Part IV: Beyond Western Russophobia: Which way Africa?

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OPINION

By Michael Kakooza, PhD (Wales)

Russian weaponisation of disinformation to subvert and polarise free and open societies extends to every part of the world. In response, today the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are launching a joint diplomatic campaign to rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threat posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence.  Under the – using, excuse me, the internet – intelligence diplomacy has become a hallmark of our administration.  I’ve instructed US diplomats around the world to share the evidence that we’ve gathered on RT’s expanded capabilities and the ways it’s being used to target individual countries and the information ecosystem that we share.

US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, ‘Remarks to the Press’, September 13, 2024

Seven months ago, this hotel [Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City Accra, Ghana] hosted a clandestine journalism retreat hosted by a little-known NGO called the Centre for Information Resilience. This organisation was founded by two former staff of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and received its funding from the FCDO and USAID. A group of 10 Nigerian journalists was flown out to Accra and lodged here at the Kempinski for this exclusive retreat, where they received detailed instructions regarding what personalities, organisations, and positions were apparently approved for journalism discourse and which ones were Russian disinformation. Upon returning to Nigeria, participants were given copies of a now infamous adaptive country plan research document, which went into great detail in naming and identifying specific individuals, organisations, and issues which were to be labelled as Russian-sponsored or Kremlin-backed.

David Hundeyin, Investigative Journalist, ‘America's Covert War On African Journalism’, 28 August 2025.

In a statement issued on June 22, 2025, Ahmed Kaballo, the Editor-in-Chief of the Kenya-based outlet, African Stream, announced its imminent closure on July 1, 2025, with the removal of its accounts from YouTube, Meta, Google, and TikTok. Personal accounts linked to the African Stream project were also to be restricted. The closure of this outlet was immediately precipitated by the remarks to the press given by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, excerpted above. 

At the time of this announcement, the African Stream had already attained eyeballs reach of 40 million per month, and close to a million followers each on Instagram and TikTok. Ahmed Kaballo stated the following in defence of the Outlet’s track record:

The smear by then–US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on September 13, 2024, labelling African Stream “Kremlin propagandists”—triggered a wave of censorship. … We are deeply proud of the work we’ve done since 2022: bringing attention to the most underreported and misrepresented continent. The imperialists want to perpetuate the dominant narrative that Africa is underdeveloped due to corruption and the mismanagement of resources. They want to remove colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism from the picture. We refused to play by those rules. For that, we paid the price. But it’s a price we would pay again and again.

Having deconstructed the ideological and moral of a discredited Western meta-narrative, and diagnosed Russophobia as the paranoid projection of the Western civilizational condition in Parts II and III above, it is now pertinent to propose ways forward for Africa.

In the preliminary observations of Part I above, the point was made that Africa’s ongoing debate about its current and future progress, development and transformation continues to be ideologically framed within and fixated upon the discredited Western meta-narrative. In other words, the continental debate, even when it does appear reactionary, as in the case of the Sahel Alliance, remains paradoxically conservative.  The point of departure for the debate is the legacy of Western colonial imposition and neo-colonial influence.

With the attainment of political independence from the erstwhile European imperial powers, the political options available to the new African States on the way forward were informed by the reality of a polarised global ideological framework, the Cold War Order.  On the one hand, there was the Western neoliberal order, economically championed by the Bretton Woods Institutions, and militarily buttressed by the ostensibly-defence alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). 

On the other hand, there was the Marxist-Leninist model of governance, ideologically and politically championed by the Soviet Union and China. The political policy options available were either to go right, that is, adopt the neoliberal agenda of the West, or turn to the left, that is, take on the socialist experiment of governance, following the Marxist-Leninist model. 

Countries like Kenya in the so-called Anglophone part of Africa, and Côte d’Ivoire, in the Francophone part, are key examples of new states that went right and opted for accommodation and collaboration with their respective former imperial metropolis.  These countries became dependent vassals of Western neo-colonial interests, for which a locally-emergent comprador class acted as custodian. 

Following the attainment of political independence that had been bloodily wrested from the heavy-handed paternalism of imperial Portugal, Angola and Mozambique went left and adopted the Marxist-Leninist governance model. Ethiopia, one of Africa’s ancient cultural entities, and virtually the only African state not to have experienced long-term colonial rule, overthrew its ancient monarchy and officially adopted Marxism-Leninism. 

