Accra, Ghana, August 29, 2017//-The embattled Deputy Agriculture Minister William Quaitoo has resigned. The Director of Communications at the Flagstaff House, Eugene Arhin has confirmed.
According to him, Mr Quaitoo tendered in his resignation “15 minutes ago and the President has accepted the resignation.”
The resignation follows days after he was accused of making ethnic comments against people from the Northern Ghana.
Mr Quaitoo who is also the Member of Parliament for Akim Oda in an interview on Accra based Starr FM said the people of the North are “difficult people.”
Last week, Mr. Qauitoo while reacting to complaints from farmers in the north on how their farms have been destroyed by the fall armyworm and subsequent appeal for some form of compensation, stated: “If anybody who is in 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.
He continued: “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…”.
Mr Qauitoo defended his position by saying that he was speaking from evidence of his 27 years sojourn in the North, and went further to indict the people of the three Northern Regions-Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions as having a penchant for concocting and peddling falsehood, deliberate deceit and engaging in fraudulent activities to rip off the nation or steal state resources.
He insisted that he knows for a fact the unhealthy character of the people of the North and their difficulty in comprehending ordinary decent discourse and that there was no shred of evidence to support the claim of the farmers from the North that their farms were devastated by the Fall Army Worms menace.
That not only were these claims totally false but also that the peddling of these lies is “Just a way of stealing money from the government, that is what they do all the time.”
Later, Mr Quaitoo issued an apology and retraction claiming he did not think about the consequences of his comments.
However, Mr Iddrisu described the apology as “grossly inadequate, insincere, hypocritical, an afterthought and therefore not deep enough to assuage the profound pain and huge damage done to the good image, integrity and respect of the people of the three Northern regions.”
African Eye Report