A digital card shared in WhatsApp groups containing the branding of Kenyans.co.ke and quoting retired Reverend Timothy Njoya is fake. BusinessToday has reviewed the digital card dated 1st August 2022, quoting Njoya supporting Azimio Presidential candidate Raila Odinga and criticising Kenya Kwanza’s William Ruto, and found that it was not published by the news website nor did Rev. Njoya make the said remarks.
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The digital card has Njoya’s photo and says: “Hypocrisy has been ingrained in their minds. Pharisees. They want to remind us of Raila’s involvement in the 1982 coup but are conveniently silent about the factors that led us there. For starters, Raila was fighting for the freedoms we enjoy today. Moi had confined public appointments to Kalenjin land and totally ignored other regions. Also, you cannot separate Ruto from Moi’s ills.”
Timothy Njoya is a theologian, human rights activist and a retired Presbyterian Church of East Africa Minister, who has been vocal on political and social matters, sometimes having run-ins with the government of the day.
BusinessToday reached out to the editor of Kenyans.co.ke, Mr Robert Ndung’u, who disowned the digital card. “No, this did not come from us,” Mr Ndung’u responded to our inquiries about the digital card and quote.
The online publication immediately flagged the post as fake on its social media platform. “This post did not emanate from our media house,” the post says. “It does not conform to the in-house branding rules and did not go through the multiple approval checks set in place to prevent misreporting. We therefore flag it as fake,” it adds.
Mr Njoya, for his part, dismissed the quote as fake news. Talking to Business Today, he blamed it on people out to use his name to propagate their selfish interests. We went further to check his Facebook and Twitter pages, where we found no trace of such utterances. Njoya is fairly active on Twitter but he has not shared such a post.
Recently, in a statement on Twitter, the retired reverend chastised the Azimio La Umoja presidential candidate for dressing in priestly clothes.
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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