In an earlier piece for this column, I wrote about Ananse the trickster who built webs not to trap flies but to acquire stories, and with them, control over what the world came to believe.
I argued the platforms shaping African minds today play Ananse’s game at a planetary scale and that Africa still had not written the philosophy to govern the web it inherited.
That piece was about the missing foundation. This one is about what is already collapsing on top of it: social media is no longer simply changing how Africans talk to one another. It is quietly reshaping the conditions under which they decide who governs them.
The Coup Has Changed Its Uniform
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the fastest route to capturing an African state ran through the barracks soldiers, a seized radio station, a communiqué read out before dawn. Whole generations here learned to recognise the sound of a coup before they understood the politics behind it.
Sometimes the barracks had help from outside. The 2011 NATO campaign that ended with Muammar Gaddafi’s killing was built, a 2016 UK Parliament inquiry found, on intelligence presented with “unjustified certainty” about a threat to civilians in Benghazi.
Five years on, Barack Obama, who ordered US involvement, called failing to plan for what followed “the worst mistake” of his presidency. Libya has not recovered since proof, well before any algorithm existed, that a state can be dismantled on the strength of a story that turns out not to be true.
The old lever was still being pulled, too. Mali in 2020. Guinea and Burkina Faso in 2021 and 2022. Niger in 2023 coups in the fullest, oldest sense, driven by insurgency, elite fracture, and state weakness, not by a hashtag.
The African Union suspended all four. Rather than wait to be readmitted, three Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger broke away entirely, forming their own Alliance of Sahel States and walking out of ECOWAS in January 2025, framing it as resistance to institutions they no longer trusted.
And now the continent is discovering the barracks were never the only door in. One of the most efficient ways to destabilise a nation today needs no soldier, a smartphone, a grievance, and an algorithm hungry enough to reward whichever one spreads fastest, because attention curdles into perception, perception into trust, and trust is the raw material legitimacy is built from.
In Ethiopia, internal documents released through the “Facebook Papers” showed the company had flagged the country as high-risk years before its civil war broke out and still failed to contain hate speech that researchers later linked to real ethnic violence.
In Kenya’s 2017 election, an executive of Cambridge Analytica, the firm behind its microtargeting, was filmed describing how his company “put information into the bloodstream of the internet” of a nation still carrying the memory of the 2007–08 post-election killings. Different eras, different tools. The same outcome: outrage travels faster than correction, and the correction arrives to a public that has already moved on.
Interest Has No Party and No Passport
Social media does not optimise for truth. It optimises for whatever holds attention, and attention, we now know with painful clarity, is held longest by fear, tribal loyalty, and righteous anger. This is not a Ghanaian problem, a Kenyan problem, or an Ethiopian problem. It is a design problem that behaves identically regardless of which political party benefits from it this week and regardless of which country the loudest voice happens to be broadcasting from.
None of this makes the algorithm a villain by design. The same feeds broke information monopolies that had protected entrenched power for decades: Sudan’s 2019 uprising, Nigeria’s #EndSARS, Ghana’s own #FixTheCountry all ran through them too. The mechanism is neutral; only the outcome tells you which side it served this time.
Burkina Faso shows both sides of this inside one country. The same algorithmic machinery that tears a state down elsewhere is, there, also being used to manufacture one man’s legitimacy: the Africa Center for Strategic Studies has traced a coordinated, AI-driven campaign of deepfakes and bot networks, orchestrated by President Ibrahim Traoré’s own brothers, who run the junta’s digital economy and communications portfolios to inflate his image across the continent, running alongside genuine reforms and a genuine crackdown on the press covering them.
The recommender system that rewards outrage is a decade old; what generative AI adds is sharper still synthetic video and cloned voices convincing enough to have a chief, an imam, or a president appear to say something he never said. The algorithm does not care whether it is used to bring a government down or prop one up. It only rewards whichever version performs.
That is precisely why our current approach to accountability keeps failing: incitement is forgivable the moment it wears a party colour, and untouchable the moment it is posted from beyond our borders. A public figure who threatens through political language, or a diaspora voice stirring unrest at home, should not be exempt because of who they support or where they post from.
That standard has to be written narrowly, aimed at inciting a specific, provable act and not at diaspora political voice itself, which African governments have too often relabelled “outside interference” to silence dissent. Africa needs a policy that judges the act on its own terms, not one borrowed from Silicon Valley, not one that bends on affiliation, fame, or address.
Why the Engineers Cannot Fix This Alone
Every proposed solution so far has come from the technology sector itself: better moderation, better classifiers, better fact-checking. These matter, but share a blind spot: built for platform metrics, not community trust. A chief in a Northern Ghanaian community will recognise the phrase that could ignite a chieftaincy dispute faster than any keyword filter trained in San Francisco ever will. A council of elders knows which rumour is a joke and which one is a match dropped near dry grass.
This is why the argument I made about AI governance needing a philosophical anchor applies just as urgently here: platform governance in Africa cannot be left to technologists and legislators alone. It needs traditional leaders, religious authorities, and community elders in the room, alongside policymakers genuinely rooted in the cultures they govern, not merely fluent in Silicon Valley’s vocabulary and platform representatives themselves.
None of them belongs there as a ceremonial guest, brought in only to critique what the algorithm already got wrong: each needs real authority to define what it should look like for African communities in the first place and to catch incitement before it spreads rather than after. Every seat at that table, elders included, carries the same discipline fixed terms, a plural bench rather than one voice, and an appeals path outside its own authority.
The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma unsettled global audiences by showing, through the engineers who built these systems, that outrage was not a side effect of engagement optimisation it was the point. Africa does not need a documentary to discover this; we are living the unfiltered version, without the luxury of watching from a safe distance.
“The old coup announced itself with tanks in the street. This one announces itself as a trending topic, and by the time we recognise it, the trust it has burned is already gone.”
Retrieving What We Already Have
There is a reason Akan tradition gave us Sankofa the wisdom of turning back to retrieve what has been left behind before continuing forward. Sankofa does not promise our ancestors anticipated algorithms; it promises that principles built for one era can be retrieved and translated for another. The same communal accountability that once made an elder’s rebuke carry more weight than any court summons can still apply to a village square that never sleeps and reaches a million people before breakfast.
Africa spent the twentieth century learning, at a devastating cost, how to recognise a coup. It cannot afford to spend the twenty-first learning day at the same cost on how to recognise this one. The room this requires elders and engineers, chiefs and coders, policymakers and platforms is not one we convene at our convenience. The window is closing now. Not tomorrow.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
