Kenya’s cancellation of Adani deals preceded massive social media uproar

There was an uproar on social media in Kenya hours after US prosecutors indicted Adani Group’s boss Gautam Adani for bribery on Thursday, forcing the government to cancel multi-billion deals that had been under intense scrutiny for months.
Hashtags like #StopAdani, #ArrestAdani, #StopAdaniDeal and #AdaniMustGo started trending on X in Kenya after the news about US government’s charges of bribery against Adani and six others reached the East African country.
Adani Energy Solutions Limited and Adani Airport Holdings Limited had signed deals worth around USD 2.5 billion with the Kenyan government for building, upgrading and expanding the nation’s electricity transmission lines and capital Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) with the condition of running it on lease for 30 years.
Even after the news of the US indictment, Kenya’s Energy Secretary Opiyo Wandayi told a parliament panel that the deals would go on, as per The Standard.
Between Wandayi’s assertion and President William Ruto’s announcement, Kenyan users flooded X with more than 20 lakh posts and AI-generated images showing Gautam Adani being detained.
‘Adani’ has been the most-used keyword on X in Kenya in the last 24 hours ending 11 am IST, according to social media listening tools.
#ArrestAdani was the top hashtag with more than 55,000 posts on Thursday. Over 41 per cent of the volume came from Kenya alone.
Hashtag #AdaniMustGo ranked second on X, finding mention in nearly 9,000 posts published by social media users in Kenya, shows analytics tool Talkwalker. Similarly, #StopAdani featured in more than 8500 posts within a day in the country.
Other related hashtags like #StopAdaniDeal, #SayNoToAdani and #RutoMustGo had been gaining traction for weeks.
The number of posts on the hashtags is considerably high for Kenya, a country with a reported X user base of just 18 lakh.
AI-generated image of Adani’s fictitious arrest by US authorities was widely shared by the campaign participants. Notably, among them was opposition parliament member Okiya Omtatah.
Despite the announcement of the cancellation of the deals, some of the hashtags continued to trend on Kenya’s social media on Friday as protesters demanded clarity on another pact between an Adani firm and the country’s health ministry.
Earlier this year, whistleblower Nelson Amenya alleged that the Adani Group was awarded contracts without a competitive and transparent bidding process following secret negotiations. Protests had been happening since then, but the government did not budge.
In an interview with Kenya’s TV channel KTN News, Amenya claimed companies from South America and Singapore were interested in upgrading the Jomo airport but were “locked out”. “It’s a bad deal. Adani is not going to touch our runway (of the JKIA) until 2028, a new (proposed) terminal building is not going to be ready by 2029. Yet, if Adani takes over tomorrow, they are going to increase the airport fees by 52 per cent,” he said in an interview in September.
Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and six others were charged with promising over USD 250 million in bribery to government officials in India to secure solar energy contracts.