On Friday morning, a coordinated pack of bloggers operating from State House and the Orange Democratic Movement machinery wove together a fabricated story claiming that former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua had been expelled from the United Kingdom and barred from meeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Gachagua had left the country a week earlier, travelling to the UK to engage with Kenyans living in Europe and to popularize his newly formed Democracy for Citizens Party. From the moment he landed, he was received like royalty, a remarkable reception for a man they keep trying to shrink and sideline back home.
That warm welcome clearly stung State House operatives deeply. Unable to stomach the sight of Gachagua thriving on the world stage, they went to work, manufacturing lies and sponsoring hashtags designed to humiliate and discredit the son of Wamunyoro. By Friday, coordinated hashtags were flooding X, screaming that the lion from Wamunyoro had been thrown out of Britain and denied access to its prime minister.
The United Kingdom was not amused.
In a swift and cutting response, the British High Commission in Nairobi moved to publicly rubbish the claims, urging Kenyans to treat the fabricated letter circulating on social media with the contempt it deserved.
“The British High Commission in Nairobi confirms that this letter circulating on social media is fake. If it were real, it would probably be stained with spilt tea,” the office stated, delivering what can only be described as a perfectly dry British takedown.
It was a crushing blow to Ruto’s government, which has been systematically deploying bots on X to sponsor anti-Gachagua hashtags and control the narrative around the former deputy president. On Friday, that strategy blew up spectacularly in their faces, with a foreign government stepping in to expose the lies they had been peddling to their own citizens.
