Former Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mithika Linturi has come out to claim that he was not fully in charge of the docket assigned to him by President William Ruto when the fake fertiliser scandal blew up.
Speaking to a local TV station on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, Linturi claimed that some unnamed individuals were interfering with his mandate.
Linturi claimed that at some point, he could take a specific stand, only for some officials to contradict him, thus exposing him to public lynching over the scandal.
The former CS, however, did not mention officers whom he claimed usurped his powers in the Ministry of Agriculture.
“When you are also in a situation where you are trying to address issues, you are not in full control of what you want to do, how you want to bring out things, and part of your work is also being done by other people who are also contradicting the position you are taking, then the matter become very messy. That is the situation we were in,” he told the local TV station.
Substandard not fake
At the same time, Linturi maintained that the fertiliser was not fake, as widely reported at the height of the scandal.
Linturi, who was not brought back to the cabinet after President William Ruto sent home all the cabinet secretaries at the height of Gen-Z-led protests, indicated that the flagged fertiliser was substandard.
The former CS explained that the said fertiliser failed to meet the specified standards to be used for farming in the country.
However, he denied claims that the fertiliser was fake.
“What I have been trying to tell Kenyan people is that we discovered there was substandard fertiliser and not fake,” Linturi stated.
He decried what he termed politicising the matter, which denied Kenyans a chance to know the truth.
“This matter became so politicised, we lost direction in terms of management because we were in a country where, when subjected to a lynch mob, nobody wants to hear the truth,” he insisted.
Linturi survived a bid to impeach him by Parliament over the fertiliser scandal. A select committee formed to investigate him after a majority of MPs had voted for the motion ruled there was no evidence of wrongdoing against the former minister.
