I've had five or discussions with locals over the past ten days. What comes up often is the chatter about facts, numbers, statistics, and reliability. It doesn't matter if you talk to a black, colored, or white...they all laugh over data given out by the government, in essence....fake data.
The true population numbers? Some folks in Cape Town suggest there's one to two million uncounted residents...mostly from Zimbabwe.
Murders? No one believes the monthly police reports.
Robberies? Same story.
One older guy said that when you see some 45 minute interview with a ANC Party official on TV, you can figure that he will 'dump' sixty facts or numbers....of which one or two might be true and the other 98 percent are fake.
So I asked, how can this continue? No one can really answer that. Their perception was that when the TV and news era came....you had to fill empty data columns and false good numbers were better than true bad numbers.
The truth is....there just isn't much to say for news. A lion attack would make for front page news....but that rarely ever happens. I noticed today some hype over a lady locally suing a bed company, when the bed collapsed during a moment of passion and she injured her back falling on the floor. The lawsuit and discussion got front page discussion. In this case, folks don't get fed fake data, and they believe the whole story.
I have three days left on this trip....with potentially 200 fake facts to receive.
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