In August 2024, Nigeria’s #EndBadGovernance protests produced an image that few analysts would have predicted a decade earlier. In Kano, Kaduna and Jos, among crowds angry about food prices, fuel costs and a collapsing naira, a handful of demonstrators waved Russian flags. Some carried placards that appeared to invite foreign military support. Nigeria has its own history of military rule and coups, but it was rarely connected to the happenings in other countries. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger had all experienced coups between 2020 and 2023. All three expelled French forces, turned toward Moscow, signed a new pact to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), and formally left ECOWAS on 29 January 2025. Observers asked whether the flags in Kano were the visible edge of a coordinated, foreign-sponsored effort to make military rule attractive across the region, or simply the theatrics of a few people trying to provoke a reaction.
Social media screenshots from TikTok and Telegram channels showing Russian flags, political commentary circulating during Nigeria’s #EndBadGovernance protests, and imagery of Vladimir Putin.
What the Evidence Shows: Telegram, TikTok and the Paid Advocate
Telegram is widely used in the country, and its channel structure suits political messaging: channels broadcast to unlimited subscribers, content is easy to forward across groups, and moderation is light. Among the channels that gained traction was “Africa Initiative,” created in October 2023, which styles itself as a Russian information agency covering African events. Its subscriber count reportedly rose to roughly 50,000 by mid-2024, and its content praised the military governments of the Sahel and framed Western and French involvement in the region as predatory.
The strongest evidence of coordination comes from a specific case. Premium Times reported that a Kano-based TikTok influencer with more than 100,000 followers, Sani Abbas, admitted he was paid by Africa Initiative to promote Russian intervention and military rule. His posts used hashtags such as #Zangazanga (a Hausa term for protest), #putin and #rusiya, and reproduced talking points supplied by the channel. This is not inference from patterns. It is a first-person account of a paid arrangement and the clearest window into how such operations recruit local voices.
The recruitment model deserves attention. It does not need to persuade millions of people directly. It needs a modest number of credible local intermediaries, people who speak the language, understand the idiom, and already command an audience. A paid influencer is cheap compared with a broadcast operation, and his followers experience him as one of their own rather than as a foreign voice. Hausa-language content from a Kano creator has an authenticity that a translated Moscow press release could never have.
The Institutional Trail
The US State Department has traced the Africa Initiative website to “Initsiativa 23,” a Russian state-registered organisation. Its director, Artem Kureyev, is reportedly an agent of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), and the entity is said to maintain local offices in Ouagadougou and Bamako, capitals of countries that, after expelling French forces, have aligned with Moscow. Readers should weigh the provenance. These claims come largely from a Western government and Western media, which are not neutral parties in this contest, and intelligence-linked attributions are hard for outsiders to verify independently. Still, the public-facing facts are checkable: the channel exists, its content is consistent, its registered organisation is traceable, and at least one paid participant has confessed.
Screenshot of the “African Initiative” Telegram channel interface, describing itself as a Russian information agency covering events in Africa.
The wider picture fits. The Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, a US Defence Department institution whose findings should likewise be read with its institutional position in mind, has catalogued a surge of disinformation campaigns across the continent. It reports Russian-sponsored networks active in over 22 African countries, with West Africa seeing 72 campaigns, half of them Russian-linked, and 19 in the Sahel specifically advocating for coups. Tactics include paid influencers, digital avatars and fabricated videos. The EU’s External Action Service has documented the same family of techniques in its own threat reporting.
African-focused influence operations also predate the current wave. In October 2019, Facebook removed three Russian-linked networks targeting several African countries, and the Stanford Internet Observatory found that they worked with local partners to pass as authentic. In December 2020, further takedowns exposed more Russian-linked assets tied to the Prigozhin network. What is new today is not the idea but the sophistication of the tools and the alignment with real political events on the ground.
