Cameroonian appointed head of continent’s largest fact-checker

By Hans Ngala

Valdez Onanina, a Cameroonian journalist has been appointed as the head of AfricaCheck- the first and largest fact-checking organization in Africa.

Onanina will be based at the organization’s French-language office in Dakar, Senegal where he will head AfricaCheck’s French edition with the French-language team.

AfricaCheck, founded in 2019 ,aims to hold public officials and powerful institutions they make in the public sphere as well as aims to debunk misleading claims made by individuals.

AfricaCheck started in Johannesburg, South Africa and has since expanded to have regional offices in Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar and London.

Some of their notable fact-checks include fact-checking viral claims made about South Africa on Facebook, such as a claim in 2013 that South Africa was “worse off now than 19 years ago. Sixteen claims about South Africa were investigated including claims such as “unemployment in South Africa has increased by over 60% in the past 19 years”, South Africa has the highest rate of rape in the world, and South Africa is one of the top-ten countries in the world for murder. Regarding these claims, Africa Check found that South Africa’s unemployment rate has increased from 20% to 24.7% during the last 19 years, an increase of 23.5%, so the claim of a 60% increase was false. They could not substantiate the claim that South Africa has the highest rate of rape in the world, but they reported that it is probably true that South Africa is in the top ten countries for highest murder rates.

In October 2018, Facebook announced its intention to co-operate with Africa Check and other third-party fact-checkers in Kenya, as well as the help of users, to flag fake news stories in a bid to improve the quality of news people find on its platform. It was subsequently to be rolled out to other African states. In the same month Facebook also started to provide fact checking tools to reduce fake news in Nigeria.
The number of journalists consulting AfricaCheck when they want to verify certain facts, is growing and their new Podcast, ‘Whatscrap on Whatsapp’ is helping to shed light on some issues of the day.

The organization hopes to grow its reach in Francophone Africa under the leadership of Valdez Onanina as he heads its French service.