For years, many Kenyans knew something unusual had happened during the 2013 and 2017 general elections, but there was no common vocabulary to describe it.

The campaigns were unlike anything the country had seen before. British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, through its political arm SCL Elections, worked for President Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaign, deploying sophisticated data analysis, opinion polling, and targeted political messaging.

Company executives later said they had conducted surveys involving tens of thousands of Kenyans, tested campaign messages, written speeches, and helped shape manifesto content in collaboration with local researchers so that every message resonated culturally and linguistically.

Much of the messaging played on voters’ fears, jobs, insecurity, and a return to the ethnic violence that followed the disputed 2007 election, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

The operation drew worldwide attention in 2018 after Channel 4 News secretly recorded Cambridge Analytica’s Managing Director of Political Global, Mark Turnbull. Posing as representatives of a wealthy Sri Lankan politician, undercover journalists captured Turnbull describing how the company had run campaigns in Kenya using local actors, proxy organisations, and online networks, while keeping its own role largely hidden.

The investigation alleged that fake social media accounts and coordinated messaging were used to portray opposition leader Raila Odinga negatively and influence public opinion.

Although the revelations sparked investigations in the United Kingdom, including inquiries by Parliament and the Information Commissioner’s Office, Kenya has never held a public inquiry into Cambridge Analytica’s role in its elections.

The scale of election-related disinformation, especially in the second phase of Cambridge Analytica’s work in 2017, which sources estimate cost $6 million, had become significant enough to trigger a coordinated response from government agencies, civil society, and technology companies.

In their report A Tapestry of Actors, Attitudes and Impact: Countering Disinformation in Africa, researchers Juliet Nanfuka, Victor Kapiyo, Victor Mabutho, and Wairagala Wakabi note that Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) partnered with social media platforms, including Facebook, to identify and remove harmful election content.

Independent fact-checkers such as Africa Check, PesaCheck, Fumbua, and iVerify worked to debunk viral falsehoods. At the same time, organisations including Amnesty International Kenya, ARTICLE 19 East Africa, and KICTANet documented disinformation networks and narratives. Peace initiatives such as the Uwiano Platform for Peace also issued early warnings on hate-speech hotspots, as media organisations trained journalists and citizen reporters to counter fake news that could have swayed how people voted.

At the time, there was no widely accepted term for this type of coordinated foreign influence operation. That changed in 2021, when the European Union, through the European External Action Service (EEAS), coined the term Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) — a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures, and political processes.

Such activity is manipulative in character and conducted in an intentional and coordinated manner, by state or non-state actors, including their proxies inside and outside their own territory.

“Cambridge Analytica ghosts keep showing up, and it really is the biggest exhibit that African countries are not bystanders or victims in the global power rivalry and the borderless information warfare,” says Alphonce Shiundu, Africa Check’s East Africa editor, when asked about the operation’s impact on the free will of Kenyan voters in the two polls. “It shows that our elections, data, and even our divisions and grievances, can be sold to the highest bidder, weaponised, and turned against us. And that was before the artificial intelligence tools that have made the scale, speed, and precision targeting much faster and more potent. Influence operations in the AI era will be difficult to detect, unless tech platforms build in defensive tools tuned to detect and expose them.”

Today, the manipulation extends far beyond one British consultancy and one country. The Africa Centre for Strategic Studies (ACSS) reports that disinformation campaigns on the continent have nearly quadrupled in recent years, with East Africa the second most targeted region.

Kenya alone has recorded nine documented campaigns — five of them domestically driven, suggesting foreign tactics are increasingly being replicated by local political actors. Sudan leads the continent with 14 documented cases.

One of the clearest illustrations came in 2021. The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), a leading research group that tracks online disinformation, exposes fake news, and studies digital influence operations, reported that Facebook had removed a network of pages, groups, accounts, and Instagram profiles running inauthentic content designed to promote a pro-Russia image in Sudan, portraying Russia as a friend of the Sudanese people while painting the country’s own leaders as pawns of the United States.

The takedown covered 30 pages, six groups, 83 accounts, and 49 Instagram profiles, with a combined following of 440,000 accounts. Only two of the pages were run from Russia; the rest were administered from Sudan itself, some posting pro-Russian content from inside the country.

ACSS estimates that nearly 60 per cent of Africa’s disinformation campaigns are foreign state-sponsored, with Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar as the primary sponsors.

China, Russia, Gulf states, and several Western powers are increasingly competing for influence across Africa’s information space through journalist exchanges, state-funded media partnerships, sponsored content, think tanks, digital influencers, and coordinated social media campaigns — many of them powered by AI.

