The Executive Governor of Ondo State, 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.
The decision of the state government to reject some of the 1,800 bags of rice sent to the state by the federal government is similar to an earlier announcement that the Engr. Seyi Makinde Oyo State government had rejected the rice sent by the federal government because they were ‘unfit for consumption’.
Speaking on the development, the Secretary of the state palliative committee in Ondo State, Mr Alex Kalejaiye, confirmed that some of the bags of rice had expired and were no longer fit for 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.”
The Punch gathered that when it was discovered that some of the rice had expired, the governor reportedly ordered that they should be rejected.
Kalejaiye added, “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 tests 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 a 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.”