The vast majority of the newly-independent states tentatively adopted what was tantamount to a mixed approach.  Some African leaders attempted to recreate what was believed to be a recovery of authentic African political philosophy. Examples of this were Ujamaa in the case of Julius Nyereere of Tanzania, Consciencism in the case of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and African Humanism in the case of Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia.  The Black Conscious Movement emerged in 1960s South Africa as a politico-ideological and cultural reaction to the Apartheid policy. 

An even more eclectic ideological mix was adopted as political philosophy in Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, in his Green Book philosophy, which drew its insights from traditional African values and customs, Marxism-Leninism, the Red Book of Mao Zedong, Western notions of democratic governance, and Arabic-Islamic religious and cultural practice.

Beyond the ideological polarity of political right and political left, another political policy option available to the newly-independent African States was to join the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), an international organisation that was established as a response to the Cold War and sought to steer clear of the polarising ideologies of Neo-liberalism and Marxism-Leninism. 

The debate on Africa’s transformational trajectory continued to be engaged in through the prism of the Western-framed narrative of ideological polarity.  However, this debate was always destined to end in futility for Africa, owing to the erosion of the ideological and moral grounds on which the meta-narrative of Western civilisation was premised.

A number of emergent geopolitical trends and developments towards the end of the 20^th century and the start of the 21^st are progressively disabusing Africa of the usefulness of its continued ideological fixation with the metanarrative of Western civilisation.

The end of the Cold War and the hegemonic unipolarity wielded by the USA during the 1990s turned out to have been only a short-lived and apparent vindication of neoliberalism.

China has emerged to become the largest world economy, with its Communist Party officially endorsing a unique model of state-owned capitalism, and that country currently enjoys the highest purchasing power parity (PPP) in the world. 

In the years immediately following the political collapse of the Soviet Union, a broken and vulnerable Russia crawled out of the rubble of Marxist political ideology for Western and Russian oligarchic scavengers to feed upon. Under the transformational leadership of Vladimir Putin, and in the face of the West’s relentless Russophobic representations, the politico-military and economic-technological situation has been remarkably reversed.  Contemporary Russia has gone a long way in redeeming its historical and civilizational credibility as a major player on the world stage. 

The phenomenon of regionalism has become a distinctive feature of the post-Cold War geopolitical landscape. It is explained by the reduction of US global hegemonic influence and the corresponding increase in interaction among regional actors. 

At the time of writing this article, the world has just witnessed, in real time, the dramatic unravelling of the global politico-economic balance of power, at the recently-concluded 25th Heads of State Council meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the largest summit in its history, which was held from August 31 to September 1, 2025, in Tianjin, China.

As a regional body, the SCO was established in 2001 as a Eurasian political, economic and international security organization, and, as stated by President Xi Jinping in his opening address at the 25^th Summit, “it immediately set the principles of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equal consultation, respect for diverse civilizations, and the pursuit of common development known as the Shanghai spirit. … Dear colleagues, today the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, having grown to include 26 countries, engages in cooperation across more than 50 fields and its economic aggregate approaching $30 trillion constitutes the largest regional organisation.

The governance paradigm proposed by SCO offers an alternative worldview of global relations, and challenges the pretensions of the discredited metanarrative of Western Civilisation to ideological exceptionalism and moral superiority.  President Xi Jinping described the SCO governance paradigm as follows:

We propose the global governance concept of extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits, practicing true multilateralism, deepening cooperation with the United Nations and other international organizations, constructively participating in international and regional affairs, always standing on the side of international fairness and justice, advocating for cultural inclusiveness and exchange, opposing hegemonism and power politics, and playing a positive role in promoting world peace and development.

In his own address at the same summit, the Russian president echoed the sentiments of his Chinese counterpart, but was much more forthright in his rejection of Western ideologised politics:

The SEO makes a tangible contribution to strengthening the spirit of cooperation and mutual trust across the entire Eurasian continent, thereby helping to lay the political and socioeconomic foundations for a new system of stability, security, and peaceful development in Eurasia. Any system that would replace the outdated Eurocentric and Euroatlantic models and take into account the interests of the widest possible range of countries would be truly balanced.

