The Ondo state government has rejected some expired bags of rice donated to the state by the federal government.
President Muhammadu Buhari had ordered the Nigeria Customs Service to distribute seized bags of rice across states to cushion the hardship of the COVID-19 pandemic on citizens. Ondo got 1,800 bags.
Rotimi Akeredolu, the governor, was said to have expressed displeasure over the poor quality of the products sent to the state and directed that they should be returned to the ministry of humanitarian affairs and disaster management.
Alex Kalejaiye, secretary of the state palliative committee, at 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.
“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,” 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.
“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.”
The Oyo state government had also rejected the bags of rice donated by the federal government. It said upon inspection, it was discovered that the bags of rice were infested with weevils.
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