Former president Jacob Zuma at the MK party manifesto launch at Orlando Stadium in Soweto on 18 May 2024.(Photo: Felix Dlangamandla) 
When former president Jacob Zuma met Burkina Faso’s coup leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, last week, he did more than pose for a symbolic photograph.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/11624250.jpg "Burkina Faso leader Ibrahim Traoré addresses a plenary session during the Second Summit ‘Russia-Africa’ Economic and Humanitarian Forum in St Petersburg, Russia, on 28 July 2023. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Donat Sorokin)")
He closed the loop on an emergent narrative of authoritarian aspiration developing within South Africa’s political imagination and across the African continent. According to Zuma, as relayed by the Burkina Faso presidency, the main purpose of the meeting with Traoré was to chart a way forward “together to continue the struggle for the liberation of Africa”.
Zuma was accompanied by his daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla – a central figure in pro-Russian online networks and one of the prime influencers in the #IStandWithRussia campaign, which she amplified from Russia around the time of that country’s invasion of Ukraine. The image of the two men together – one a former democratic president turned alleged populist insurgent, the other a 37-year-old military ruler hailed in some circles as Africa’s “strongman of renewal” – trended across South African X (formerly Twitter).
Former South African President Jacob Zuma met with Captain Ibrahim Traoré in Ouagadougou today to talk about Africa’s real liberation.
Zuma praised Burkina Faso’s bold stance, saying he wanted to join forces with Traoré to push the fight for true African sovereignty. “The… pic.twitter.com/dX85Siiyza
— African Hub (@AfricanHub_) November 3, 2025
For Zuma’s supporters, the meeting was a declaration of defiance against the liberal order. For others, it was a warning: if the former president has his way, the language and symbols of post-democratic politics will come to define the mainstream of South African life.
This was no coincidence. It was the public flowering of seeds that have been quietly cultivated for years – through political grievance, economic despair and a sophisticated campaign to normalise authoritarianism as a legitimate, even patriotic, alternative to democracy.
Frustration becomes fertile ground
According to the latest Afrobarometer survey, nearly half of South Africans (49%) now support military rule, up dramatically from 28% in 2022 – a 21-point surge in just three years.
For the first time in the democratic era, more citizens favour authoritarian rule than oppose it. The shift is sharpest among rural residents (71%), those facing high poverty (79%), and the unemployed (76%). Seven in 10 respondents say they are dissatisfied with how democracy functions.
Former president Thabo Mbeki has warned that young Africans are rebelling because “the vision for a reborn Africa hasn’t been achieved”.
Their anger is justified. But anger alone does not explain the new appetite for strongmen. Rather, disillusionment has been weaponised. Poverty has become propaganda’s most potent ally.
Cultivating the authoritarian imagination
Authoritarianism is rarely born in crisis; it is grown in chronic disappointment. It begins when frustration curdles into cynicism – when faith in democratic repair gives way to nostalgia for control. Across Africa, and specifically in South Africa, this disillusionment is being exploited by multiple sociopolitical currents that cut across ideologies, faiths and demographics.
First, there is the rise of religious nationalism, imported from the right-wing Global North and embraced by conservative churches and family-values movements that echo US evangelical and Maga narratives. These groups preach obedience, patriarchy and the defence of “Christian civilisation” against “decadent” liberalism. Their rhetoric collapses moral, spiritual and political authority into one, portraying democratic pluralism as ungodly chaos in which zero-sum socioreligious solutions are the only solutions.
Conspiracy theories such as white genocide – a transmutation of legitimate rural safety and farm murder concerns into a populist concept for Global North right-wing audiences – help bridge the gap between local and international authoritarian narratives, instilling fear, driving citizens towards easy answers to complex question, which makes it easier to justify strongman interventions of the kind we are currently seeing in the Global North.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Oped-Findlay-SA-authoritarianismWhiteGenocide.png "A network map of X users discussing #WhiteGenocide shows that most of the discussion was within the US Maga community. Few South Africans used the term except to refute it (blue community). Plaasmoord (‘farm murder’) rural safety activists found a sympathetic ear among US conservatives and started catering their content to that audience rather than a domestic one in a process known as ‘audience capture’.")
