FALSE: This photo of a man in a room full of sports shoes is not Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni
The photo has been shared on a post claiming that the shoes are part of Museveni’s strategy to appeal to young voters, but it was first shared in 2017 from Zimbabwe
An article with a photo claiming to show Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni posing with sports shoes is FAKE.
The photo shows a man in a room with pairs of high-end sports shoes, including Nike Air Force Ones, Classic Adidas Superstars and Nike Air Jordans. The photo was published alongside an article published on Bana.co.ke, a Kenyan blog, claiming that the man in the picture is Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, and that had bought more than 100 pairs of sports shoes to increase his appeal among young voters ahead of the 2021 general election. The same claim and photo have been tweeted by Flame TV Kenya.
However, a Google reverse image search finds that the man in the picture is Zimbabwean businessman Wicknell Chivayo and not President Museveni, revealing the image was first shared in 2017 on an article about Chivayo’s extensive shoe collection.
Additionally, the Bana.co.ke article attributes the claim that President Museveni had bought the shoes to the Daily Monitor newspaper in Uganda, but no such story has been shared on the paper’s website, or on its Twitter and Facebook pages.
PesaCheck has looked into an article claiming to show Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni posing with more than 100 sports shoes he bought to lure youthful voters and finds it to be FALSE.
This post 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 organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Fact-Checker Pius Enywaru and edited by PesaCheck Deputy Editor Enock Nyariki.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck Managing Editor Eric Mugendi.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
