About & methodology

What we cover

All 24 wards of Stellenbosch Local Municipality — including Kayamandi, Cloetesville, Idas Valley, Jamestown, Pniel, Kylemore, Lanquedoc, Franschhoek and the rural areas — and provincial services such as Stellenbosch Hospital, clinics, ambulances and public schools.

How a claim gets onto this site

1. Researchers find and save the original record (council agenda, minutes, budget, tender award, judgment, reply in the legislature) with its address and retrieval date.
2. Each claim is written down with its source, page or paragraph, the responsible institution, any counter-evidence and any official response.
3. An independent editor opens the cited document at the cited page and assigns an evidence status.
4. Only reviewed records are integrated into the published data. The site is generated from that data; nothing is typed into pages by hand.

Evidence labels

Verified

Confirmed against an original primary record by the independent fact-checker.

Corroborated

Supported by at least two independent credible sources, but not yet by a primary record.

Under investigation

Reported or alleged; evidence is still being gathered. Not an established fact.

Disputed

Credible sources or the responsible institution contest this account.

Unsupported

Examined and not supported by the available evidence.

Principles

• We never invent figures, quotes, documents, dates or locations. Where something is not known, we say so.
• Allegations are kept separate from findings. An evidence label describes the evidence, not guilt.
• We do not infer corruption, nepotism or discrimination from relationships, race or repeated success.
• We distinguish municipal, provincial and national responsibility, and say which institution had legal authority.
• We record official responses, successes and corrective action, not only failures.
• We are non-partisan: officeholders are assessed on decisions within their mandates. We make no electoral predictions.
• Where records are missing, we prepare formal access-to-information (PAIA) requests; the municipality has said some document collections are being restored, so a missing document is recorded as missing, not as non-existent.
• Map positions are shown only where coordinates come from a documented source.
• Money is shown in nominal rand by financial year (July–June) unless a series is explicitly labelled real, with its deflator.

Corrections

Every correction is logged with its date and reason in the corrections log.