Second, the surge of anti-foreigner and anti-crime populism – driven by xenophobic nationalists that cluster around key ActionSA accounts – feeds into the same desire for decisive, punitive governance. “We will take back our country” and “law and order first” may sound like policy, but they are really authoritarian slogans framed in civic language that scapegoat vulnerable “others” to provide us with a common enemy. They legitimise the idea that complex social failures can be solved by force and that the rule of law – rather acting as a bulwark in the face of just these kinds of tendencies – is a liberal inconvenience that can be ignored.
Third, on the radical-left flank, we have the co-option of Pan-African liberation ideals by radical, nationalist movements such as the MK party and the most recent arrival – Floyd Shivambu’s Mayibuye Afrika Movement, an EFF-MKP-splinter that openly venerates Ibrahim Traoré. Shivambu has repeatedly praised the Burkinabé leader (examples here, here, here, here, and here) as a model for African liberation – an “authentic” revolutionary who uses strength, not compromise, to rebuild the continent. He has even drawn explicit parallels between Burkina Faso and South Africa, suggesting that South Africa needs to draw a “lesson in bravery” from the Sahel coups:
“South Africa needs a 21st-century liberation movement that takes inspiration from the Sahel’s anti-colonial struggles. South Africa is at a crossroads. Decades after the fall of apartheid, the promise of true freedom has still not been fulfilled.”
This movement rebrands authoritarian control as Pan-African restoration, borrowing directly from the rhetoric seeded by Moscow’s digital networks.
Long Live Captain Traoré! pic.twitter.com/47zezMJ7Pe
— Floyd Shivambu (@FloydShivambu) May 2, 2025
Former EFF and MKP member, and now leader of the Mayibuye Afrika Movement, Floyd Shivambu, is a big Traoré fan who says South Africa needs its own coup.
In combination, these strands form a multi-polar authoritarian current: right-wing religious revivalism, xenophobic law-and-order populism, radical leftist statism, and digital foreign influence. Each speaks to a different constituency, but all share the same underlying logic – that freedom is disorder, and that South Africa needs a firmer hand.
Finally, these ideas are seeded and cultivated by geopolitical actors whose own governance models are authoritarian in nature. Russia is perhaps the best known of these, providing content and a supporting “alternative” digital media ecosystem to support and cultivate authoritarian narratives.
Case study: How Russia seeds authoritarian narratives across Africa
The European Council on Foreign Relations’ (ECFR) 2025 policy brief, The Bear and the Bot Farm, shows how Russia’s hybrid-warfare networks have turned Africa into a laboratory for digital authoritarianism.
Through paid influencers (see Daily Maverick’s series on how this industry works in South Africa here), AI-generated content, and co-opted local journalists, Moscow reframes democracy as Western decadence and strongman rule as African sovereignty.
It warns of the West’s neocolonialism while conveniently ignoring its actions in the Sahel region, where remnants of the Wagner group still control numerous natural resources or the economic leverage it has over poor African countries that signed up to Russian nuclear builds.
Beginning in the Sahel, Russia cultivated coups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. There, Traoré’s profile was first promoted by the same network of online accounts now pushing his image across the continent. His brother, Inoussa Traoré, trained by Russian operatives, now runs a government unit dedicated to social media influence, exporting pro-junta messaging to neighbouring states.
South Africa has been in the crosshairs of this continental strategy for a while now. The Russian Perspective Network (RPN) – a loose web of global social media accounts anchored by Russian state media outlets, key influencers and “alternative news” channels – promotes the Russian worldview, which just so happens to be sympathetic to an authoritarian approach to political organisation.
Accounts within the orbit of the RPN – whether knowingly or not – have their content injected into domestic African online conversations through Russia’s alleged partnership with local mega influencers and their armies of nano influencers, which act as local proxies that give plausible deniability to geopolitical information operations.
This strategy is repeated across the African continent, from Burkina Faso to Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Content from accounts such as @RT, @Sputnik, @AfricanHub_, @Joe__Bassey, @JacksonHinklle, @GlobeEyeNews, @BRICSInfo, @Megatron_ron, among others, regularly espouse views sympathetic towards Russia, or critical of their competitors, and when domestic nano influencers amplify that content, these narratives end up being mixed in with domestic conversations about football, reality TV, music and youth opposition movements such as #EndSARS (Nigeria), #RejectFinanceBill (Kenya) and Gen Z protests.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Oped-Findlay-SA-authoritarianismSAdiscussionsTraore.png "When it comes to the narratives that South African X users imbibe about Burkina Faso coup leader – and now president – Ibrahim Traoré, they primarily amplify content from accounts such as @AfricanHub_, @Joe__Bassey, @cecild84 and @_AfricanSoil")
A parallel media ecosystem
An entire periphery of digital “news” outlets – some international and some domestic – provide a secondary ecosystem for their content to find purchase within African countries.
