Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta is under fire for launching projects past curfew hours.

President Kenyatta launched five hospitals on Tuesday night and explained that it was necessary to do it at night so as to ensure efficiency in service provision.

He said the hospitals in the capital, Nairobi, were meant to operate 24 hours and he needed to monitor that.

The president also explained that a daytime launch would have violated the social distancing guidelines.

"As you have seen for yourselves, it would have been impossible to go and do what we did today, during the day because of the number of people who would have been out there," he told journalists.

Kenyans online accused the president of disobeying his own orders.

"Why is President Uhuru Kenyatta launching projects at night! Why is he defying curfew hours? He has no respect to his orders too, leave alone court orders," Ongoma tweeted.

"President Uhuru Kenyatta should be tomorrow be arraigned in court of law for breaking curfew hours," Miqdad Abdissalam wrote..

"Now Uhuru should lift the curfew as he too sees the value of working extra hours in the night," Ahmad Salim tweeted.

Kenya's overnight curfew runs from 22:00 to 0400 local time in the capital and the rest of the country except for some counties in the west where its starts earlier at 19:00.