Somewhere in the United States, a New York-based TV presenter has learnt that mentioning Nairobi or Kenya bears consequences. His contemporaries in the industry had learnt that lesson years earlier.
That host, Rob Finnerty, got schooled the way Kenyans know best – through the use of social media. By now, he knows that Kenya is a country where “kusalimiwa” (being bombarded with messages on social media) is a common lobbying tool.
It began during one of Finnerty’s shows where he was complaining about the rising chaos in New York. Finnerty belongs to what is often described as the conservative wing of American television. He hosts “Finnerty”, a nightly primetime show on Newsmax that he started on October 8, 2024.
Newsmax describes itself as an independent news network with a conservative perspective, and when Finnerty joined it, a Florida publication described it as President Donald Trump’s new favourite cable channel.
Finnerty’s common targets in the show are Democrats, the mainstream media and what he sees as “woke” culture.
With that background, it would be a no-brainer as to why he would compare the current state of New York with Nairobi and Uganda. During an October 9 broadcast, he claimed that former President Joe Biden had allowed millions of people from Africa, the Middle East and South America into the country, adding: “They move to blue sanctuary cities, and the cities then start to look more like Nairobi than New York City.”
A montage was run from interviews conducted on motorcyclists living and working in New York. They said they came from Africa and other Global South countries like Guatemala.
“Take a look. Every single person we talked to were immigrants from Third World countries, which is exactly what the new socialist mayor of New York City wants. He was born in Uganda. Why not make New York City look more like Uganda? And it does,” said Finnerty.
With the remarks about Nairobi, he stirred the nest that is Kenyans on social media, who found his social media accounts and used them to express their displeasure. As the barrage of criticism mounted, his Instagram account was changed to private and comments to posts were restricted.
On Tuesday, he was forced to make an apology on X. He wrote: “I want to offer an apology to the people of Nairobi, Kenya. The passion you have for your city and homeland is amazing… We all make mistakes. I misspoke, and I am sorry to anyone I have offended.”
Later in the day, on his show, he also read out an apology.
“While discussing my concerns about New York City turning into a third world city under the new mayor, I compared what New York City has become to the city of Nairobi, which was just wrong. Nairobi, which is in Kenya, is a largely Christian nation,” he said. “I know my comments offended a lot of really good people who live there and all over the world. And for that, I am truly sorry. It was a stupid comparison to make, frankly, because unlike so many other cities all over the world, Nairobi is actually thriving.”
“And I know I’ve got the responsibility as a broadcaster, as a journalist, to speak thoughtfully and respectfully, and I failed here, and I will admit that. So, I hope the people of Kenya accept this apology,” he further said.
It is telling that he only apologised to Kenyans whereas Uganda was equally slandered by his remark. That is where the key lies – the “mobbing” power of Kenyans online.
For Kenyans, this has been happening for well over a decade. In March 2012, after grenade attacks at a Nairobi bus station, American network CNN ran its coverage under the banner “Violence in Kenya”, with the country’s flag in the background.
Kenyans on Twitter (KoT) responded with the hashtag #SomeoneTellCNN, which was posted so many times that it trended globally. Within hours, CNN’s Nairobi correspondent David McKenzie tweeted: “Our reporting on last night was accurate, the banner used in the bulletin was not… Apologies to all.” The video was subsequently pulled down.
The hashtag came back a year later, during the 2013 General Election, when it was used to lampoon a CNN report on militias preparing for conflict in the Rift Valley. A second hashtag, #PicturesForStuart, targeted France 24 anchor Stuart Norval, who had tweeted about “dramatic pictures” of crowds at polling stations, and Kenyans replied with their own “dramatic pictures”.
A more prominent episode came in July 2015. Days before the visit to Kenya by America’s 44th president Barack Obama, a CNN report said he was “not just heading to his father’s homeland, but to a hotbed of terror”. #SomeoneTellCNN came back to life, registering as many as 120,000 tweets.
The late Joseph Nkaissery, who was then the Interior Cabinet Secretary, demanded that CNN apologise “if it is civilised enough”, and the Kenya Tourism Board said it was withdrawing advertising from the network.
In August that year, CNN’s Executive Vice President and Managing Director, Tony Maddox, flew from Atlanta to Nairobi to apologise in person to President Uhuru Kenyatta . He told the President: “It is regrettable and we shouldn’t have done it. There is a world at war with extremists; we know what a hotbed of terror looks like, and Kenya isn’t one.”
The New York Times faced the same anger in January 2019, after it published graphic photographs of victims of the DusitD2 terror attack in Nairobi. More than 12,000 people signed a Change.org petition asking the paper to take the photos down, and its photo handle, @NYTphoto, was suspended by Twitter. It is still suspended.
The campaigns have also gone after individual celebrities. In early 2026, American actress Skai Jackson claimed that mirrors were so expensive in Kenya that some Kenyans did not know their own reflections. Her social media pages were flooded with angry comments, and she posted a video apology, saying she had been referring to a single village she visited in 2018, not the whole country.
Finnerty has now got the same schooling. Kenyans rejected his first apology on X and demanded that he apologises on the same show where he made the remarks, and he eventually did so.
In reply to the apologies, Kenyans have been brandishing the line from the Swahili anthem: “Kenya istahili heshima .” Will Ugandans also go after him? Time will tell.
