A Deputy Minister of Agriculture, William Agyapong Quaitoo has incurred the displeasure of northerners for making comments that sought suggest that people from the three regions of the north are difficult and insincere.

The Minister who was responding to complaints from farmers in the area suggesting that their farms have been destroyed by the fall armyworm and therefore appealing for some form of compensation in an interview said: “If anybody who is the north and said his farm was destroyed by fall armyworm the person must prove it. Our brothers (in the North) it is so difficult to deal with them. I lived there for 27 years, I speak Dagbani like a Dagomba and all that. They are very difficult people. Nobody can substantiate. If anybody says that his farm was destroyed by armyworm, the person would have to come and prove it. We have no records of that. It’s just a way of taking money from the government: that’s what they do all the time…”

A cross section are demanding that the minister retracts and apologise unreservedly for his ethnocentric comments indicating that they are unworthy of a person of his pedigree.

Meanwhile, he insists that there are no records to suggest that farms have been destroyed by the fall armyworm in the three northern regions.

“We have two of our ministers being northerners and they are big-time farmers and there is no record of that”, he emphasized.