This screen grab on Facebook depicting a tweet purportedly authored by Kenyan lawyer Miguna Miguna and reprimanding President William Ruto and his deputy Rigathi Gachagua is FAKE.

The 12 July 2023-dated tweet claims that the Canada-based lawyer said the two were a wrong choice for the country.

However, the purported tweet has glaring red flags that prompted PesaCheck to investigate its authenticity.

The first red flag is that the tweet uses a 24-hour format on its timestamp, while Twitter uses the 12-hour system.

The date stamp also uses the wrong format, date-month-year, whereas the authentic Twitter format is month-date-year.

We also checked Miguna’s verified Twitter account to confirm if such a tweet was posted on 12 July 2023, but there was none.

On 17 July 2023, the lawyer published this statement, disowning the tweet.

PesaCheck examined a screen grab on Facebook with a tweet purportedly authored by Canada-based Kenyan lawyer Miguna Miguna reprimanding President William Ruto and his deputy Rigathi Gachagua and found it to be FAKE.

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 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 Rodgers Omondi and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.

The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.

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.