The number of disinformation campaigns – most of them launched by Russia – has almost quadrupled in Africa since 2022, destabilising democracies and bolstering pro-Moscow military juntas.
In South Africa, some of the 11 documented campaigns now under way have been designed by Russia to boost the ANC.
The Kremlin has concentrated most of its fake news efforts in Africa on sabotaging Western-backed democracies in the Sahel, according to a new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think-tank within the US Defense Department established and funded by Congress.
The in-depth report cites evidence that former president Jacob Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, was among South African influencers who played a key role in the #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia campaigns launched shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Zuma-Sambudla visited Russia at the time.
The disinformation surge has been facilitated by an explosion in the use of social media, with 400 million active social media users and 600 million internet users now in Africa, say the authors of the report, titled “Mapping a Surge of Disinformation in Africa”.
They found that African countries experiencing conflict were subject to much greater levels of disinformation than the average – highlighting the connection between instability and disinformation.
“Disinformation campaigns have directly driven deadly violence, promoted and validated military coups, cowed civil society members into silence, and served as smokescreens for corruption and exploitation.
“This has had real-world consequences for diminishing Africans’ rights, freedoms and security.”
Foreign and domestic campaigns
Of the 189 known campaigns – targeting at least 39 African countries specifically – 72 are in west Africa, 33 in east Africa, 25 in southern Africa, 21 in central Africa, 15 in north Africa and 23 are trans-African.
The authors suspect there are more undetected campaigns.
Eleven of the 25 southern African campaigns are in South Africa. Of these, six campaigns are conducted by “Kremlin-linked actors”, two by “CCP [Chinese Communist Party]-linked actors” and three by “domestic political actors”, the report says.
“Russia has been the primary disinformation actor in South Africa. In addition to pushing narratives intended to polarise communities, fan distrust and bolster the African National Congress, Russia has used influential South Africans to promote pro-Russian narratives within South Africa and abroad,” the report says.
It adds that China has been the primary external purveyor of disinformation in Zimbabwe, enacting campaigns to support Zanu-PF by suppressing opposition and civil society voices, promoting Chinese political and business propaganda, and pushing anti-Western narratives.
The report found that nearly 60% of disinformation campaigns on the continent are foreign state-sponsored – with Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar as the primary sponsors.
African elections are a prime target for disinformation.
“One private Israeli group, dubbed ‘Team Jorge’, has reportedly implemented disinformation campaigns to disrupt over 20 African elections since 2015,” the report notes.
The report adds that domestic political forces have also increasingly resorted to disinformation tactics, notably during Kenya’s 2022 and Nigeria’s 2023 elections.
“Disinformation is surging in African information spaces at a time when press freedom – a critical protective barrier against disinformation – is in decline.”
The report also says African countries that uphold presidential term limits – i.e. have stronger checks and balances – are less vulnerable to foreign-sponsored disinformation.
Though the field of perpetrators is expanding, Russia remains the primary purveyor of disinformation in Africa, sponsoring 80 documented campaigns – nearly 40% of the total – targeting more than 22 countries, to gain influence in Africa and displace the West, the report says.
Russia has deployed disinformation to undermine democracy in at least 19 African countries, “contributing to the continent’s backsliding on this front”.
West Africa
The report says that in west Africa, 38 of the 72 disinformation campaigns have been organised by “Kremlin-linked actors” – mostly the private military/mercenary company Wagner, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a suspicious aircraft crash last August after launching a mutiny against Russia’s military command.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Wagner has a new name tag but still plunders Africa’s minerals
Russia has homed in on Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, with 19 of the campaigns directed at these countries which are governed by military juntas that recently seized power in coups.
The report highlights how Wagner-linked campaigns hit Niger with a barrage of fake content before, during and after the July 2023 coup.
This included spreading rumours of a coup months before it happened, encouraging the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Niamey after the coup, and “exploiting the confusion to frame the events as anti-France and as representing a momentous surge in African support for a Russian vision of the global order”.
The Wagner campaigns also tried to derail negotiations between the Niger junta and regional mediators, including by spreading fake news that the regional body, Ecowas, was about to invade Niger supported by French jets which had supposedly already landed in Senegal.
The Russian bots then celebrated the coup as an affirmation of support for Russia.
Read more in Daily Maverick: With the signing of an ‘all-for-one’ pact, Russia’s new African empire starts to take shape
‘Industrial scale’
The report also notes that Russia, with 16 operations, and China with five, are the largest purveyors of the 23 transnational disinformation campaigns in Africa.
The Russian and Chinese campaigns aim to “advance their geostrategic interests and shape narratives that undermine democratic processes, promote coups in Africa, stoke anti-Western and anti-United Nations sentiment, and spread confusion about climate change science, among others”.
Russia, especially, conducts its campaigns “on an industrial scale”.
The report cites two prominent disinformation influencers connected to Russia, for example, who have a combined social media following of over 28 million users “and their content has been amplified by a sprawling ecosystem of hundreds of Russian-linked accounts and pages.
“These disinformation campaigns employ paid African influencers, digital avatars, and the circulation of fake and out-of-context videos and photographs. These messages copy-and-paste from and are amplified through multiple channels of Russian state-controlled media, radio and official communications, creating the repetitive echo chambers in which disinformation narratives become rote.”
The report adds that Russian embassies appear to have helped set up a network of ostensibly African grassroots front organisations to generate and amplify disinformation.
“The Wagner Group has been the Kremlin’s primary vehicle for engineering disinformation in Africa – with direct links to approximately half of all Russian-linked campaigns on the continent.”
With Prigozhin’s death, Wagner’s disinformation operations are being absorbed into Russia’s newly established Africa Corps and the Africa Initiative news agency, connected to Russian intelligence services and overseen by Artem Sergeyevich Kureyev from Moscow. DM