In South Africa, content from continent-wide alternative “news” accounts such as African Stream, BRICSInfo, DD Geopolitics, Going Underground, Africa View Facts, Africa First and African Hub mix with local-focused accounts such as African Perspective (linked to @_AfricanSoil, who was acquitted of incitement charges relating to the July Unrest riots), News Live SA, The Truth Panther (one of the anchors of the xenophobic nationalist #PutSouthAfricansFirst/Operation Dudula movement), South African Daily, Central News, to consistently push a worldview in which Traoré and his style of rule are heroic.
“Alternative news” channels like The African Perspective provide an alternative perspective on global geopolitics.
The African Perspective will give you the latest updates on Russian President, Vladimir Putin visit to North Korea and Vietnam this week. https://t.co/rACO2HHjnn
— Evaluator. (@_AfricanSoil) June 19, 2024
These accounts bypass mainstream media such as Daily Maverick and News24, delivering “African truth-telling” in short, emotional, shareable form.
When Zuma met Traoré, he was meeting a mirror image of a growing fantasy – one in which liberation and democracy have failed, and power reclaimed through force is justice.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/putin-story-for-janet-.jpg "From right: Cameroonian President Paul Biya, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traoré and Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi with other delegates at the Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg on 28 July 2023. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Mikhail Tereschenko / Tass)")
Domestic strongman fantasies
South Africans have ample reasons for anger: above 30% unemployment, collapsing infrastructure and rising inequality. Those conditions, left unaddressed, are the soil in which authoritarian sentiment germinates.
The Afrobarometer findings make the connection clear: economic pain correlates directly with support for military rule. The unemployed and impoverished are the most open to authoritarianism, not because they reject freedom, but because freedom has stopped feeding them.
This makes them uniquely susceptible to manipulation. Hybrid propaganda, whether foreign-state-backed or home-grown, doesn’t merely sell ideology – it sells emotional release: the promise that chaos will end if only a “real leader” takes charge.
The overlap of personalities and narratives promoting authoritarian ideas is unmistakable. Influencers such as @joy_zelda and Chris Excel – who has been an indefatigable cheerleader of Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s since early 2024 – have celebrated both Traoré and Mkhwanazi (examples here, here, here and here), framing Mkhwanazi as a fearless enforcer who will “restore order” – the quintessential strongman archetype.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Oped-Findlay-SA-authoritarianismJoyZelda.png "X mega influencer, @joy_zelda, has been one of Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s key cheerleaders (along with paid mega influencer, Chris Excel) since early 2024.")
Deepening the parallels, newly installed Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia criticised Mkhwanazi for making his 6 July press conference surrounded by military regalia, stating:
“The military has to understand that they exercise their powers, the incredible powers, subject to the parameters of a civilian state. That is true also of the law enforcement, the police. Now, when I saw that image (of Mkhwanazi) and, of course, what was being said, it wasn’t just the military fatigues, but the fact that they were armed and so forth. My initial impression was, ‘What’s going on? I mean, is this South Africa?’ It conjured up images in my mind of a kind of coup d’état.”
Tellingly, Cachalia was challenged in his interpretation of Mkhwanazi’s press conference pageantry by an MK party MP, whose leader was meeting Traoré at roughly the same time.
Others, such as David Skosana – husband of disgraced former Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane and also a MK Party member – are open admirers of Traoré. Then there are, of course, Msholozi himself and his firebrand daughter.
South Africa may lack the military muscle for a coup – its armed forces are weak and under-resourced – but it has a large, increasingly militarised police force, giving any future authoritarian project a potential instrument. This is why it is imperative that the Madlanga Commission and Parliament’s ad hoc committee get to the bottom of the rot at SAPS and ensure that our police force supports our democracy.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Oped-Findlay-SA-authoritarianismMkhwanazi-earlydays.png "Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s profile has primarily been driven by mega influencers @joy_zelda and Chris Excel (@chrisexel102 – the largest paid mega influencer in the country) since early 2024 and long before Mkhwanazi’s July 6 2025, press conference. Journalist Dasen Thathiah has also played a role through his crime reporting in KZN.")