The clearest human cost of this episode fell on Nigerians themselves. In the aftermath of the August 2024 protests, more than 90 protesters were arrested, among them minors. In Abuja, 76 people, including about 30 minors were charged with treason and inciting a military coup, according to court documents. Human rights lawyer Femi Falana put the number of defendants at 130, noting that the prosecution planned to present 76 Russian flags as evidence. In Borno, 19 more people, including three minors, were arraigned, and 11 were accused of displaying the Russian flag in public. The police, for their part, insisted that the flag-wavers were criminally liable whatever their age.
Images of malnourished children collapsing in court produced domestic and international outrage. President Tinubu ordered the minors released, and the federal case was struck out on humanitarian grounds, after which Falana argued in public that hoisting a foreign flag is not a criminal offence in Nigeria.
This episode illustrates something important. Information operations do not only harm the targeted society through changed opinions. They also harm through the reaction they provoke. A foreign campaign that induces a government to overreact, whether by prosecuting teenagers, shutting down platforms or criminalising speech, accomplishes part of its work without persuading anyone. The protesters who carried the flags were partly instruments of a message they may not have fully understood, and the state’s response validated a narrative of authoritarian overreach that the same campaign could then exploit.
The Traoré Phenomenon and Synthetic Media
The most striking case is the online image of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who took power in Burkina Faso in September 2022 at the age of 34. As The Economist noted, he has been cast as a retro-revolutionary in the mould of Thomas Sankara. He is now among the most visible African leaders on social media, and much of that visibility is manufactured. Hundreds of AI-generated videos on TikTok and other platforms show him leading imaginary armies, defeating Western powers, unveiling supposedly indigenous aircraft and electric vehicles, and receiving celebrity endorsements from performers who never made them, as DAIDAC finds.
Screenshot of an AI-generated TikTok video by “africamailtv” featuring Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré in a field, accompanied by promotional text about welfare plans.
Fact-checkers have documented the pattern, and VOA has debunked the claim that his government paid off the national debt. Other viral claims, such as higher civil-service pay funded by cuts to ministerial salaries, a “tax-free nation,” and a fabricated meeting with Donald Trump, have not survived scrutiny either.
The strategy relies on two things. The first is the aesthetic of the Sankarist tradition: youth, austerity, pan-African defiance and anti-imperial rhetoric. Thomas Sankara remains a beloved figure among young Africans, and the association gives Traoré instant emotional credibility. The second is algorithmic reward. Content that is triumphant, simple and emotionally charged travels well on short-video platforms, so a low-cost production pipeline can reach millions of viewers who never see the debunking.
Sovereignty and the Regional Order
The second consequence is geopolitical. Analysts such as Dr. Aminu Hayatu have argued that AI-driven narratives are effective at framing juntas as anti-imperialist liberators and elected governments as foreign puppets. Ambassador Abdullahi Bindawa, an ECOWAS country facilitator, has warned that this propaganda may spill into neighbouring states. That concern is not fanciful. ECOWAS, once the most institutionally ambitious regional bloc in Africa, has been badly weakened. Its threat of force against Niger in 2023 was never carried out, and in February 2024 it lifted its sanctions on Niger on humanitarian grounds even though none of its conditions had been met. The withdrawal of the three AES states then took effect in January 2025, the first time in the bloc’s history that members had left in this manner.
Since then, the pattern has continued. In November 2025, a military coup in Guinea-Bissau removed President Embalo after a contested election. On 7 December 2025, a group of soldiers attempted a coup in Benin, and the attempt was foiled with the help of Nigerian air power. ECOWAS also ordered a standby force of soldiers from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Ghana to Benin. Some analysts believe that a successful coup there could have taken Benin toward the AES, and many people in the AES states welcomed the initial announcement by the coup leaders. Whatever the causal role of online narratives, the region is now visibly less confident that constitutional order is the default. In that environment, a media ecosystem that normalises military rule as heroic is not harmless noise.
