What do these statements about Africa have in common? A white farmer is killed every five days in South Africa. Earlier this year Nigerian Islamists Boko Haram burnt 375 Christians alive. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the rape capital of the world. Johannesburg is the world’s biggest man-made forest.
Answer: despite being widely accepted, none of them is true. In an age when information cascades down Twitter feeds by the millisecond, it is increasingly difficult to sieve for facts, especially when it relates to much of Africa.
Step forward newcomer websites such as BudgIT and Africa Check, who are hoping to usher in the kind of non-partisan data and fact-checking services made popular by the likes of PolitiFact and others in the West.
Their daunting tasks range from tackling the sort of popular myths which once led outsiders to cast Africa as a land of giant birds and cannibals, to taking on officials in countries where data is often sketchy and accountability even more so. By poking holes in accepted narratives, the websites’ creators hope to “kickstart people’s sceptical reflex,” said Peter Cunliffe-Jones, an Africa Check founder and journalist who formerly worked in Nigeria.
That country has a particularly fearsome reputation when it comes to sorting fact from fiction. This week, the military claimed — for a second time — that dozens of almost 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by Islamists Boko Haram had been freed amid an “ongoing” rescue operation. None had been, and the statement was later retracted.
The fledgling website, headquartered in the journalism department of Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University, hopes to foster a culture where even simple statements can be verified before they are picked up by local newspapers, and sometimes foreign ones.
Misinformation can have severe practical consequences. That has recently been illustrated in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where many people’s initial conviction that the Ebola outbreak was a hoax created by their governments to plunder public coffers led to them disregarding health warnings.
Inaccurate media reports are hardly limited to Africa, but there’s a greater chance of international newspapers getting things wrong — and not admitting so — when it comes to the continent, Ms. Seay said.
Around half of Africa Check’s investigations are triggered by readers wanting to know anything from the veracity of claims made by pop stars to supposed disease-busting local herbs.
Operating out of Lagos and Johannesburg, the not-for-profit organisation funded by grants and individual donations has a team of five full-timers working alongside volunteers and freelancers, and hopes to expand to Kenya and Senegal next. Anton Harber, a highly-regarded South African former investigative journalist and co-founder of the project, explained its ultimate aim. “I imagine a situation in which every public figure and journalist feels nervous about what they say or write because Africa Check might just catch them out.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
