A police officer trying to ward off people scrambling over rotten chicken
By Mustapha Sesay
The Freetown City Council has announced plans to dump two more containers of imported chickens declared as unfit for human consumption.
The announcement comes just days after the dumping of a 40 feet container full of a similar consignment. But that exercise was fraught in controversy as residents in the east of the capital Freetown went to collect the chickens against warning from police and health officials.
The Freetown City Council (FCC) wasn’t happy with how the first exercise was conducted. Cyril Mattia, its Public Relation Officer, told Politico on Tuesday that they were “marginalized” by the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in the process of dumping the first container and he blamed that for the way it all turned out.
Mattia said that was not the first time FCC had been snubbed and prevented from executing its responsibilities. He said this time a committee has been set up to handle the forthcoming dumping exercise and that the FCC is part of it.
“We were marginalized but thank God we have been exonerated and one of our colleagues has been put in charge of the remaining process,” he said.
Sulaiman Zainu Parker, Environment and Social Officer at FCC, was named as a member of the new committee which has been created to oversee the disposal of the remaining two containers. He told Politico that they were putting modalities in place to prevent the recurrence of the “ugly situation” that characterized the first exercise.
Parker declined to reveal where the next consignment would be dumped, but he noted that this time around chemicals would be used to make the chickens were unattractive to anyone.
“This committee will ensure that what happened will not repeat itself. I will not disclose the place now where we will do the exercise, it might be in the night or day time, but what remains as the fact is such a situation that happened last week will not occur again,” he said on a telephone interview.
Parker defended the unnamed importer of the spoiled chicken, noting that the businessman had done what they ought to have done, and to alert the Ministry of Health after noticing that the product was not good for consumption. He stressed that the blame should be on those who were responsible for disposing off the consignment because of how they handled it. He named MASADA, the waste disposal company, as one of those to be blamed.
Parker said an investigative committee had been setup to look into what happened.
According to reports, last week hundreds of residents in the eastern part of the city stormed the Bomeh dumping site to scavenge for the chickens which were dumped.
Most of what was taken away was not consumed by the scavengers but was sold at local markets to unsuspected persons. This has caused many people to stop buying chicken products.
There are reports that Police have already discovered over 250 cartons of the spoiled chickens in various markets places, mostly in the east end of Freetown, including Kissy Road Market, Dove Cut Market on Guard Street and Hagan Street Market.
© Politico 27/07/16