BRICS was set up in 2009 to strengthen its collective identity, foster cooperation among member nations, and contribute to global stability, development, and cooperation. It is emblematic of 21st-century multipolarity and presents a counterweight to organisations concerned with hegemonic control, such as the G7.

Since its founding, BRICS has grown in international stature and recognition, and now has the following three African States as full members: South Africa (founder member), Egypt and Ethiopia. Such is the current global standing and influence of BRICS that some of its leading members, like Brazil, India and South Africa, have been hit with a slew of tariff sanctions from a reactionary USA.

These trends and developments reflect the dynamics of a multipolar global reality that is sold short and undermined by the ideological fiction of a discredited Western hegemonic myth.  The fast-changing dynamics of the global geopolitical landscape are a wake-up call to Africa to rouse itself from its Western-centric ideological fixations and embrace the emerging global opportunities of the multipolar dispensation.

A radical ideological shake-up for much of Africa, still obsessing with the Western metanarrative of civilisation, has been the shift in the US foreign policy pursued by the Trump Administration 2.0, especially regarding what had served as the functional development cooperation model with Africa. 

In the name of cost rationalisation to control the spiralling trillion-dollar debt, and as a means of curbing what was viewed as the harmful influence of the Deep State left-wing ideologised politics, the newly-created Trumpian structure, the Directorate of Government Efficiency (DOGE), undertook the near-complete shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This decision massively impacted the continued funding of sundry health and governance initiatives in the Global South. Further, it has exposed the toxic dependency and non-sustainability culture of the greater part of the NGO industry in Africa. 

Although the USA remains the preferred dream destination of a majority of young Africans seeking educational and work opportunities, the Trump Administration 2.0 is increasingly putting restrictions in place regarding visa access for travel to the USA, narrowing opportunities for Africans to study at US universities, and is implementing deportation actions of persons who have overstayed the period of their official permitted stay, or are undocumented immigrants.

Inevitably, the evolving hardline US foreign policy has elicited protest reactions from African persons who are directly affected, as well as those whose interests are related. Much as decrying the US foreign policy as an atavistic display of ingrained Western racism may offer some therapeutic release, I do believe, however, that it is unfortunate, historically, that there are Africans who still need to frame their sense of acceptance, validation and legitimacy within constructed Western ideological narratives of race and identity. 

To my mind, this condition remains an indicator of a deeply-rooted historical inferiority complex that can only be sustained in the perpetuated belief in a coherent, credible and stable metanarrative of Western civilisation. As already argued above, the erosion of the ideological and moral grounds of this Western metanarrative renders the discussion of this specific focus on actual and/or perceived Western racism against Africans a dead-end proposition.

Linking back to Russophobia, and charting the way ahead for Africa’s socio-economic transformation, a number of challenging lessons are proposed for the Continent.

Interpreting Russophobia as a paranoid projection of the terminal decline of the meta-narrative of Western civilisation, it then follows that, if Africa’s transformation debate is to assume authenticity and credibility, the Continent should steer clear of a reactionary politics, expressed in either pro-Western or anti-Western polemics. In endeavouring to frame and affirm a positive Continental meta-narrative, Africa should courageously and critically revisit its past in its totality, unravelling the lessons arising out of each of the experienced historical epochs.

Africa’s past, just like her present, should be approached as a dynamic complex of encounter, resistance, adaptation, collaboration, and integration.  It is important, however, that the past is not reduced to an undifferentiated and monochromatic reality.  It is important that Africa’s past is not reconstructed using a romanticised lens, that is, that it is not cast as the nostalgic antithesis of the currently-challenged historical moment.  It is also important that the ideological arbitrariness imposed by the moralising binary opposition of good and evil is replaced with the critical adoption of nuance and context.

An authentic and credible engagement with Africa’s past would include the Africa of the ancient pre-Christian civilisations, the Africa following the Christian and Islamic encounters, and Africa at the advent of Western imperialism. The multifaced historical experience and character resilience of the African is part of the wealth of the civilizational legacy that should positively inform the construction of a credible pan-Continental ideology.

It is fundamental to the African transformation debate that an authentic and credible metanarrative should rest securely on core morals and values that reflect the common civilizational heritage and wisdom of the African peoples. In other words, the various humanist philosophies of life that permeated and formed the various African civilisations and cultures should be studied and critically interpreted, with a view to proposing and arriving at a consensus of commonly-upheld morals and values that Africans identify with, and which form part of their contribution in the ongoing inter-civilizational dialogues. 

