A tweet by a Twitter account bearing the name Ng’endo Murugu contains an image of a post allegedly from Assistant Chairperson of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Juliana Cherera.
Background
Prior to the announcement of the winner of the presidential seat in the August 9 general elections, four IEBC Commissioners led by the Assistant Chairperson dissented and refused to own the results that were declared by the IEBC Chairperson.
After the announcement, the commissioners held a press briefing and gave a statement highlighting reasons for their dissension including that the announcement by Mr. Chebukati was made without their input. Mr. Chubukati, however, followed with a statement (archived here from IEBC official Twitter page) which states in part;
“The four Commissioners i.e. Juliana Cherera, Francis Wanderi, Justus Nyang’aya and Irene Masit demanded that the Chairperson moderates the results for purpose of forcing an election Re-run contrary to their oath of office” (page 3, paragraph 4)
Verification
The statement is from a post on Facebook on an account with the name Juliana Cherera. PigaFirimbi however established that the account listed as Juliana Cherera on Facebook does not belong to the IEBC Assistant Chairperson. This account was created on May 23, 2022 under the name Titus Chirchir and the name was later changed to Julianna Cherera on August 17, 2022. See screengrab below;
Some of the posts in the account have links that lead to articles with outrageous claims such as here and here.
PigaFirimbi reached out to the owner of the Facebook account via the number in the profile but the call failed to connect even after multiple attempts. The number is registered under the name Titus Chirchir.
Juliana Cherera has since denied having any social media account and reported the purported accounts on Facebook and Twitter for action as reported by Citizen Digital.
Verdict
The Facebook account purporting to belong to IEBC’s Assistant Chair, Juliana Cherera is FAKE.
This fact-check was produced by Africa Uncensored with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, African Fact Checking Alliance network and the United Nations Development Programme.
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