The Gap Between Image and Reality
Burkina Faso has been ranked the world’s most terrorism-affected country in the Global Terrorism Index in recent editions. Over two million people are internally displaced, schools and health facilities have closed across the north and east, and food insecurity is severe. Mass-casualty attacks have continued despite the junta’s promise to restore security as its central justification. On 24 August 2024, the al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM attacked civilians who had been made to dig defensive trenches at Barsalogho. Human Rights Watch confirmed at least 133 deaths, while other estimates run considerably higher, and Bellingcat’s investigation found that the government had been slow to release information about what happened.
Mali’s story has taken a more dramatic turn, and it is the most important update to the evidence in this essay. The junta’s flagship achievement, the recapture of Kidal in November 2023 with Wagner’s help, was widely regarded as its high-water mark. The record since then has been one of steady erosion. In 2022, a UN human rights investigation found strong indications that more than 500 people were killed at Moura by Malian troops and foreign military personnel, the vast majority summarily executed, and UN experts had alleged the involvement of Wagner. In June 2025 Wagner announced its departure and was replaced by the state-run Africa Corps, a change that ACLED’s analysts read as more rebranding than retreat. From September 2025, JNIM imposed a fuel blockade on Bamako’s supply routes, and residents queued for days to find petrol.
Then, on 25 April 2026, JNIM and the Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front launched what FDD’s Long War Journal called the largest coordinated offensive in Mali since 2012. Defence Minister Sadio Camara, a principal architect of the pivot to Russia, was killed, and Russian forces were pushed out of Kidal. JNIM then announced a total siege of Bamako. Analysts writing in African Arguments argued that the attacks were the culmination of a long decline, noting reports that fatalities linked to militant Islamist groups had tripled under the junta. Goïta took over the defence portfolio himself. In September 2026, reports emerged that about 100 soldiers had died when JNIM overran the Dioura camp, and that the junta had convened a crisis meeting. That last item rests on a secondary source relaying RFI and AFP reporting and should be confirmed.
It is not simply that military rule has demonstrably failed while civilian rule succeeded. It is narrower and harder to argue with: the online promise of military competence is not matched by the measurable record, and the gap is precisely what synthetic content works to conceal.
Why the Message Lands: The Grievances Behind the Appetite
Propaganda succeeds when it resonates with existing beliefs, and the beliefs it resonates with here are not irrational and in Western Africa, the narrative operates like a chameleon. The Sahel coups did not come from nowhere. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger had all endured years of escalating jihadist violence under elected governments, despite the presence of French forces (Operation Barkhane), UN peacekeepers (MINUSMA) and Western-funded training programmes. Ordinary people in the affected regions saw a decade of foreign military presence coincide with worsening insecurity. When soldiers, often junior officers who had themselves suffered losses at the front, seized power promising to fight the war properly, many citizens gave them the benefit of the doubt. In Burkina Faso, both the January 2022 coup and the September 2022 counter-coup were triggered by battlefield humiliations.
Nigeria’s own northern experience amplifies this. Communities in the north-west and north-east have lived with banditry, kidnapping and insurgency for over a decade. When citizens observe that the state cannot protect them, arguments for a firmer hand acquire natural appeal, and calls for military intervention become an expression of desperation more than of ideology.
Economic Hardship and the Legitimacy of Elections
Nigeria’s 2023 reforms, including the removal of the fuel subsidy and the unification of exchange rates, produced sharp inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. Whatever their long-term economic merits, they landed hardest on the poor. For a young Kano resident who cannot afford food, a lecture about macroeconomic adjustment is unlikely to compete with a message that says the whole system is rotten.
