‘Vouchers more dignified than queueing for food’

Former Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn has slammed Government’s offering of school meals to needy children during the summer vacation, suggesting that the Mia Mottley-led administration should instead be distributing supermarket vouchers to their families.

Chief among his objections to the Summer Nutrition Programme is that children would have to experience the indignity of going to various locations to queue for food and be exposed to ridicule.

“That has me so angry it ain’t funny. I pray about not losing my cool over that. You have a situation where you have needy children; God knows I needy myself but I ain’t lining up in no place for nobody to see me going in there with my hand out begging for food,” Franklyn argued.

“Those days are gone. In the Prime Minister’s grandfather’s time, it served that purpose to get him elected and to make him popular. It should not be serving that purpose now. . . You have to treat people with dignity and the dignity of this whole thing is not putting young children to go and line up and let people pass and see them and say ‘look, Caswell children out there in the line’,” he said during an interview with Barbados TODAY.

Last Thursday, Prime Minister Mottley announced that students would benefit from free school meals from July 25 to September 2, to help ease their parents’ and guardians’ grocery bills, as consumers continue to feel the burden of the rising cost of living.

But the trade unionist insisted that the measure is an insult to Barbadians in 2022.

“We talk about pride and industry. Where is the pride in that? Where is the pride in humiliating people who have no other choice but to go and accept that?” he questioned.

Franklyn suggested that if the Government preferred not to go the route of giving money to families in need of assistance because of fear the funds would be misused, there was the option of giving out vouchers that can be redeemed at supermarkets.

“Okay, you go to school, you sign up. You have a child that is three years old and ain’t going to school yet, and the parents still can’t feed them, so who is going to feed them? You have children in secondary school that are not into school meals, who is going to feed them?

“So what you need to do is to feed the family. If the family is vulnerable and needs help, you feed the entire family. You don’t go out there with this vote-catching nonsense and put people in line to be humiliated,” Franklyn insisted.

He further urged persons who assist the poor to do so in private, to allow recipients to maintain their dignity.

Making reference to a photo in another section of the Press in which a young boy who spoke about his desire to feed the homeless was on camera doing just that, Franklyn said: “People think that is a laudable goal but that is a laudable goal that you keep to yourself. When you help the needy, you do so privately and leave them with some dignity, you don’t humiliate them.” (AH)