By Balogun Damilola
The Ondo State Government has rejected expired bags of rice from the 1,800 bags sent to the state by the Federal Government.
The federal government sent about 1,800 bags of rice and vegetable oil to the state as part of measures to cushion the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown in the country.
The state Governor, Mr Rotimi Akeredolu, has ordered the return of some bags of rice sent to the state by the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management as they were found to have expired.
Speaking on the development, the Secretary of the state palliative committee, Mr. Alex Kalejaiye, confirmed that some of the bags of rice had expired and were no longer fit for consumption.
According to him, the bad rice will be separated from the good ones and the good ones will be taken to the laboratory to ascertain if they were fit for human consumption.
He said, “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.”
It was gathered that when it was discovered that some of the rice had expired, the governor reportedly ordered that they should be rejected.
Akeredolu, who officially received the palliative items at the Government House ground, Alagbaka from the state coordinating unit of the Youths Empowerment and Social Support Operations, last week, was said to have expressed displeasure over the development.
Kalejaiye said, “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.
“Some are expired , it is even written on the bags 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 .
“We will separate the extremely bad ones from the rest and we will carry out the laboratory test on those ones that appear good, to ascertain how safe they are for consumption. But the extremely bad ones, we don’t even need to do test on them , we will return them.
“We will meet tomorrow (today) to decide when to return them , you know we can’t do it without the consent of Mr. Governor.”