There is also a legitimacy problem specific to elections. Many West African elections have been marred by irregularities, low turnout, vote-buying and the sense that political competition is a contest between the same elite factions. The best available evidence on attitudes comes from Afrobarometer. Its inaugural flagship report found that 66 per cent of Africans in 39 countries still prefer democracy to any other system, and that two-thirds reject military rule as such. But it also found that 53 percent would accept a military takeover if elected leaders “abuse power for their own ends,” that opposition to military rule had weakened by 11 points across 30 countries over a decade, and that the weakening was sharpest in Mali and Burkina Faso, by 40 and 37 points respectively. Only 37 per cent said they were satisfied with the way democracy works. Youth were more accepting still: 56 per cent of those aged 18 to 35 would tolerate a takeover under those conditions. The report’s most important finding may be its explanation. Shifts in support, it argued, track declining election quality, corruption and failures of the rule of law more than economic performance. A newer round of Afrobarometer data, reported in September 2026, points to further erosion of demand for democracy across the continent.
That gap between support for democracy as an idea and satisfaction with how it works is where the propaganda operates. It does not have to teach anyone to dislike their government. It has to offer a story about what comes next.
Yet again, the resentment of France is not a Russian invention. The legacy of colonial rule, the CFA franc arrangement, the perception of French military and commercial dominance, and a long record of Paris supporting friendly autocrats all provide raw material that any anti-French message can draw on. When Russian-linked channels and local influencers denounce Western neo-colonialism, they are amplifying a sentiment that was already widely held and often justified.
This point matters for how the central question should be framed. The interesting thing is not that Russian narratives exist. It is that Western and French narratives lost credibility so thoroughly that a challenger could gain a hearing with modest resources.
The Sahel as a Test of the Argument
If military rule is as attractive as its online marketing suggests, the Sahel juntas should be delivering on their central promises. What is the record?
This is the juntas’ strongest claim. French troops have left, UN peacekeepers have gone, and the governments have pursued more independent foreign policies, including with Turkey, China and Russia. For many citizens, this is a real and valued accomplishment, and analysts should not treat it as trivial. Yet a shift from French to Russian security dependence is a change of patron rather than an escape from external influence. Reporting on the Wagner arrangement in Mali indicated that Russia was paid about $10.8 million a month plus mining concessions, and the terms of Russian engagement have generally been less transparent than those they replaced. When the April 2026 offensive forced Russian troops out of Kidal, it also tested how much that partnership was worth in a crisis.
Transitions that were promised to last 18 to 24 months have been extended repeatedly. Burkina Faso extended its junta’s rule by five years in 2024. Niger’s General Tchiani was sworn in for a renewable five-year term in March 2025. In Mali, the transitional parliament granted Goïta a five-year mandate, renewable “as many times as necessary” and without an election. Whatever one thinks of the quality of the previous elected governments, the trajectory does not resemble a brief corrective before a return to civilian rule.
The Response may be Wrong
The threat of disinformation invites responses that can be worse than the disease. West African governments already have a record of using national-security and cybercrime laws against critics, and the language of “information warfare” is an attractive justification.
Regulation as Pretext
Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act has been used repeatedly against journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented three journalists detained in the second half of 2025 despite a legislative reform, and Reporters Without Borders counted at least eight prosecuted or detained in the months after the amendment. The government also suspended Twitter for seven months in 2021 and 2022, after the platform removed a post by the then-president. These cases follow a familiar logic in which a real problem, foreign manipulation, licenses tools that governments then apply against domestic opposition. If the response to disinformation is a broader power to punish speech, then the beneficiaries are likely to be the same actors who benefit from the disinformation itself: those who prefer that citizens not be able to speak or verify freely.
The Sahel juntas offer a cautionary example here. They too frame their restrictions on media as defences against foreign propaganda and information warfare, and Burkina Faso’s authorities accused RFI of “misleading information” about the leader when they suspended it. The same argument, applied in Abuja, Accra or Dakar, would produce a similar outcome: an information environment controlled by the government of the day.
Platform Responsibility Without Platform Dependence
The other tempting response is to lean on the large technology firms to remove content. Platforms can and should act against demonstrably coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and they have done so in previous cases. But dependence on foreign platforms to police African political speech raises its own sovereignty concerns, ironically the same ones the propaganda exploits. Moderation decisions made in California or Dublin, with limited African-language capacity and thin local context, will be error-prone and easy to portray as neo-colonial. Platform action is necessary but not sufficient, and it works best when it is transparent, accountable and informed by local partners.
