The county’s Director of Communications has disowned the page.
This Facebook account imitating Uasin Gishu Governor Jonathan Chelilim and offering loans in his name is a HOAX.
Dubbed ‘Hon Jonathan Bii’, the account has 3,900 friends and uses the photo of the governor on its profile.
The account has made several posts including this one, purporting to issue Inua Jamii loans ranging from KSh10,000 to KSh150,000.
To benefit from the purported loan, one needs to send a message via WhatsApp to given phone numbers.
Although the page uses Governor Chelilim’s photo, it is not authentic and appears to be intended to defraud unsuspecting prospective loanees.
Silas Koskei, the Director of Communications at Chelilim’s office, disowned the account under investigations when we contacted him.
According to Koskei, this is the governor’s official Facebook Page.
It uses the name ‘Governor Jonathan Bii Chelilim and has over 52,000 followers and follows 583 pages.
Its bio section has a link to the county’s official website and an intro that reads: “Transforming Uasin Gishu County to greater heights through development.”
The page’s transparency information section indicates that it was created on 2 May 2019 and has had seven name changes.
At creation, the page went by the name Kimeli Arap Chelilim but it was respectively renamed Jonathan Kimeli Bii, Jonathan Kimeli Bii-Chelilim, Jonathan Kimeli Bii-Chelilim, Chelilim Mashinani, Jonathan Bii-Chelilim, KotiMoja Mashinani-Nguzo Kumi and finally Governor Jonathan Bii Chelilim.
We checked Governor Chelilim’s official page for any information on the loans featured on the page we are debunking, but there was nothing.
PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook page imitating Uasin Gishu Governor Jonathan Chelilim and offering loans in his name and finds it to be a HOAX.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media.
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