Russia’s build-out illustrates how deliberate this competition has become. After RT and Sputnik were blacklisted across most of Europe in 2022, Moscow swerved toward Africa, culminating in a large, multifunctional Amharic-language editorial hub in Addis Ababa, opened in February 2025 — Sputnik’s first anchor bureau on the continent. By mid-2025, its FM radio programming was reaching roughly 6 million listeners around the Ethiopian capital.

The choice of Ethiopia wasn’t incidental: its Orthodox Christian ties to Russia, its history as the only African nation never colonised, and its role hosting the African Union all made it a strategically useful base. Uganda is also a target, with Sputnik and RT intensifying Facebook content tailored specifically to Ugandan audiences, building on Museveni-era historic ties to Moscow and state broadcaster UBC’s long-running practice of airing RT documentaries.

Rwanda and Uganda both carry RT through the Chinese-owned StarTimes cable platform, giving Russian content a foothold even in countries with no formal Sputnik bureau. Beyond Ethiopia and Uganda, Sputnik has signed content partnerships with local media platforms in Kenya, Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, and works alongside “Russia House” cultural centres and the intelligence-linked African Initiative news agency, part of what researchers describe as a “clandestinisation” strategy, in which local voices carry foreign narrative.

And East Africa has become a FIMI target. It doesn’t help that the region has a young, fast-growing social media population paired with weak media literacy and under-resourced regulators; contested elections in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania that reward narrative manipulation; deep anti-Western and anti-colonial sentiment that FIMI drivers readily exploit; and a geopolitical scramble for minerals, ports, and security footholds, where friendly media coverage smooths the way. Weak fact-checking infrastructure and low barriers to entry make the region both cheap to influence and hard to police.

“I was sponsored to go to China and had a guided trip through most of the country. I returned, and I can attest that the country is good, and I have a chance to return to China, so I won’t say anything bad about it,” says a Standard reporter who requested anonymity, fearing he could be blacklisted and denied another trip to a country whose image he describes as “very good — I am eager to return there.” Asked whether he could remain objective while covering China’s affairs, he demurred: “My brother, let’s leave that alone. I want to return to China — what I may say could lock me out.”

Daniel Dembede, who runs a local blog covering parts of Western Kenya and Nyanza, told Open African Tribune that China is gaining ground in its information war, and that the country’s perception in the region is improving. Dembede founded a local media outlet, Jabali Sauti Africa, where he receives stories from a Chinese proxy that he runs on his blog. By the time this article went to press, his latest republished piece, dated July 18, 2026, was titled “Xi Voices Firm Support for UN in Meeting With Guterres.” He receives a “small token” for running the stories, which he says helps him meet some of his basic needs.

It is not only small media houses. China has cooperation agreements and partnerships with major Kenyan media houses, including the Nation and Standard groups. This followed Xinhua establishing its African headquarters in Nairobi in 2006, its largest bureau outside Beijing, followed by CGTN, China Daily, and China Radio International, all of which carry a consistently positive message about China.

Russia and China are not the only ones running this playbook. Turkey has built a parallel strategy in which media is only one layer of a broader identity-and-commerce push: Ankara’s embassy count on the continent grew from 12 in 2002 to 42 by the end of 2019, alongside schools, air links, and investment across dozens of countries. Turkey brands itself as a fraternal, non-colonial partner; Erdoğan’s own framing was that Turkey isn’t “here for your gold,” unlike other external powers focused on African resources, but the pattern on the ground follows a more strategic sequence. Turkey, for example, entered Somalia in 2011 through famine relief, then secured long-term infrastructure contracts by 2013, including running the port and airport in Mogadishu, making it Somalia’s leading foreign investor in trade and transport infrastructure.

Defence ties followed in 2015, leading to Turkey’s first overseas military base in 2017. Media followed the same trajectory: TRT Afrika, launched in March 2023 at an Istanbul broadcasting summit with the African Union of Broadcasting, was built to reach an audience of more than 72 million people, broadcasting in English, French, Swahili, and Hausa, alongside Anadolu Agency journalist-exchange programmes and reporting grants aimed at young African journalists.

European policymakers argue that many of these activities now fit the characteristics of FIMI, because they seek not merely to communicate but to manipulate information ecosystems in pursuit of geopolitical objectives.

At a conference in Dakar earlier this year, European officials and researchers warned that Africa has become one of the world’s most contested information spaces. Some are even calling for organised foreign information manipulation to be recognised as a transnational security threat, rather than simply a communications issue.

The concern is not that countries tell their own stories — every nation practises public diplomacy. The concern is whether audiences are told when the information they consume forms part of a coordinated influence campaign, rather than independent journalism. That distinction is increasingly defining the new global information war.

