Old images on social media falsely linked to tax hike protest in Kenya
- Published on July 19, 2023 at 12:07
- 4 min read
- By James OKONG'O, AFP Kenya
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Seven people in Kenya died and hundreds were arrested on July 12, 2023, after opposition leader Raila Odinga called for protests against government tax proposals and the rising cost of living (archived here).
In the Mlolongo area of the capital Nairobi, protesters burned tires and dismantled part of a recently-built toll expressway, a road many locals cannot afford to use (archived here).
Since March, Odinga has repeatedly called on Kenyans to protest as the country grapples with the burden of surging living costs.
The new taxes (archived here) have added to the frustration, with inflation at around 7.9 percent (archived here). An additional 1.5 percent housing levy and a doubling of taxes on petroleum products from eight to 16 percent are expected to have a ripple effect.
Odinga has vowed to stage further protests, with another scheduled for three days beginning July 19, 2023.
By conducting reverse image searches, AFP Fact Check established that three photos purported to be from the July 12, 2023 march were old and unrelated.
Old photos and footage
One of the photos was published on Twitter on the day of the protest.
The tweet, written in Swahili, translates to “Live scenes in Kilifi county,” followed by the hashtag “#MaandamanoKilifi”.
“Maandamano” is Swahili for “protest”.
The photo shows a man in a yellow T-shirt running through a cloud of tear gas smoke. However, the image is neither recent nor was it taken in Kilifi.
We traced the original to the Reuters photo archive (archived here). It was taken by journalist Baz Ratner in November 2017 when police dispersed Odinga supporters as they welcomed him back to the country from an overseas trip.
Five people were killed that day when Kenyan police used tear gas to break up crowds cheering Odinga’s convoy from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to central Nairobi (archived here).
Odinga had urged his supporters to boycott an election rerun in 2017 after the initial results of the presidential poll were nullified. Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner with 98 percent of the vote in a rerun in which only 39 percent of registered voters participated.
Another image published on July 12, 2023, shows a section of a highway blocked with rocks and police trucks parked on the road.
However, the photo was taken in July 2022 and shows police officers cordoning off (archived here) a section of the Nairobi-Thika highway after a fuel tanker overturned. It was published by Nairobi News and credited to Lucy Wanjiru.
No casualties were reported.
A third image, tweeted by politician Samson Cherargei, who is the senator for Nandi County in Rift Valley, shows people going about their businesses in a commercial part of a city.
Cherargei, a close ally of President William Ruto, claimed the photo showed how peaceful the streets of Nairobi’s Central Business District were on July 12, 2023.
Cherargei's tweet also stoked ethnic prejudice by implying that only people from Odinga’s Luo community participated in the protests.
But the image used by Cherargei has been online since at least 2019 (archived here).
UN-Habitat published the photo in its May 2021 newsletter (archived here) as part of a report about a revamp of Luthuli Avenue, a street in downtown Nairobi. Mark Ojal took the image in 2019 and another picture of the same street in 2018 before it was given a makeover.
AFP Fact Check recently debunked another claim linking a video to the protests. The video purportedly showed the invasion of a police station by marchers, but it was actually taken in May.
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