In his address at the SCO Plus Meeting held on 1^st September 2025, President Putin said:

I would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that on September 20, Moscow will host the InterVision international television song contest. This major project aims to promote universal cultural and spiritual values. … In current international discourse, traditional values are too often pushed into the background. It is time to bring them back onto the global agenda.

This lesson is especially important when Africa, vulnerable already in its relationship of ideologico-economic dependency with the West, and incoherent and divided in its Continental moral stand, is confronted with the aggressively amoral Woke ideologies of the West. 

Further, Africa must take determined steps to morally reanimate its Continental soul in order to reverse the debased mentality of material-acquisitions-at-any-cost in the public sphere, a sought end justified by any means, that is steadily eroding trust in the integrity of Africa’s public service. 

Africa should also steer clear of the civilizational sin of exceptionalism.  In order to justify its so-called “civilising mission”, the West appropriated ideological and moral codes to invest its imperial enterprises with a messianic appeal.  The underlying tensions and contradictions of imperialism only served in time to unmask the hollowness of the West’s ideological and moral pretensions.  

Today, the wreckage that once pointed to Western exceptionalism can only be articulated through the use of the enabling negative, by projecting Russophobic sentiments of fear, guilt, hatred, and pessimism.  Rather than indulge in an insulating, narcissistic and suicidal civilizational mindset of exception, as the West has collectively chosen to do, Africa should, instead, confidently celebrate openness to the world, sharing its own complexity of experiences and values in the ongoing global dialogue of encounter, peace and prosperity. 

Addressing the final plenary session of the 19th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in October 2022, President Putin said:

Development should rely on a dialogue between civilisations and spiritual and moral values. Indeed, understanding what humans and their nature are all about varies across civilisations, but this difference is often superficial, and everyone recognises the ultimate dignity and spiritual essence of people. A common foundation on which we can and must build our future is critically important.

In order to fully leverage the benefits of inter-civilizational dialogue, it is important that the model of leadership that is currently dominant in Africa be reviewed. Since the attainment of political independence from the West, African states have continued to cultivate and strengthen the larger-than-life role of political leadership. It will be remembered that during the historical context of Western imperialism, political governance was necessarily coercive and not based on good governance principles. The political imperial establishment was surrounded by the mystique of pomp and pageantry, and fortified by the military. 

Over time, the functional limitations of the partisan political leadership models, in both the West and in post-colonial Africa, have been exposed to be counter-beneficial to the dynamics of a generationally-responsive democracy. 

In the UK, though the ruling Labour Party Government enjoys an unprecedented absolute majority in the House of Commons, the prime minister is currently polling at 13% in popularity. 

Although Dr William Ruto ran a successful presidential campaign on behalf of what he described the “Hustler Nation”, that is, for those who had fallen through the net of Government support, the very hustlers, the majority of whom are subsumed in the so-called GenZ, have since engaged in nationwide protests against Ruto’s government’s economic measures, and a number of them have succumbed to its state-perpetrated violence.

What is at stake here is the demystification of power, that is, effecting a radical shift away from the destructive weaponisation of ideology for narrow partisan interests to a retooling of consensus as the ethical modus operandi to drive socio-economic transformation. The public space on the Continent has become so dominated by partisan politics that non-political voices may only hope to be heard if they too strive to become part of the political establishment. 

Political leadership on the Continent today appears to have little in common with the moral/ ethical sense of responsibility of Africa’s justly-famed historical leadership culture. There are many an indication, instead, that contemporary partisan political leadership in Africa is morphing into a gigantic lottery scheme, cynically promising a life of dividends for its victors, and exclusion and misery for the losers.

Leadership in Africa should seek to move away from an establishment-based or elitist model of leadership to one which is much more diffused in scope, one which encourages and welcomes more players from different sectors of society to participate in leadership, conceptualised and practised beyond partisan politics.  This development would create a much wider and more durable consensus on the civilizational ethos. 

One consequence of Africa’s ideologico-economic dependency on the West is the failure to leverage its presence and collective continental experience and perspectives in international fora. It remains a source of both national and continental embarrassment, as well as a running commentary on Africa’s deficiency in continental self-esteem, for large African delegations to appear in high-level Western-mediated diplomatic and/ or negotiation spaces, only for the same delegations to be outsmarted in diplomatic and negotiation skills on account of their weak strategic thinking, inadequate preparation, weakness in cross-cultural communication, among others, and for the myth of African intellectual inferiority to be perpetuated. 

