LONDON: Disinformation campaigns on social media, sometimes instigated by external countries, have fueled poor governance in parts of Africa, Nigeria’s foreign minister said on Wednesday.
Speaking during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yusuf Tuggar said that while social media could have a positive effect on governance and improving transparency, disinformation spread on its platforms was something Nigeria was having to deal with.
He pointed to countries neighboring or near to Nigeria where foreign powers had been blamed for sophisticated social media campaigns that helped to swell support for military regimes.
Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso underwent military coups in recent years and broke away from the Economic Community of West African States — ECOWAS — last year to form their own alliance.
Disinformation or misinformation had a “deleterious effect on governments and governance, and sometimes it’s even destructive,” Tuggar said during a panel on the threat of poor governance.
“It’s so sophisticated, and then sometimes you also have external interference where you have other states sponsoring such attacks, if you will, on others.”
While he did not name any countries in particular, Tuggar said that this was something Nigeria was contending with in discussions about the three countries leaving ECOWAS. Nigeria is the most powerful member of the economic bloc, which is regarded as having helped to improve financial and political stability in the region.
“That sort of negative campaign sways public opinion one way or the other, and if you’re relying on votes on openness and transparency, then, you know, it’s not a fair game,” Tuggar said.
A study released last year by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is based at the US Department of Defense, found Russia to be the leading source of disinformation in Africa, with West Africa and the Sahel the most targeted.
Tuggar’s comments came as the panel discussed how leaders could tackle the poor level of governance globally that is blamed for eroding global cooperation and stalling progress on critical social, economic and environmental issues.
Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, said that good governance was about whether people could continue to trust you when you got things wrong.
“Resilience in leadership takes legitimacy as well as effectiveness,” she said. “Legitimacy is about the trust you engender among those you govern or those that you lead in your company.”
Johan Andresen, chairman of the Norwegian private investment company Ferd, said that good governance needed to be handled in two ways — risk and responsibility.
“You have to have management of the risks in the organizations, but you should also try to experiment with how much responsibility can you actually take,” he said.
