Dagoretti South MP John ‘KJ’ Kiarie has apologized for claiming certain images taken during the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests on Tuesday were doctored.
In a statement on Monday, the legislator said he made the utterances in the heat of the moment during the debate on the finance bill.
He also noted that his remarks were ‘unnecessary, misguided and insensitive’.
Declaring himself a photo expert capable of easily identifying digitally altered images, Kiarie informed the House that many of the photos widely shared on the internet following Tuesday’s protests were actually old images downloaded from various protests around the world.
“The committee was already in the process of engaging Kenyans way before a fake protest was organised… Some of the photos we were seeing, I can tell you as a graphic editor, that they do not belong to this country,” KJ claimed.
The legislator further suggested that crafty Kenyans were skillfully recycling old photos to perpetuate a non-existent narrative.
“Photos were being taken off the internet and being edited and posed as Gen Z. I am a photo expert and I can point out to you photos that were edited to look like they were in the streets of Nairobi but they were not,” he claimed.
“Every digital image has a digital footprint. If a photo was taken in 2020 and was being used (yesterday) we can tell from the metadata of that photo.”