The UDA party presidential candidate William Ruto has withdrawn from the 2022 presidential debate scheduled by the media stakeholder for July 12.

Through a statement released by his Director of Communication Hussein Mohamed, decried being eclipsed by a section of the media whom be accused of being biased against him.

“We have noted with much concern the repeated and continued bias and propaganda in a section of Kenya's mainstream media in abuse of statutory terms of license and violations of constitutional freedoms,” the statement read.

According to his campaign secretariat, there has been an unequal allocation of coverage and negative profiling of the Kenya Kwanza Alliance and its affiliates.

“We note the unequal allocation of coverage, compounded by biased framing and negative profiling of the Kenya Kwanza Alliance campaign and personalities affiliated to it,” the statement read in part.

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Even though Ruto and his team termed the actions as wicked and inconsequential to enlightened people, they demanded fair play as a matter of right as well as professional decency.

“Political news is a matter of public interest and its coverage therefore by a journalist, media practitioner or media enterprise, according to the Media Council Act (2013), has to be done fairly, accurately and with all sides of the story being reported. This has been deliberately contravened, consciously ignored and brazenly abused by the sections of the media,” the statement read.

They further mentioned two established media houses in the statement which they accused of abusing public bandwidth by offering unfair coverage against their faction.

“We expect the media to play their rightful role in cultivating a healthy, robust and inclusive discourse. Our democracy depends on the media to make our political environment less divisive and less toxic,” the statement read.


Based on the allegations, the Kenya Kwanza team is threatening to withdraw from the 2022 presidential debate as a consequence.

“Under the current partisan media environment, we have advised our candidate against participating in the Presidential debates,” the statement read.

The Kenya Kwanza Alliance has alleged they receive limited media coverage compared to their chief opponents in the Raila Odinga led Azimio la Umoja One Kenya coalition.