Ondo state government has rejected some ‘expired’ bags of rice donated to the state by the Federal Government.
President Muhammadu Buhari had on April 16th ordered the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to distribute seized bags of rice across states to cushion the hardship of the COVID-19 pandemic on citizens.
Ondo State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu has however expressed displeasure over the poor quality of the 1,800 bags of rice sent to the state.
He directed that the products be returned to the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management.
Alex Kalejaiye, secretary of the state palliative committee during the weekend said some of the bags contained expired rice which were not fit for human consumption.
He said the bad ones will be removed, while the good ones will be sent to a laboratory for testing.
Kalejaiye stressed that;
We discovered that some of the bags have expired and not good for consumption at all, so we are separating them from the ones that are still manageable for consumption. After this, we will still take the ones that appear good to the laboratory to test if they are fit for consumption.
He explained that;
They brought many bags of rice , we just carried out random check on them to discover the ones that are not good. What we are trying to do is to separate those ones that appeared bad from those ones that appeared good then we will carry out laboratory test on them to ascertain whether they are safe for consumption before giving them out to our people.
According to him, some of the products are expired goods and it is written on their bags.
Kalejaiye however noted that;
But some are not expired but it seemed they were not properly stored, and those ones are not properly stored would not be good to be given to our people without carrying out the laboratory test.
But the extremely bad ones, we don’t even need to do test on them , we will return them. We will meet tomorrow to decide when to return them , you know we can’t do it without the consent of Mr Governor.
This comes after Oyo state government on Friday also rejected the bags of rice donated by the Federal Government.
Debo Akande, an aide to Governor Seyi Makinde stated that upon inspection of the products, it was found out that the bags of rice were infested with weevils.
Akande added that;
It was in the process of further inspection that we discovered that the rice had been infested with weevils. On that basis, we formed a committee to re-inspect it so we can be sure of what we have received.
