FALSE: This video announcing the death of ex-South African President Thabo Mbeki is misleading
The video is an old clip by the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation after the station erroneously reported the purported death in 2016.
This post on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that former South African President Thabo Mbeki is dead is FALSE.
The post says Mbeki died at the age of 74 after a short illness. The same claim has been published here, here and here.
However, the video is similar to a previous clip by the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, which erroneously reported Mbeki’s death in August 2016. The same clip has resurfaced in recent posts, falsely announcing the death of the ex-president.
According to the South African government portal, Mbeki is currently 81 years old, contrary to the claim in the post that he is 74.
The same clip has resurfaced in recent posts as seen here to claim that the ex-President has passed on.
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation also dispelled the claim regarding the purported death in a January 2024 statement.
PesaCheck has looked into a post on the X (formerly Twitter) claiming that former South African President Thabo Mbeki is dead and found it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Pius Enywaru and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
