By Kofi Safo-Antwi

So determined to swim in a sea of profits while ripping-off unsuspecting buyers of their monies, crooks operating from locations along the Spintex Road in Accra appear hell-bent on driving the rice industry straight into a ditch this Christmas, THE GHANAIAN SUN can reveal today.

Consequently sacks with prints of favourable brand names such as SUNDIATA, ROYAL FEAST, SAVANNAH, BLUE BIRD, THAI JASMINE RICE, THAI UMBRELLA RICE, RUBY, PHOENIX, BLACK JEWEL and the like attract a handsome pricing, once they can be delivered to the rogues in pretty good condition such that re-bagging may not give the game away.

Slippery tongues who have developed the pattern of playing the inquisitive monkey who had a bullet in the face have told THE GHANAIAN SUN that, the lowest grades of rice (in certain cases declared unfit for human consumption) are stashed into the bags and sewed neatly and professionally, in order to escape its detection by the most prying of eyes.

“They are then packed in commercial quantities and loaded onto trucks and dispatched to scores of stores for sale to the unsuspecting public,” one source told THE GHANAIAN SUN as the paper was on the prowl to ascertain the authenticity or otherwise of the goings-on.

Some patrons of some brands THE GHANAIAN SUN spoke to complained that, quite apart from the fact of some rice appearing in broken form, the grades are just too low that there is little doubt some of them are fit only for consumption by poultry animals.

The paper discovered a number of bags of rice so cleverly sewed whose inner stuff could possibly not match the quality writings on the sacks-claim otherwise, there would have been no need to open the sack for re-sewing at the premise as claimed by witnesses.

With a full bag of rice on the markets averaging 160 Ghana Cedis, it now confounds most consumers who end up with raw deals how else The Ghana Standards Board, and The Food And Drugs Board seem to sit idly by for crooks of such nature to have a field day, in landing massive profits?

Indeed with the Christmas season fast approaching, smart crooks, it appears the crooks know in the fibre of their being that rice sales will soar to the high heavens, and therefore continued dozing by the relevant authorities could lead to a catastrophe, if they drag their feet a shade late in a rescue mission.

THE GHANAIAN SUN learnt while on the investigative growl that not too long ago, the nation used to spend a colossal $500 million on rice importation until the advent of the ruling NDC, when so much talk was made of growing and eating local rice. However, the sudden appearance of low quality grades of rice ought to be a teasing challenge to the nation’s law-enforcers that, unwholesomeness has landed on Ghanaian markets.

The end result is that rice brands of the more popular kinds are duplicated with cheeky ease, and once buyers do not wise-up early enough to differentiate good from bad among the brands, rice buying in the stores will be business as usual. The other day THE GHANAIAN SUN acting on prompts from a source, learned of a 24-hour shift in a Lebanese-controlled rice warehouse along the Spintex Road, where milling and stuffing machines that supposedly undertake the clandestine venture were sited. But as Christmas inches closer and closer every day, it becomes incumbent on our security agencies that they need not clasp their hands and sit idly by because, if rice has to be eaten its qualitative taste and excellent nutritional values have to be distinct from the crap the rogues are bagging, popularly called TI GYIMI. …