Charlene Ruto: PHOTO[COURTESY]
The original gazette notice shows that President Ruto appointed Joseph Kipchumba Lagat.
This image on X (formerly Twitter) of a gazette notice claiming that Kenyan President William Ruto has appointed Charlene Ruto as the chairperson of the National Mining Corporation (NMC) has been ALTERED.
President Ruto has a daughter named Charlene. The claim image, a screengrab of a gazette notice showing Charlene’s name highlighted, accompanies a post partly in Kiswahili and reads: “Rigathi Gachagua was Tribal and corrupt, so he must go home and many other stories. Is this not Charlene Ruto whose father has fixed here? She also run(sic) other government tenders.”
The image, also shared here and here, purportedly shows an appointment made by Ruto on 3 October 2024.
However, the image is not accurate.
A review of the image shows that the font used on Charlene’s name is different from the font used in the rest of the document.
PesaCheck further reviewed the 3 October notice, published on the Kenya Law website, which carries a record of all gazette notices, and established that the image under scrutiny had been altered to include Charlene’s name.
In the original notice, Ruto appointed Joseph Kipchumba Lagat as the NMC chair for three years, effective 4 October 2024.
The gazette also lists other appointments reported here.
Moreover, a keyword search revealed that no such appointment by the president was reported by credible media.
Charlene also dismissed the claim in an X post on 11 October 2024.
PesaCheck has looked into an image on X of a gazette notice claiming that President William Ruto has appointed Charlene Ruto as the chairperson of the National Mining Corporation (NMC) and found it to be ALTERED.
This post was first published on the PesaCheck website. It is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organizations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. They do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
