Some Youth in Afforestation personnel under the Nation Builders Corp(NABCO) attached to the Forestry Commission in the East Akyem Municipality have clashed with a mentally unstable man for uprooted trees they’ve planted.

The unstable man is reportedly notorious for targeting and uprooting trees planted along the Accra-Kumasi Highway.

Checks in Akyem Asafo and Akyem Akoko by staff indicate that he has so far destroyed about 49 planted trees.

Some of the beneficiaries of the Youth in Afforestation got wind that the suspect was at Akyem Asafo engaging in his usual distractive activity. Attempts by the youth to interrogate him rather turned violent.

The District Manager for the Forestry Commission Kwame Oteng justified the action of his men in an interview with Starr News.

“I was told there was a mentally challenged person who was uprooting seedlings that have been planted along the road specifically around Asafo so the drove him away by attacking him. But my beef is that I’m a little bit surprised in my mind why a mentally challenged person will be uprooting a targeted tree because there’s a lot of vegetation so if he’s not sane he should have been uprooting all vegetation along without definite pattern.

He added: “But this is a planted species along the road and he went on removing those ones alone living the weeds around, so that is the little challenge in my mind. The way forward is that we have to be very vigilant so that such occurrence will not go on because the nation has incurred a lot of cost in establishing these trees to green Ghana.”