For this to change, Africa should leverage the structures of its continental frameworks, like the African Union and the African Development Bank, to develop a formidable and sustainable critical mass of diplomatic and negotiating talent to promote the continent’s diplomatic credentials. 

For Africa’s media establishment, the near-blind adaptation of Western media business management and training models has exposed it to the consequences of the ideological and moral bankruptcy of a discredited metanarrative of Western civilisation. What had been religiously proclaimed as the hallowed neo-liberal philosophical framework within which the freedoms of the Western press were celebrated has turned out to be an ideological charade. The self-censorship exercised by the Western mainstream media in reporting about the number of journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2022, is morally indefensible.

Therefore, it is important that Africa’s media training structures should critically review the definition and scope of media in Africa, the form and content of the media development curriculum that is fit for purpose in an Africa set for transformation, and propose the culturally-acceptable and professionally-required profiles of African media practitioners, media managers and media owners.

In the face of at least 18 sanctions packages imposed on Russia to date by the European Union, Russia has not only been able to attain an amazing level of national self-reliance, but has demonstrated success in leveraging its standing among the global majority of nations and BRICS.  This lesson should not be lost on Africa, which is still reeling from the dependency consequences of what until recently was the largely uncontested development cooperation model with the West.

Agenda 2063 and the institution of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) provide an ideological framework of promise for the Continent’s transformative future through enhanced intra-African trade.  Each African state and the players in each state are all called upon to commit to the implementation and realisation of the aspirations and goals enshrined therein. 

It is important that the ideological frameworks of Agenda 2063 and AfCFTA are securely and sustainably underpinned by positively stated and consensually agreed upon moral/ ethical values, so that Agenda 2063 and AfCFTA do not suffer the transience of mere structures, but are morally animated to drive Africa’s debate on the way ahead.

An iteration of such ethical/ moral values is especially important with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, and the twin dangers of what have been described as Western data colonialism and algorithmic colonialism. Africa’s engagement with AI should ever seek to ground it in a human ethical context and avoid locating its justification in the anti-life Western philosophies of posthumanism and transhumanism.

In this regard, it is noteworthy that in September 2025, a 3-day cybersecurity and AI forum will be hosted in Equatorial Guinea to focus on “non-Western” approaches to protecting digital infrastructure and managing cross-border payments.  Should the foundation built on moral/ ethical values be neglected, then the entire framework on which the ideological aspirations of Agenda 2063 are cast is doomed to be a short-lived fantasy in aping the building of structures.

The thrust of the above discussion has attempted to contribute to extricating the debate on Africa’s socio-economic transformation from the prismatic framing of Western ideological fixations. Africa’s continued obsession with the Western colonial legacy has resulted in an ideological dead end for the Continent, with what ostensibly appear to be two opposed scenarios of policy options, but which are essentially one and the same ideologically, that is, either for the African state to adopt reactionary anti-Westernisation or to become a collaborationist pro-Westernised entity.

Having lost its ideological and moral bearings and no longer championed by the political establishment, the metanarrative of Western civilisation can no longer assert itself positively, but can only draw attention to itself through the use of an enabling negative. Russophobia has become the preferred Western ideological tool for this purpose, effectively being mainstreamed as the moral basis for curtailing human rights and freedoms in Western society, especially of expression and association, the ideological foundation for EU foreign policy, and the justification for a crude NATO militarism. 

As a pathological projection, Russophobia provides a diagnosis of the pathological condition of Western civilization, enabling Africa to say Yes to courageously and critically embracing its own past and reviewing its present, and liberating the Continent to say No to the ideological fixations with a discredited metanarrative, and to destructive anti-life trends and developments that erode the ideological and moral integrity and legitimacy of any civilization.

So, while Russophobia is an enabling negative for the West to cling on to and perpetuate the myth of a metanarrative of civilization, for Africa, Russophobia provides a comprehensive diagnostic for the Continent to fundamentally understand and review its current ideologically dead-end position, turn its attention to a dynamic world beyond the ideologized West and consider the emergent options on the way ahead, and then affirm Continent the quest for a pro-civilizational choice going forward.