Africa: Ibrahim Traoré

I now know that Africa has been in search for a progressive hero since the passage of the great ones – Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nasser, Nyerere, Mandela, Sankara, etc. I know because of the thoughtless and uninformed speed with which young Africans are going in support of Captain Ibrahim Traoré as the new hero based mainly on the success of a Russian propaganda video company producing tons of messages about this “greet” African who came into power through a coup d’état in September 2022. The propaganda that people are falling for is cheap, unprofessional and poorly made.

The videos all portray him as a hero combatting Western imperialism and accelerating the development of his country and people. Take the example of a recent video showing a massive low-cost high-rise residential block allegedly constructed under Traore’s leadership. The claim is false. The construction site seen in the videos is a national building project in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria. The new roads, agricultural and industrial revolution videos are virtually all the same. The Viral Video about Captain Ibrahim Traoré rejecting a US state visit is fiction as there was no invitation for such. The Burkinabé leader was also said to have rejected loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank since he took over leadership. All these stories, and there are hundreds of them are simply fabricated to create the image of a progressive African hero and a lot of my progressive friends are falling for it.

As Ebenezer Obadare has pointed out recently, Traoré is deliberately always described in quasi-mythical terms with words such a “liberator,” “transformative,” “visionary,” “exceptional,” “courageous,” and “saviour”. This makes people both fond of him and the fondness is mixed with an unmistakable adulation. His propaganda team from day one has presented him as the second coming of Thomas Sankara, the country’s one-time charismatic leader who was assassinated in 1987 by a French-led plot.

In the videos, Burkina Faso is engaged on an unprecedented path of economic and social development thanks to the achievements of the great leader. That is the “reality” in the social media. The reality is that Burkina Faso has become caught in a spiral of violence that has spilled over from neighbouring Mali and Niger. Since 2015, regular attacks by armed jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have claimed tens of thousands of lives in the country and terrorists control a significant part of the territory. According to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2025, Burkina Faso is the country most impacted by terrorism in the world — topping the chart for the second consecutive year. That story is not being told as the mass media and civil society in the country have been terrorised into keeping quiet. Those who have tried to talk have been sent to the war front and placed on the frontline to be killed by terrorists.

It is important to note that the disinformation we are witnessing is not new and there are strong reasons why progressive Africans want to support Traoré. The return of the military to power in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Niger have been accompanied by an orchestrated campaign against France as the architect of the underdevelopment of the Sahelian countries and a saboteur of the battle against violent extremism. France is guilty as charged. Since 1990, a striking 78 per cent of the 27 coups in sub-Saharan Africa have occurred in Francophone states with the hands of France visible in most of them. This history laid the justification for the recent coups. Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, who was named prime minister by the military junta in Mali in September 2022, launched an attack against France criticising their “neo-colonialist, condescending, paternalist and vengeful policies”. That made the junta popular and the others learned the narrative. Anti-French vitriol have flourished in the three Sahelian countries – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where the military governments ended a long-standing accord that allowed French troops to operate in their countries.

French colonial rule established a political systems designed to extract valuable resources while using repressive strategies to retain control. The British did the same. The difference was that while the United Kingdom learnt to give up on maintaining the colonial system after independence, France persisted in nurturing and sustaining it. The French were very elaborate in retaining neo-colonial institutions. Seven of the nine Francophone states in West Africa still use the CFA franc, which is pegged to the euro and guaranteed by France, as their currency. Their foreign reserves are kept by France under terms that favour the French economy. France also forged defence agreements that saw it regularly intervene militarily on behalf of unpopular pro-French leaders to keep them in power. In many cases, this behaviour strengthened the hand of corrupt and abusive figures such as Chad’s former President Idriss Deby, President Paul Biya of Cameroon and former Burkinabe President Blaise Compaoré, creating additional challenges for the struggle for democracy. Africa did need heroes to uproot the French systems and the junta leaders realised that and used it.

They received help from the Russians, in particular, the controversial Wagner Group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in August 2023 when his plane was blown off the sky. He had built bridges into Francophone Africa. Indeed, one of his greatest talents was developing elaborate and sophisticated ways of weaponizing the genuine and deep history of Francafrique terrible maintenance of its colonial grip on the governments and resources of Francophone Africa for its interest while pretending to propose liberation. The purpose has been to introduce in its stead Russian neo-colonial control of the said territories through the instrumentality of installing military dictatorships. His method has been through deliberate and sustained manipulation through the social media.

The methodology and practice in this field have been developed by certain companies and States such as Russia to impact on social and political processes to obtain predetermined outcomes despite the fact that their actions are toxic and anti-democratic. One of the most infamous practitioners has been the firm Cambridge Analytica which acquired and maintained complex databases on the likes, dislikes, pressure points, and political positions of millions of social media users in order to deliver tailored ads and polemics. The technique is based on the idea of ‘informational dominance,’ which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening. While the internet was assumed to have broken information monopoly by appearing to offer users numerous and diverse sources of information, what it often does today is to lock people into this information cocoon where they essentially have only one source which is not only biased but also manipulative.

On Francafrique, the Wagner approach was to devote years of bombarding Francophone Africa with images through Facebook, WhatsApp, Tic Tok, Twitter and other outlets that France was actively providing arms to jihadists to keep terrorism active. Prigozhin used his Internet Research Agency (IRA), an online “troll farm,” and the Association for Free Research and International Cooperation (AFRIC) for the work. Today, there is informational dominance in Francophone Africa that terrorism remains because of France and the solution is to bring in the Russians. For the past fifteen years, thousands of video images appearing to show French helicopters delivering arms to terrorists however have been shown to be fake. The videos and associated propaganda created a wave of very strong antipathy to France in the affected countres. Wagner therefore succeeded in weaponization these narratives, much of which were false, to turn the tide of public opinion against France. They succeeded.

A number of sophisticated social media influencers emerged, some of whom are on Wagner payroll, to lead the advocacy for Russia as the solution. They include Nathalie Yanm (@Nath_Yamb), Kemi Seba (@KemiSeba) French citizen originally from Benin Republic and a French lecturer @FranklinNyamsi with Cameroonian roots. They lead the social media campaign and have also been active in the Russia-Africa summits. Over the past five years, they have succeeded in making the strong association between the idea that France must be thrown out, which most Africans support and that Russia is the way forward. Africans must rise to the imperative that the objective of combating neo-colonialism must be for autonomy not for a replacement a neo-colonial power. The most insidious aspect of this weaponisation is the presentation of military vanguardism as the pathway to salvation. They do so with the knowledge that the current generation of African youth have no experience or knowledge of military rule and the negative consequences of dictatorship.

I like the fact that the three juntas threw out the French from the control of their countries. I however refuse to categorise Captain Ibrahim as my hero, my heroes don’t tell lies about their achievements and they do not terrorise their people.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.