On August 25, a tweet (archived here) showed a video of a man struggling to take oath. The man in the video holds what appears to be a Bible as he struggles to read from a script amid laughter from the crowd. By the time of this publication the tweet had been retweeted 133 times and had 364 likes.
Background
The August 9 elections were highly contested with the top contenders driving a political narrative of ‘hustlers’ versus ‘dynasties’. This ideology was propagated by presidential aspirant, now president-elect William Ruto.
Ruto views himself as a ‘hustler’ who came from a humble background with no political ancestry, pitted against Raila Odinga whom he considered dynasty having come from a well-to-do political family. Odinga was backed by incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta, whom Ruto also considers a ‘dynasty’ given his political ancestry. Ruto also viewed Odinga as a state “project” after his fallout with Uhuru.
Verification
A reverse search of key frames of the video leads to an Instagram account where the video seems to have been first posted. Although the video in the tweet is quite grainy, on the Instagram page, one can make out the Bukedde TV watermark on it. The video was posted on Instagram on September 18, 2017.
The video is from Uganda. Piga Firimbi reached out to a journalist from Uganda, Damba, who works at Bukedde TV who confirmed that indeed the video is from Uganda. The video was taken in Mpigi District during the Uganda 2016 general elections. Piga Firimbi could not however establish the identity of the man in the video.
Verdict
The claim that the man in the video is a leader in Kenya is FALSE.
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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