Mahama is a clueless man, his brother is not qualified for ‘free’ fertilizer – Agric Minister

The Minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto has disclosed that farmers in commercial farming are not entitled to the subsidized fertilizers from the government contrary to claims by former President John Dramani Mahama who he describes as clueless.

According to him, small-scale farmers are the target and therefore it is wrong for the former President to say that his brother who is cultivating three hundred acres of farmland is not getting support from the government in that sense.

“Mahama is totally wrong. First of all the subsidy is not meant for his brother. He is exposing himself. The subsidy is meant for farmers with two, three acres not for three hundred acres”, the Minister revealed on PM Express monitored by MyNewsGh.com hosted by Evans Mensah.

This comes after Mr. Mahama on a Sunyani-based radio station, attributed the rising cost of food to the government’s failure to fund the Planting for Food and Jobs programme.

“I have a brother who is into farming, and he tells me the government has yet to supply farmers with fertilizer this year, and so he had to buy it himself,” Mr. Mahama is quoted to have said.

Reacting to this, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto described the former President as an ignorant and clueless person in the field of agriculture.

“For him to make such a conclusion from one observation, it means that when it comes to statistics, he has absolutely no clue. It is just like he coming to parliament when I was Member of Parliament putting four people in the balcony of parliament and said evidence base. We don’t do that! Though we are talking politics, Ghanaians are more intelligent than that,” he fumed.