President Uhuru Kenyatta checks his laptop during a live stream on his Facebook recently. He is accused of using fake news and vernacular radio inappropriately in a bid to woo voters. [Photo: the-star.co.ke]President Uhuru Kenyatta and NASA flag bearer Raila Odinga have been accused of employing 'dirty tricks' to woo voters that include fake news and vernacular radio to disseminate 'poisonous bile'.Veteran journalist and newspaper columnist Macharia Gaitho says that Uhuru's 'dirty tricks' department was behind the fake news video productions purporting to be from CNN and BBC projecting his victory over Raila."Mr Kenyatta has his slick fake news video productions, purporting to be CNN and BBC broadcasts predicting his victory. The gullible faithful are lapping it up. He also has at his service the internet and vernacular radio, whose poisonous bile if disseminated by any other candidate would attract whole battalions of angry officials threatening to hang, draw and quarter anyone so brazenly breaking the laws on hate speech election advertising," writes Gaitho on Tuesday's Daily Nation.He adds that the web-based propaganda affords the Jubilee Party campaign a degree of separation in case those 'pesky meddlers from the International Criminal Court take an interest'.Raila, on the other hand, is accused of 'shouting it from the rooftops' without concealing his 'manoeuvres'."Mr Odinga, by contrast, does not conceal his manoeuvres behind the anonymity of the World Wide Web: He personally shouts it out from the rooftops, and the blindly faithful get even more agitated. He has made so much noise about election rigging that one must wonder whether he might be falling into a carefully laid Jubilee trap," adds. Gaitho.He adds: "If the election is eventually stolen, Mr Odinga will scream and shout, 'I told you so!' But Mr Kenyatta will be laughing with his own, 'I told you so', having consistently sold the narrative that the persistent alarm bells were just advance preparations for the eventual rejection of the election results."Gaitho's main misgiving for Raila is that he constantly whine and generally engage in unchecked rhetoric that could add fuel to the fire in our already explosive arena of ethnic political duels."Mr Odinga, in many ways, seems guilty of wild and reckless statements that succeed, at least, in drawing angry ripostes from his rivals," he says.

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