Africa Check

Yes, mayoral candidate Helen Zille was correct about infrastructure spending in South Africa’s metros

Africa Check corrected its verdict that she was wrong to claim that Johannesburg spends less on maintenance than any other ...
Africa Check

Africa Check fellows graduate, bullish about future of fact-checking and media literacy in Africa in AI age

Fellows from Algeria, Lesotho, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda wrapped up a two-week programme aimed at boosting information resilience.
Africa Check

#AnambraGovernorship election: Offences that could land voters in trouble with the law

Anambra’s 2021 governor election saw issues related to administration and security, and electoral malpractice in the form of ...
Africa Check

No, viral photo doesn’t show Mozambican woman arrested in Johannesburg, despite endorsement by untrustworthy sources and chatbot

A photograph of a woman dressed in orange struggling with another woman in police uniform has been widely shared in South ...
Africa Check

Nigeria’s senate president Akpabio didn’t say president Trump should focus on US or ‘Nigerians aren’t complaining about killings’

IN SHORT: According to several Facebook posts, Nigeria’s senate president Godswill Akpabio told US president Donald Trump to focus on the US instead of Nigeria. But the state attributed to Akpabio has ...
Africa Check

Why it's wrong to call South Africa - or any country - the world's 'rape capital'

Claims that South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo or even India can lay claim to the unwanted title of "rape capital of the world” have been doing the rounds for well over a decade. In 2000, ...
Africa Check

No, WhatsApp still fully encrypted. Ignore old hoax that the government will monitor your messages and calls

IN SHORT: An online message from 2021 has resurfaced in Kenya claiming that all WhatsApp calls will be recorded, social media monitored, and that “devices will connect to the ministry system”. But ...
Africa Check

Are SA whites really being killed 'like flies'? Why Steve Hofmeyr is wrong

Are white Afrikaners really being killed “like flies”? Is a white South African farmer being “slaughtered every five days?” Would the number of whites “killed in SA in black on white violence” fill ...
Africa Check

Are 40% of South African women raped in their lifetime and only 8.6% of perpetrators jailed?

A newspaper ad made two shocking claims about how many women would be raped in their lifetime, and how few rapists were convicted for their crimes. There is too little data available to conclude that ...
Africa Check

ANALYSIS: Why does an old, false claim about tetanus vaccine safety refuse to die?

Under the guise of tetanus vaccination, the Unicef and World Health Organisation is supposedly conducting a “mass sterilisation exercise” in Kenya. Or so a French content aggregator of health ...
Africa Check

South Africa's criminal cops: Is the rot far worse than we have been told?

1,448 serving police officers are convicted criminals, among them a major-general, ten brigadiers, 21 colonels, ten majors, 43 lieutenant-colonels, 163 captains, 84 lieutenants and 716 warrant ...
Africa Check

FACTSHEET: Statistics on farm attacks and murders in South Africa

Attacks on people living and working on farms and smallholdings in South Africa are a topic of emotive debate. The terms “farm attack” and “farm murders” are popularly used to refer to “certain crimes ...