Rumours online claim that President Barack Obama intends to run for President of Kenya in 2021.
The rumours were started by the website WorldNewsDailyReport.com that published an article with the headline “Barack Obama announces intention to run as president of Kenya in 2021” that claimed the former US president announced his candidacy “this morning” while touring Africa.
The article reads in a part –
In a surprise announcement that could upset African politics for years to come, former American President Barack Obama has confirmed this morning his candidacy in the 2021 Kenyan presidential campaign.
Son of a Kenyan senior governmental economist, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., the politician who served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017 is actually touring Africa to give a series of conferences.
While visiting the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, he was greeted by a large and extremely enthusiastic crowd, loudly cheering and chanting his name.
Mr. Obama drew an almost ecstatic roar from the crowd when he made the announcement that he was returning to politics.
“I’m a bit disgusted with American politics recently while seeing Kenya struggle. I realized I needed to do something to help my Homeland.”
The story is pure fiction, and started by WorldNewsDailyReport, a website that deals exclusively in spoof news. It has a tag line that reads “where facts don’t matter” under its flagship logo, and a disclaimer in the footer of each page that reads “World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content.”
However the story has been copied verbatim onto many other aggregator and copycat websites, and even appears to have made its way onto otherwise legitimate media outlets, including the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and the Maravi Post.
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Even if the story wasn’t started by a spoof news website, it is doubtful that President Obama would even be eligible to run for the President of Kenya, since the Constitution of Kenya requires any presidential candidate to be a “citizen of birth” (Obama was born in Hawaii, USA) and to “not owe allegiance to a foreign state”, which Obama obviously would.
Of course, it appears this spoof article is designed to tie in with the long running conspiracy theory that Obama was in fact born in Kenya, not the United States, and as such was always ineligible to run as President of the United States.
We rank the claim that Obama is running for President of Kenya in 2021 as false.