The coming harvest
The danger is not just structural but also in the narratives we believe. South Africa’s democratic fatigue is being curated. Online campaigns thrive on emotion, framing authoritarianism as justice, nationalism as survival, dissent as betrayal.
As the ECFR brief notes, Russia’s media architecture thrives because local journalism is underfunded and slow, while propagandists speak in memes, reels and WhatsApp voice notes.
A growing narrative – not just from the right, but also from the left and radical corners – suggests that the mainstream media is irretrievably biased. On the one hand, they are accused of being captured by white monopoly capital; on the other, of being “wokeist” shills.
style="font-weight: 400;">missteps, editorial reversals and perceived hypocrisies are continuously gathered and cited as evidence. For instance, the case involving News24’s exposé of the anonymous X user, @twatterbaas, who promoted false information about farm murders that was used by Elon Musk and Donald Trump to justify that white genocide is occurring in South Africa, is commonly referenced. An IOL article titled, How News24’s Twatterbaas scandal exposed the moral collapse of South African Journalism, covers how the outlet mistakenly disavowed content it had earlier published, fuelling claims of bias.
Meanwhile, Daily Maverick has also come under fire. Critiques range from accusations of neoliberal bias to claims that its opinion-and-investigation coverage selectively targets activists advocating for social justice (again published by IOL).
Together, these examples illustrate how, rather than holding these news organisations to account, both conservative and progressive critics use documented errors and controversies to argue that the role of traditional media no longer exists. And, at the same time, they offer up an alternative media ecosystem in its place – from podcasts to X and TikTok “breaking news” accounts.
The irony, of course, is that these “alternative’ news outlets face no equivalent findings of misconduct; not because they are beyond reproach, but because they operate entirely outside the formal oversight and accountability structures that govern “traditional” news organisations.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Oped-Findlay-SA-authoritarianismPolitcsWeb.png "Traditional news organisations are increasingly framed as biased and irrelevant by more conservative and radical commentators.")
South Africa is no longer an exception; it is an incubator. The Zuma-Traoré meeting symbolises the merging of economic despair and ideological engineering into one powerful, emotional story.
The Afrobarometer data, combined with this media infrastructure, suggest that South Africa is approaching its harvest phase – when long-planted authoritarian seeds mature into political sentiment.
The rhetoric of “decisive leadership” and “African solutions” is edging closer to open advocacy for non-democratic governance. Once these ideas take root, they rarely remain rhetorical. Across the Sahel, coups were preceded by years of conditioning – first in conversation, then online, then on the streets. South Africa’s public sphere now echoes that rhythm.
What do we do about it?
There are two sides to this discussion – structural and narrative. We can continue to hold our leaders to account and expect them to solve the structural challenges that create the conditions for authoritarianism to grow. This is not a quick fix. However, we can also take cognisance of how narratives shape our beliefs.
And yet, as much as it attempts to contribute to that awareness, this very article is, in a sense, futile. It preaches to the choir. Readers of Daily Maverick, News24, TimesLive or the Mail & Guardian are not the ones scrolling through the timelines of African Hub, African Perspective, @_AfricanSoil, or @Joy_Zeld. The people absorbing those messages live in different information universes – X, TikTok, Facebook groups, Telegram channels and WhatsApp forwards.
They consume emotionally charged memes, voice notes, and short videos, not thousand-word analyses like this one. They inhabit a parallel ecosystem that rewards outrage, identity and simplicity over nuance.
This is the defining strategic problem: facts no longer circulate in a single, shared public space. When problematic content surfaces, democracies respond timidly with fact-checking and defensive debunking. Authoritarian actors, by contrast, flood the zone with narrative, using humour, faith and fear to make politics emotional again.
To reach these audiences, defenders of democracy must adapt – creating authentic, locally rooted, emotionally resonant content that can compete on the same terrain. Success depends on credible, charismatic local voices, not institutional PR, and on decentralised networks that can tell compelling stories of democratic renewal with agility, humour, pathos and perhaps a bit of snark.
Until that happens, essays like this will remain confined to elite circles – elegant laments read by those who already agree – while the seeds of authoritarianism continue to grow in the algorithmic dark, watered by resentment and harvested by those who know how to make fear go viral. DM
Kyle Findlay is a researcher and data scientist specialising in the analysis of social media ecosystems, online propaganda and influence operations. He has led investigations into covert influence campaigns across Africa and globally and is co-founder of the data consultancy Murmur Intelligence.