likely to be achieved with maximum impact. # III. Policy Recommendations ? The state government should partner with Parents Teachers Associations (PTA) to come up with measures to restrict pupils from sneaking homes after meals. ? Government attention should not completely swing to huge attendance in schools, rather should also focus on measures to ensure education/school curriculums are treated and updated. ? Kaduna State Government should change the psyche that makes pupils think school as a means to an end, rather an end in itself. IV. # Conclusion The proponents of school feeding policy claim that providing food in schools would ostensibly attract less privilege children to schools, improves their attendance and reduced drop-outs. However, drawing a lesson from the content analysis of literatures, the paper sees the school feeding program as mere chasing shadows or an attempt to gain cheap political point at the expense of the obvious challenges confronting primary school educational sector in Kaduna state. ![of Public Expenditure of Kaduna State: A Case of Free Feeding Policy in Public Primary Schools](image-2.png "") s within a given environment providing obstacles and opportunities which the policy was proposed to utilized and overcome in an effort to reach a goal or realize in objective or purpose. Jenkins and Anderson cited inDlakwa (2009) conceptualisations of public © 2016 Global Journals Inc. (US) It was deduced from the research that; government own primary schools teachers' salaries, which characterized by poor welfare scheme, poor training and development, poor instructional aid and infrastructures among others. 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