Kenya: Man Who Sued Kenya’s Deputy President Murdered? No Evidence and Claim Not Published By Citizen TV

According to reports, Mwaniki wanted to run for the Gatundu constituency parliamentary seat in Kiambu county in the August elections. Kiambu borders Nairobi to the north.

Mwaniki had made similar claims to Kioko in a lengthy Facebook post in October 2021. He wrote that he “started the bottoms up economic model conversation in the year 2014” and “came up with bottom up economic model blueprint”.

But Africa Check could find no evidence that Mwaniki had taken this complaint to the courts and we could find no reports of foul play in his death.

No evidence of post

We thought it unlikely that Citizen TV would have gotten the facts so muddled, so next we searched on Facebook for the exact words from the screenshot and came up empty.

Then we copied and followed the link in the screenshot. But this led to an unrelated article published by the TV station on 21 March 2022. The article was about a hike in fuel prices.

There is no indication that the late Martin Mwaniki, who had criticised Ruto’s use of the term “bottom-up economics”, was murdered. He had not gone to court to claim ownership of the term. We could also find no evidence that Jacob Kioko, who was challenging the model in the high court, had been murdered.

It would appear that someone copied the link to an existing but unrelated Citizen TV article when falsifying the post in this screenshot. It was not published or posted on Facebook by Citizen TV.