A new website, Africa Check, has emerged to provide the valuable service of fact checking (and oftentimes debunking) claims from public figures and journalists.
From the website:
For democracy to function, public figures need to be held to account for what they say. The claims they make need to be checked, openly and impartially.
Africa Check is an independent, non-partisan organisation which assesses claims made in the public arena using journalistic skills and evidence drawn from the latest online tools, readers, public sources and experts, sorting fact from fiction and publishing the results.
Hopefully the site will flourish. It got a good writeup in The New York Times recently and should serve as a South African version of Politifact or Factcheck.org and should be a go-to source for anyone writing about Africa and especially South African affairs.
