The governor of Kenya’s capital has denied that contractors are uprooting grass planted in Nairobi for US President Barack Obama’s visit.<\/p>\n
A video began circulating on social media on Thursday appearing to show workers in the city uprooting plants and alleging they were only on loan.<\/p>\n
But Nairobi governor Evans Kidero said a contractor was “restoring the ground in order to do the proper planting”.<\/p>\n
Mr Obama left Kenya on Sunday after his weekend visit.<\/p>\n
The governor’s efforts to plant grass along the roads only a few days before President Obama’s trip had previously been mocked on social media.<\/p>\n
The BBC’s Abdullahi Abdi in Nairobi says the governor spent about 50m Kenyan shillings ($488,000, \u00a3312,000) on giving the city a facelift, which included planting the grass.<\/p>\n
Last week, the governor used the hashtag #KideroGrass in a plea for people to avoid walking on the newly planted verges.<\/p>\n
It then began trending on Twitter, and even Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta got involved, joking: “Don’t worry: Plant it, it shall grow”, Kenya’s Capital TV reports.<\/p>\n
Governor Kidero used the hashtag again in his Facebook post on Thursday denying the accusation that plants were being uprooted.<\/p>\n
“NO ONE is uprooting \u202a#\u200eKideroGrass,” he said.<\/p>\n
“#KideroGrass is well on course, the quality of grass selected takes time to grow!” he added.<\/p>\n
One of the comments on his post said: “Governor please explain to me slooowly why the flowers were planted with polythene bags intact”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The governor of Kenya’s capital has denied that contractors are uprooting grass planted in Nairobi for US President Barack Obama’s visit. A video began circulating on social media on Thursday appearing to show workers in the city uprooting plants and alleging they were only on loan. But Nairobi governor Evans Kidero said a contractor was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":139394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-139393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/139394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}