How, then, do we distinguish FIMI from legitimate diplomacy? Shiundu says that, rather than relying solely on propaganda, FIMI encompasses covert influence campaigns that combine fake online identities, proxy media outlets, sponsored content, coordinated messaging, and digital amplification to shape public perception while concealing the real actors behind them.

The EEAS’s latest annual report on FIMI identified 540 incidents globally in 2025, involving more than 10,500 social media accounts, websites, and digital channels used to create or amplify manipulative content. Of the incidents attributed to specific actors, Russia accounted for 29 per cent and China 6 per cent, while most remained unattributed.

The report notes that campaigns have become more sophisticated through the use of artificial intelligence, including AI-generated text, synthetic audio, and manipulated video, and that Russian and Chinese operations rely on extensive covert and fabricated networks aligned with their strategic objectives to expand their reach while maintaining plausible deniability.

Significantly for Africa, the EEAS’s network analysis identified regional hubs targeting “Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Moldova and Armenia.” Elections remained a major target of Russian influence operations, the report says, citing campaigns around polls in Germany, Poland, Romania, Moldova, the Czech Republic, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Beijing has consistently rejected allegations that its expanding global media footprint amounts to information manipulation. Most recently, on July 17, 2026, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian dismissed U.S. claims that China had accessed 220 million voter records to interfere in past American elections. “The U.S. allegations have no factual ground and are aimed at defaming China,” Lin said. “China adheres to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. We have no interest in interfering in U.S. elections and have never done so.” He turned the accusation back on Washington: “On the contrary, who has interfered in other countries’ internal affairs, conducted indiscriminate surveillance of governments, businesses and the general public worldwide over a long period of time, and carried out large-scale theft of data from citizens of other countries? The international community is quite clear about that.”

Russia advances a similar defence, arguing that its international broadcasters simply offer an alternative to Western media dominance, and that accusations of coordinated influence campaigns are attempts to silence Russian voices.

Yet researchers paint a more nuanced picture. In the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Isaac Antwi-Boasiako of the Technological University Dublin argues that Africa has increasingly become a “dumping ground” for competing public diplomacy campaigns by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia.

He adds that Russia’s public diplomacy on the continent combines historical ties, education and health assistance, international broadcasting, digital media, and the exploitation of anti-Western sentiment to advance its strategic interests.

The question, however, is whether this is simply the latest chapter in a long-running contest for influence, or something fundamentally different.

Karl Stoltz, a policy analyst who wrote for the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Centre for Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare in March 2025, argues that defeating this information war won’t be simple, likening the FIMI challenge to the scale of defeating fascism in the Second World War or confronting global terrorism, and warning that democratic societies cannot afford complacency if they want to survive it.

The EU, for its part, is more optimistic. In a training session with government officials in Nairobi on July 2, 2026, it likened ed the FIMI network as a house of cards that can be dismantled, offering a formula: raise the costs and risks for threat actors so manipulation no longer represents a favourable cost-benefit calculation; isolate and constrain their operational space; target critical capabilities, the organisational networks, financial flows, operators, and technical infrastructure that keep the architecture running; push perpetrators to reshape their strategy, forcing them to waste time and resources rebuilding; and delegitimise threat actors by eroding their credibility and influence.

That resilience-building push didn’t start in Nairobi. It traces back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when health misinformation spread at a scale that forced governments, platforms, and civil society into a coordinated response for the first time. UNESCO’s pandemic-era project, #CoronaVirusFacts, became something of a template: it trained more than 30,000 journalists, fact-checkers, and communicators across 157 countries, building resource hubs and cross-professional information-sharing networks. The gap that template exposes is real, though; plenty of working journalists and small newsrooms are simply too stretched to plug into a network like that, even where it exists.

On the platform side, the UN’s Business and Human Rights framework calls on tech companies to conduct human-rights due diligence, increase transparency around their disinformation-related policies, engage with civil society, grant users greater control over their online experience, and open platform data to independent researchers.

The funding gap is where the story sharpens for Africa specifically. The African Union has raised concerns about disinformation, but there is no dedicated continental fund to fight it. Most African journalists and independent fact-checkers end up looking to Europe instead — and even that money is limited and largely Europe-centred, funding African-facing projects case by case rather than through any standing continent-wide mechanism.

Whether that formula holds in Africa remains to be tested. But Kenya has already run this experiment once. Long before “FIMI” had a name, Cambridge Analytica proved the model worked here first, a foreign firm harvesting Kenyan data, exploiting Kenyan fears, and walking away with its role still not fully accounted for, years after the fact. The ghosts Shiundu describes are not a metaphor. They are a warning that the country that unknowingly hosted one of the earliest information wars of the social media age never closed the file on it — and may be doing so again, in real time, without realising it.