Fact Check: Is President Uhuru Kenyatta Back On Twitter?
The twitter account for President Uhuru Kenyatta has been restored, days after controversial President’s Strategic Communications Unit (PSCU) team led by Dennis Itumbi.
However, the account is not being operated from State House, as it may seem.
A suspended Twitter handle is made available to a new user after a year of inactivity, and the President’s account clocked a year on March 19, 2020. The account therefore does not belong to the President, as it is indicated to be unofficial.
The account, @UKenyatta, was suspended alongside all his social media accounts in March last year, over alleged hacking by some staff in his office.
The alleged staffers were suspected to be the PSCU team led by Iumbi, who were responsible for handling the accounts.
The twitter account at that time had 3.62 million followers and 12,300 tweets.
Hours before the suspension, the account had tweeted a stern warning on corruption.
“If you are corrupt we will fight you. You can be my brother or my sister or my closest political ally, but if you are corrupt we will fight you,” Mr Kenyatta tweeted from Windhoek, the Namibian capital, where he was on a state visit.
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Many believed an administrator with ill intentions had fired the tweet to put Mr Kenyatta at loggerheads with his deputy William Ruto.
After hours of speculation, his Chief Of Staff Nzioka Waita tweeted that the accounts had been deactivated.
“On account of unauthorised access to the official social media handles of H.E the President of the Republic of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta .All official social media handles for the President have been temporarily suspended to allow for the necessary remedial measures to be undertaken,” he said.
At that time, President Kenyatta was the most followed leader in Sub-Saharan Africa on Twitter according to a study released in 2018 dubbed Twiplomacy by Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW), an international communications agency.
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