Old video falsely shared as showing 2025 vandalism act at Kenyan ruling party office

Published on January 16, 2025 at 16:27
Updated on January 20, 2025 at 11:56
3 min read
By Peris GACHAHI, AFP Kenya

The majority leader of Kenya’s National Assembly, an ally of President William Ruto, was recently involved in a verbal altercation with an opposition member over a wave of abductions in the country. A video shared on TikTok claims to show Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) party office in Trans Nzoia being vandalised following the spat. However, the claim is false: the incident dates back to 2021 and is unrelated to the men.

“UDA office in Kitale vandalized after Kimani Ichungwah demeaning Governor Natembeya,” reads a text overlay on a TikTok post shared on January 14, 2025.

Screenshot of the false post, taken on January 15, 2024

Kimani Ichung'wah is the national assembly’s majority party leader and a member of UDA, while George Natembeya is the governor of Trans Nzoia county and deputy leader of the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP-K) (archived here and here). Kitale is a town in Trans Nzoia.

The footage shows a group of men pelting stones and hurling chairs at the UDA-branded building to the sound of shattering glass.

Verbal altercation

Natembeya and Ichung’wah had a heated exchange on January 3, 2025, during the burial ceremony of the mother of the national assembly speaker Moses Wetang’ula in Bungoma county in western Kenya (archived here).

The governor called on the president, who was in attendance, to step in and put an end to the rising cases of abductions, arguing that there was no justifiable reason for targeting state critics (archived here).

Ichung’wah in turn rebuked the governor over his remarks, noting that Natembeya was a regional commissioner in the previous regime, which faced similar allegations (archived here).

The claim about the TikTok video is, however, misleading.

Old video

AFP Fact Check performed video reverse searches and found that the clip was published on the YouTube channel of Kenya Digital News on April 30, 2021 (archived here).

Local media reported at the time that youth were unhappy about the way some leaders were conducting party affairs (archived here).

Screenshot of the People Daily article, taken on January 15, 2024

Neither Natembeya nor Ichung’wah were mentioned in the incident.

January 20, 2025Adds the metadata of the country being mentioned in the claim

January 20, 2025 Adds the metadata of the country being mentioned in the claim

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