BARELY 24 hours that Kwara State Government announced that it received 1,800 bags of rice from Federal Government as palliatives, Ondo State Government said it has rejected the same quantity of bags of rice from the Federal Government because they were expired bags of rice.
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.
But according to Alex Kalejaye, Ondo State Secretary of Covid-19 Palliative team, Rotimi Akeredolu, governor of the state 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.
Kalejaiye, confirmed that some of the bags of rice had expired and were no longer fit for consumption.
He explained that the bad rice would be separated from the good ones noting that the good ones would be taken to the laboratory to ascertain if they were fit for human consumption.
“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,” Kalejaye 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.”
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.
It would be recalled that Oyo State Government was the first to reject the bags of rice from the Federal Government on the ground that the bags of rice have expired.