Social media is awash with pictures of former President Mwai Kibaki look -alike.
Several people have posted the picture of a man who resembles former president Kibaki with the caption
“This Ugandan man is in Kenya looking for his father. He was born in 1960’s when his mother was at Makerere University, his mother told him that his father was Kenyan and was a very prominent politician. Your guess is as good as mine,” posted a group calling itself Kenyans online.
Another user Journalist Geoffrey Mosoku posted “He is from Uganda. He has heard that his father is a Kenyan who came to study in Makerere University. He is set to start a mission to come to Kenya to search for his roots…help a brother… Any leads???”
Before joining politics in Kenya, former President Mwai Kibaki studied in Makerere Univesity, Uganda.
However, the identity of the man and what he does have remained scanty.
It’s not also clear if the man is Ugandan, Kenyan or maybe he is from any other country.
However, cases of people looking alike in the world and not related are many.
In 2013, the Ugandan media claimed that President Uhuru Kenyatta’s grandfather might have been the legendary Bunyoro king Kabalega who fought a long guerrilla war against the British colonialists.
After he was declared the president elect, the then present day Omukama of Bunyoro, Solomon Gafabusa Iguru, congratulated Uhuru Kenyatta on his election and recalled how the late Jomo Kenyatta often visited his father, the late Sir Tito Winyi.
Then after social media in Uganda was full of talk about ‘Iguru congratulating his cousin’.
According to the Ugandan media then, the theory that the first president of Kenya was the son of the Omukama Kabalega of Bunyoro-Kitara stemmed from the remarkable resemblance between Kabalega and Jomo Kenyatta.
Kabalega and Mwanga, the deposed Kabaka of Buganda, were eventually captured in the plains of Lango in 1899 by a combined force of British, Baganda and Nubian troops.
Kabalega was shot in the right arm which had to be amputated.
They were then marched into exile. On their way to the Seychelles through Kismayu, Kabalega’s wound became severely septic.
His journey was halted and he stayed in Kenya at a place called ‘Kikuyu’ for two years to undergo treatment, according to colonial records.
While in the Kenyan hospital, a young Kikuyu nurse allegedly attended to Kabalega who then fell in love with her, bringing the young Kamau into being.
There are different reports of the date and place of Kenyatta’s birth. But historians agree that he was born Kamau Ngengi in a place called Ngenda between 1897 and 1901, around the time Kabalega spent two years in Kenya.
Historians agree that Kenyatta’s father died when he was young and his mother, who was a nurse, subsequently remarried. But she is said to have gone back to her parent’s home further north, where she died.
He was baptized in Johnstone Kamau in August 1914, but later adopted the name Jomo (Kikuyu for burning spear) Kenyatta (from the waist bead belt worn by natives then).
A guide to the Seychelles, where Kabalega spent 24 years in exile, mentions that “Kabalega was a father to a prominent politician in the region”.
If Kabalega was indeed Jomo’s father, the Kenyan son appears to have inherited the fighting spirit of the legendary Ugandan resistance leader.
In September 2014, Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye met Jeff Ochieng, a Kenyan photojournalist who he resembles.
In early August 2014, The New Vision wrote a story about 22-year-old Ochieng who had been searching for his father.
Ochieng told New Vision then that for the past 9 years, he had been asked if he was Besigye’s son because of the striking resemblance.
Ochieng travelled to Uganda where he met Besigye but Besigye denied Ochieng is his son.