Image shows Zambian truck with mining equipment, not Kenyan IDs sent to Somalia

In February 2025, Kenyan President William Ruto signed a proclamation to officially abolish arduous identification card vetting requirements for residents of the northeastern part of the country. The region is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Somalis and Somali refugees. Following the recent development, a post shared on X claimed to show a truck transporting Kenyan IDs and passports to Somalia’s capital Mogadishu. The claim is false; the image shows a cold box unit being delivered to a mine in Zambia in 2024.

“First shipment of Kenyan IDs and Passports headed for Mogadishu after the lifting of vetting and background check requirements,” reads an X post published on February 5, 2025, and reposted over 800 times.

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Screenshot of the false post, taken on March 18, 2025

The image accompanying the claim shows a yellow and white freight truck carrying a large load.  

ID vetting in northeastern Kenya

Ruto signed a decree on February 5, 2025, abolishing discriminatory ID vetting requirements for the inhabitants of border counties in Northern Kenya, during a four-day tour in the region (archived here).

Ethnic Somalis and refugees who fled Somalia during the civil war in 1991 make up most of the population in the northeastern part of Kenya, which borders Somalia to the east.

The recent directive means that all Kenyan citizens can now register for national IDs without being subjected to extra scrutiny, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

The 60-year-old vetting requirement for issuing IDs and birth certificates in the region had been adopted as a security measure following the effects of the 1960s Shifta war (archived here and here).

The development has been viewed by critics as a political strategy by Ruto to secure the northeastern voting bloc ahead of the 2027 general elections (archived here).

During his tour, Ruto also opened Kenya’s 10th immigration office in Garissa County to ease the process of acquiring passports for Northern Kenya residents (archived here).

The post shared on X claiming to show identification documents being transported to Somalia following the halting of ID vetting in northern Kenya is, however, false.

Zambia cold box unit

AFP Fact Check conducted reverse image searches and found that the photo was published in an article by Zambia Mining on November 27, 2024 (archived here).

According to the publication, the image shows a cold box unit that was successfully delivered to Zambia’s Kansanshi Mine in Solwezi town.

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Screenshot of the Zambia Mining article, taken on March 18, 2025

Zambia’s Road Development Agency had earlier published the image on Facebook, in an update on the movement of the mining equipment (archived here).

The 64-metre-long piece of equipment, which weighed 154 metric tonnes, was one of the largest loads to travel on Zambian roads, according to Zambian news site Lusaka Times (archived here).