A website promoting a cash grant of Ksh20,000 by President-elect William Ruto is fake. The cash grant is being promoted on this web link which emerged after Ruto was declared the winner of the 9th August Presidential elections.
The web link has a poster claiming to offer Ksh20,000 to Kenyans for electing him as president. It says this grant is part of Ruto’s plan to make Kenya become self-reliant.
“President William Ruto on Friday. August 15th offered a matching grant of 20,000 to individuals to appreciate all citizens for electing him as the new president,” the poster says. “My idea for the matching grant is to make our country self-reliant.”
The poster goes ahead to advise the public to apply by filling out an online form capturing personal details such as name, email, phone number and location.
A fact-check on the web link and poster revealed that the cash grant is a hoax. We searched for the domain of the website, rutogrants.newfundings.online, on the WhoIs domain repository and found that it was registered on September 23, 2021, in Iceland. WhoIs does not reveal the identity of the person or company that owns it.
The official website for the United Democratic Alliance (UDA), Ruto’s party, is uda.ke. The UDA website does not have any communication relating to the grant, and neither does the party’s social media account or Ruto’s Twitter page.
Meanwhile, BT reached out to Ruto’s communication director Hussein Mohammed, who dismissed the grant announcement as fake. “Treat it as fake,” he said on phone. “The President-elect or UDA has not issued such communication.”
Also, a closer look at the announcement shows it contains grammatical errors and disjointed sentences, raising suspicion about its authenticity. This points to a scheme by the web link operator(s) to collect personal data and contacts from unsuspecting members of the public.
This fact-check was produced by BUSINESS TODAY with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, African Fact Checking Alliance network and the United Nations Development Programme.
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