The video uses a doctored image of President Kenyatta discussing economic recovery in a virtual meeting with global leaders.
Syndicated story by PesaCheck.
A YouTube video of President Uhuru Kenyatta watching lawyer Otiende Amollo making submissions on the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) at the Court of Appeal is ALTERED.
The image shows the Kenyan president, with his hand raised, sitting with another person inside a boardroom and following the proceedings on one of the two television sets in the room.
The title of the video is, “Uhuru reacts after listening to lawyer Otende Amollos [sic] brilliant submission during BBI appeal case”.
The video is dated 30 June 2021, the day Amollo made submissions before the Court of Appeal.
The BBI appeal proceedings, which took place from 29 June to 2 July 2021, at the Court of Appeal in Nairobi, are set to determine the fate of the push to amend Kenya’s constitution through a referendum.
The appeal followed a High Court verdict that declared the BBI process, which sought to reorganise the structure of the government by creating the position of the prime minister and increasing revenue allocation to counties, unconstitutional.
The bottom of the screen of the YouTube video bears a watermark of State House Kenya, common with images issued by the Presidential Press Unit.
PesaCheck ran a reverse image search on one of the frames of the footage which revealed that the video had been created by doctoring an image of President Kenyatta during a virtual US Chamber of Commerce Global Leaders’ Forum on Economic Recovery.
The image was taken on 19 May 2021, and the TV screen does not show Amollo making his submissions at the Court of Appeal as claimed. Instead, the TV screen shows other participants at the summit.
PesaCheck has looked into a YouTube video claiming to show President Uhuru Kenyatta watching lawyer Otiende Amollo making his submission on the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) at the Court of Appeal, and finds it to be ALTERED.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Simon Muli and edited by PesaCheck deputy editor Rose Lukalo. The article was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.