STATE Minister Rudyard Spencer received strong backlash yesterday for suggesting in a political speech that supporters and members of his governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) are now in a better position to get help from the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA).

Spencer has found himself in the midst of a firestorm of criticism for telling labourites at a political meeting in Bellefield, Manchester on the weekend that now that a member of the JLP is now at the helm of the RADA, whatever issues they had faced with receiving assistance from the entity, which provides agricultural extension services, were of the past.

“We have a system where we will now have our own chairman of RADA and things have been happening and things can happen at RADA. But naturally, you will meet some bottlenecks because we have just taken over the system and we are trying to find our way around the system. Where you never have a parish manager for RADA, you now have a Labourite being the chairman of RADA, so whatever problems you use dto have … I believe now most of those problems would have gone away because you have your own manager to assist in the management of RADA … So, therefore, you can’t say that you are getting no attention, you can’t say nothing is happening, because in fairness, you have your own manager to report whatever problems you have and expect him to solve those problems,” he told the crowd, where some reportedly sought to remind him of media presence.

Former Member of Parliament (MP) for Clarendon North Western, Michael Stern, who lost his seat in the 2011 general election, was appointed RADA chairman in August of last year.

Yesterday, Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) spokesman on agriculture, Fenton Ferguson, and the corruption watchdog, National Integrity Action (NIA), called on Spencer, the junior minister in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, to issue a formal apology to farmers and the country for his political statement.

“Rather than unifying the farmers for growth, you choose to politicise and divide the sector. This must be condemned and rectified immediately,” Ferguson said in a release yesterday.

The Opposition spokesman called on Prime Minister Andrew Holness to sanction Spencer for his “disgraceful” comments. He further called on members of the Holness Administration to desist from politicising the agricultural sector.

“Plants do not grow in political colours. Both JLP and PNP supporters depend on food from all our farmers. We cannot develop our agriculture sector on a partisan divide,” Ferguson said in his release.

The Opposition spokesman argued that it was “beyond troubling” that a senior member of the Government would make such a pronouncement “at a time like this”. The Prime Minister must act now to reassure the nation that what Mr Spencer said is not a continuation of outdated political behaviour now being sanctioned by his Government,” he said.

The NIA, meanwhile, asked Holness to make his position on the matter clear by demonstrating “strong transformational leadership, fairness and integrity in this matter” and to “disassociate himself and the Government he leads from the statement by Minister Spencer and, thereby, send a clear message to Jamaicans that RADA benefits shall be administered fairly to all citizens of this country”.

Spencer’s comments, said the NIA, should be repudiated by all Jamaicans who wish to stamp out political tribalism, and it also demand an “unequivocal retraction” from the senior JLP politician.

According to the NIA, RADA’s chairman also “needs to make it publicly and absolutely clear that he is chairman of RADA for all farmers, PNP, JLP and non-aligned and not as, Minister Spencer indicated, a “Labourite…chairman” who has “just taken over the system” for the benefit of labourites”.

In addition, the NIA stated that Spencer’s remarks were a breach of the country’s Code of Political Conduct which states that “officials who…have control or influence over the appropriation of public funds should not discriminate against any individual, group or community on the basis of political allegiance or support”.

Minister Spencer, who yesterday expressed some level of remorse for his remarks in an interview with Cliff Hughes on Nationwide Radio, but intimated that what he said was taken out of context.

“I wasn’t going down no tribal line, and I think it is really unfortunate that people put this label to it. I am not a tribalist…what I was merely saying (is that) all these complaints that keep coming to me, there is no need now because there is a new person there – go there and they will be addressed,” he said.

Spencer said, however, that: “In retrospect it could have been better [said] and I take full responsibility for that. I’m very sorry that it came over that way; I could have handled it much differently, but that’s what happened.”