Why African countries believe Russian propaganda and how to prevent it
Raymond Acquah is the Director of Research at Multimedia Group Limited, Ghana’s largest media holding company. During the second Crimea Global international conference, which took place in Kyiv in November 2024, Raymond Acquah spoke about how Russia is convincing African countries that it is waging a war to liberate the people of Ukraine from alleged Western colonisation.
ZMINA published his speech.
Between 2017 and 2019, Ghana’s average GDP growth was 7%. In 2019, Ghana’s growth was one of the highest in the world, not just on the continent. Indeed, then came the COVID-19 pandemic and it dropped 0.5%.
Then, the next year, it started wobbling again. The government ran out of excuses. COVID-19 was the main excuse for the low growth.
Then it was Russia attacking Ukraine, the country that is supplying us grains. That was the issue. With time, the excuse changed to “Ukraine’s problems have become our problem”.
The Executive President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, during his Nation’s address, said that every single bullet directly hits our pocket. So, what was a very distant problem became our problem too, even though we didn’t know how we could help solve it. But that was not the most important conversation in Ghana.
What was happening was that, at the core, most people were made to believe predominantly Russian narratives. Just like how we fought for our own independence, the people of Crimea are fighting for their independence from Ukraine, not from Russia, and that Russia is helping them out in doing so. Now, that narrative to us is personal and important because my ethnic group, on three different occasions, fought the British. They were able to colonise the people who lived within the coastal regions, but we within the Asante group resisted […].
We may not be able to do anything beyond that, but we support a cause that says these are people fighting for their independence because we tried to do the same some time ago. Now, when you extend that, the other narrative was also, when it comes to Ukraine and Russia, “a private matter between two family members”. They use the old saying that ‘like tongue and teeth sharing the same mouth, they will resolve their differences. They fight, but they resolve their problems. So, we should not involve ourselves with it.
On the first day of the invasion, the President of Ghana made a statement supporting Ukraine. Ghanaians are wondering, why is that your business in the first place? Why are you seeking to interfere and intervene in a matter that has nothing to do with you? Which of the “brothers’ sides” would you want to join?
Not to mention, the academics in Ghana believe that they are opposed to the West. This narrative is fundamental because of the perspective of Ukraine representing Western interests and Russia representing the rest of us and the rest of us are not privileged Westerners. So, why should we support the side of the West?
To many people in Ghana, the decision to support the West would be unfair to our founding fathers. It will be unjust to the lives of Kwame Nkrumah if we are seen supporting Western countries and their prosperous quest to amass wealth and spread their tentacles.
Why is that our business? That really tilted the scales of public opinion against Ukraine. Why should we care when, first and foremost, Western countries are fighting the proxy war through Ukraine? In fact, the presumption is that Russia is the victim, and there were public lectures to portray that narrative. Most people who read on their own can discern and separate the facts.
But for a particular section of the population who are opposed to their government supporting Ukraine, they felt the government had isolated itself from the people and was rather pursuing a Western agenda.
If put this together, I insist that in the first few years of this war, not including from 2014, the presumption was that Russia is right, Ukraine is wrong, and that there’s nothing wrong with another narrative. There’s nothing wrong with bringing a region together.
In fact, sometimes they’ve been compared to our quest to have a united Africa. What is wrong with having everybody go back to join forces with their own, especially when the language is almost the same? And that the current war is just a small price to pay for that reunification, which is important, which is needed, which is something that we should be doing even as Africans all together.
That kind of narrative and if people buy into it, they are justified, because it makes sense and we can identify with those things. There is a political party that lost favor in Ghana in the 90s, just because the leader of the political party asked South Africa to fight their own fight. Our principle is that we, being the first black African nation to gain independence, cannot fight against the independence of any other country. And that perspective was spread out nicely to everybody.
I’ve just laid out about seven scenarios where it was almost impossible to get Ukraine being 1) the victim, 2) the ones that needed support, and 3) getting public sentiment in their direction.
With time, it will be very strange for Ghanaians to say, “Oh no, we support Ukraine”. The only time it became obvious to us that there was a problem was when we heard of the number of killed Ukrainians. It was problematic for us.
Regardless of what the sentiments were, it didn’t make sense for a massive number of people to die as a result of whichever reunification, whichever independence quest they had. So that is when I think sentiments are shifting in the direction of Ukraine. Had they done enough? No. Is there still massive support for Russia?
I need to point this out: even before 2020, we didn’t think it was possible for Russia to operate a “truth farm” from Ghana. So now, national security is involved. It was a big house, 16 people were living there, and their job every day was to make sure that they spread propaganda on the internet. Sometimes it’s not even targeted to Ghanaians. These were things that had nothing to do with us. The only problem, the government, at the time, was a part of the sentiments that were opposing democracy, which became a problem for the citizens.
Because then it is not just about Ukraine, it is not just about the US, it’s about fighting a system of government which is still operating in Ghana despite the difficulties with that system.
That’s when the government officially started opposing this. As you may have seen or heard, the president of Ghana met the US ambassador and told him that he should tell his government that a Wagner mercenary group was operating in Burkina Faso. We are worried about their tendency to come to Ghana. So we have already put military power at the border because we fear that they will extend to our country. It became a big issue for many people in Ghana and elsewhere.
In terms of sentiments, this perhaps summarizes Ghanaians’ history of thinking about not only the aggression in Ukraine but also how Russia has operated on the African continent, which is perhaps the blind spot of many people who have not taken it seriously up to this point […].
It is astonishing that we are compelled to such lengths to elucidate the position of the victim, as if it required justification – a nation under daily bombardment. Victims should not bear the burden of explaining their position. It is incumbent upon us to exert every effort to secure justice. This is not a matter of ideology, but of fundamental humanity.