Throughout West Africa it has become difficult to avoid the blitz of viral videos, memes and social media posts glorifying the military rulers of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
Experts say that there has been a calculated campaign to elevate the stature of one man in particular: Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, the youngest leader on the continent, who seized power by overthrowing Burkina Faso’s previous military junta in 2022.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” host Martine Dennis said in the May 13 episode of her Africa Here & Now podcast. “Ibrahim Traoré seems to be online, everywhere, all the time. In much of the material, he’s lionized as the young king of Africa, but there’s clearly fakery involved.”
Investigative journalist David Hundeyin, editor of West Africa Weekly, said most of the social media campaign around the 37-year-old Traoré is controlled by third parties. Some use cheap-looking, cartoonish videos generated by artificial intelligence to falsely attribute progress and development to Traoré’s leadership.
In one video, a massive, low-cost high-rise housing development in Tizi Ouzou, northern Algeria, is presented as something being built in Burkina Faso. Another shows Traoré at the inauguration of a cement plant alongside false claims that he had announced a drop in cement prices.
“They go way overboard, and that’s why you get a lot of these AI-generated videos with incredible visuals from places around the world,” he said during the podcast. “People are claiming that this is some fantastic revolution taking place in Burkina Faso. So these things are very easy to disprove and discredit.”
Since the coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, violent extremist organizations backed by al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have dramatically expanded their operations. In Burkina Faso alone, more than 2 million people have lost their homes, and the number of people killed by terror groups has nearly tripled since the second coup in 2022.
Terrorism has run rampant in the three coup-plagued countries that broke away from regional bloc ECOWAS to form their own Alliance of Sahel States. Experts say deteriorating security and unstable governance in the Sahel set the stage for Russia to unleash a flood of false information.
“In countries with significant instability, military juntas already limit speech and dissent, paving the way for pro-Russian sentiment and anti-imperialist rhetoric to flourish, further shifting the tide to support the Kremlin’s activities in areas of the Sahel,” Vikram Kolli wrote in a March 7 analysis for the Harvard International Review.
Russia launched its “African Initiative” news agency to take advantage of the 300 million Africans who have joined social media in the past seven years and the 600 million internet users on the continent.
“Inadequate media infrastructure, newspaper distribution and poor internet have created information poverty throughout the continent, and, consequently, many Africans rely on social media platforms for the majority of their news — a vulnerability to misinformation,” Kolli stated.
The African Initiative primarily spreads fake news and false information through social media accounts, websites such as afrinz.ru and VKontakte, and channels on Telegram such as “Smile and Wave.” The content is produced by “Russian propaganda units and then given to these influencers, through the middlemen, to post on social media,” Nigerian journalist Philip Obaji told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at the pan-African think-tank Good Governance Africa, said the deceptive social media campaign has spread as far as Nigeria.
“This growing admiration for Traoré in Nigeria poses serious risks to national security and democratic stability,” he told AFP. “It normalizes military intervention as a viable political solution and opens the door to foreign ideological interference.”
Experts have noted the irony of Russia promoting anti-colonial rhetoric in African countries where it has embedded operatives and mercenaries in the military and government, helping to drive a massive effort to extract natural resources. From gold mining alone, Russia has “siphoned $2.5 billion in earnings” since 2022, according to Geopolitical Intelligence Services.
Kolli said that Sahelian countries are on a dangerous path.
“Without a genuine commitment to prioritizing long-term stability over short-term geopolitics, the feedback loop of external interference and internal turmoil will likely continue, leaving the Sahel trapped in a battle that compromises its future,” he wrote.
