IN SHORT: In the midst of Rigathi Gachagua's impeachment proceedings, a TikTok video claims that president Ruto has forgiven him and given him new responsibilities. But the audio is from a speech made two years ago.
Two identical videos, one with an English caption and the other with a caption partly in Kiswahili, are circulating on TikTok claiming that president William Ruto has “forgiven” his embattled deputy Rigathi Gachagua.
Each video is 37 seconds long. In one video, the caption reads: “President Ruto forgives his deputy Rigathi Gachagua and assigns him responsibilities.”
The videos show Ruto delivering a presidential address in which he says: “A very busy person. And I am sending an executive order for print to assign my deputy very clear responsibilities that will assist me to be able to discharge the heavy responsibility put on my shoulders by the people of Kenya.”
Together, the videos have over 489,000 views and more than 17,000 likes.
The context
Ruto chose Gachagua to be his running mate in the 2022 presidential election. At the time, Ruto was Uhuru Kenyatta’s deputy. The Kenyatta-Ruto duo won a second term in 2017. But the two appeared to fall out early in that term, with Kenyatta accusing Ruto of campaigning prematurely.
Subsequently, most of Ruto's duties as deputy president were allegedly transferred to then interior minister Fred Matiang'i. In his 2022 campaign, Ruto promised that he would never allow his deputy to be “humiliated”, like he had been.
But two years after winning the 2022 elections, the relationship between Ruto and his deputy Gachagua has also soured. On 1 October, the national assembly passed an impeachment motion to remove Gachagua from office.
The motion was then sent to the senate for a hearing set for 16 and 17 October.
The videos began circulating a few days after the national assembly voted to impeach Gachagua. But are they authentic? We checked.
Video from 2022
An online search of terms in Ruto’s speech, such as “sending an executive order,” along with his name, brings up several videos of an event he hosted at State House when he nominated his first cabinet.
The video can be found on the State House Kenya’s YouTube page posted on 27 September 2022. It is clear that the suspicious video consists entirely of a segment of this original video, from minute 3:48 to minute 4:25.
The speech took place more than two years before October 2024, two weeks after Ruto was sworn in as president. On that occasion, Ruto also assigned responsibilities to his deputy Gachagua. This speech is not recent.
Because of the public interest in Gachagua's impeachment, such a development would also make national headlines and be widely reported by official government sources. This has not happened. Ruto has maintained a studied silence on the impeachment of his deputy.
Further evidence that this was not the case was Gachagua's appearance before the senate in his defence on 16 and 17 October.
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