The Risk of Feeding the Narrative
There is a subtler danger. Aggressive Western-led campaigns to expose and counter Russian disinformation can reinforce the very story they seek to rebut. If the message is that Africans are being duped by Russia and need to be protected by Western fact-checkers and Western-funded media, the framing repeats the paternalism that gives anti-Western narratives their emotional force. Effective responses will need to be African-led, credible with local audiences and free of the impression that they serve foreign geopolitical interests.
West African States must have a Balanced Response to Protect Democracy
Invest in local, multilingual fact-checking and media literacy. Organisations such as Dubawa, Africa Check and the investigative units of outlets like Premium Times have already done impressive work exposing specific campaigns. They need sustained funding, language capacity in Hausa, Fulfulde, Bambara, Yoruba, Igbo and others, and partnerships with community radio, which remains the most trusted medium in much of the region. Media literacy efforts should focus on practical skills, such as recognising synthetic video, checking claims and understanding how paid promotion works, instead of moral exhortation.
Demand transparency, not censorship. The strongest tool against covert influence is disclosure. Requirements that paid political content be labelled, that platforms publish information about coordinated network takedowns, and that influencers disclose foreign funding are less prone to abuse than content bans. Legislation should target covert coordination and undisclosed foreign payment, not opinion. Judicial oversight, narrow definitions and sunset clauses are essential safeguards.
Protect and empower independent journalism. The clearest sign of an honest information environment is the presence of journalists who can investigate power without fear. Supporting investigative outlets, protecting reporters from arrest and harassment, and pushing back against media suspensions across the region are part of any counter-disinformation strategy. Journalists are the most credible debunkers of synthetic myths, and their protection is a security priority as much as a rights issue.
Take grievances seriously as a security matter. No amount of counter-messaging will substitute for delivering better security, functioning services and credible elections. Governments that want citizens to reject the appeal of military rule must give them reasons to believe civilian institutions can protect and serve them. That means addressing banditry and insurgency effectively, cushioning the poor from the costs of economic reforms, and making elections more credible and inclusive. Afrobarometer’s finding that support for democracy tracks election quality and corruption rather than economic outcomes suggests where the priority lies.
Rebuild regional cohesion around a positive offer. ECOWAS’s threat of force in Niger failed, and its sanctions were unpopular. The bloc’s response to the AES exit and to new coups needs to combine firm principles about constitutional order with pragmatic engagement on trade, security cooperation and freedom of movement. The Benin deployment shows that the bloc can act decisively when a government requests help and the intervention is narrow and lawful. Keeping doors open to the departed members, while continuing to defend democratic norms elsewhere, is more likely to preserve regional influence than punitive isolation. The AES states’ own security crisis may also reopen conversations that looked closed in 2024.
Conclusion: Two Truths at Once
Coordinated influence operations, some plausibly connected to Russian state-linked organisations, have deliberately promoted military rule and pro-Moscow sentiment in West Africa, using paid influencers, Telegram networks and AI-generated content. These operations have had real consequences, including the arrest and prosecution of Nigerian teenagers and the manufacture of a heroic image for a leader whose country suffers some of the world’s worst violence. At the same time, these operations succeed because of genuine failures: of security, of economic management, of electoral credibility and of Western partnership. The propaganda is a symptom as well as a cause.
Democracy in West Africa will not be defended by exposing a few Telegram channels, and it will not be defended by censorship. It will be defended when citizens can see, from the evidence of their own lives and from an information environment they can trust, that accountable government serves them better than the alternatives on offer. The juntas’ appeal rests substantially on the perception that they deliver what elected governments did not. Whether they can is now being tested, and in Mali the test is under way in the most brutal terms. The answer will arrive from the field, not from a feed. The task for those who care about the region’s stability is to ensure that, when it does, people are able to see it clearly.
