• Addressing a press conference at Serena Hotel, Kiunjuri said the decision by President Uhuru Kenyatta did not come as a surprise.
Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mwangi Kiunjuri was on Tuesday fired from the Cabinet and looking at his body language and demeanor moment after that announcement, he remained defiant and unapologetic.
Addressing a press conference at Serena Hotel, Kiunjuri said the decision by President Uhuru Kenyatta did not come as a surprise. “I saw this coming but the action will not in any way derail the journey I have started”.
Kiunjuri was right that his sacking was long overdue.
He, however, failed to tell Kenyans the real reasons that prompted the President to fire him, and instead opted to politicize the matter. He termed Uhuru’s move as ironical because he had in same breath praised the progress that his Ministry had made.
Here, the President was talking about the work done through his personal interventions to address the myriad of problems facing the farmers. This is after it emerged that Kiunjuri was doing nothing or very little to address the raised issues.
In various occasions, the farmers pleaded with Uhuru to come to their rescue. The President is currently implementing the recommendations of the task forces he had created to look into the challenges coffee, tea, milk and potato farmers were going through.
Bearing in mind that the Mt region is known to be the bedrock of Uhuru, the Ruto team had one job. Sabotage the President’s Big Four agenda and use this as the basis of inciting locals to abandon Uhuru so that, come 2022, the community will rebel against him and vote for Ruto. I would not expect the Tangatanga luminaries to have their way.
Notably, there have been graft allegations in the Ministry of Agriculture, and some NCPB officials have been charged with corruption. For instance, in the maize scandal, billions of shillings allocated to buy maize from farmers in the North Rift were embezzled.
Many Kenyans believed that top politicians were the key beneficiaries in the scam and this was one of the ways of raising money for 2022 campaign.
The name of CS would also pop up in the Sh63 billion dam scandals. He is among the CSs that were summoned to record statements at Directorate of Criminal Investigations in connection with the scandals. He said had been prosecuted and judged by the court of public opinion and left to do whatever he may, to clear his name.
“Over the past 7 months, my name has been dragged through mud, and appeared in newspapers and the social media for all the wrong reasons - from the maize scandal, sugar, fertilizer and now the dams,” he said.
Ndonga is a political commentator