Who Shapes What We Believe? Why Local Trust Is West Africa's First Line of Defence Against FIMI

The EEAS Connecting Media Communities conference opens in Brussels on 29 October. I will join remotely from Kumasi to present "Building trust locally: Strengthening Community Resilience to Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI)."

FIMI is often discussed in capitals and conference halls, but it succeeds or fails in markets, mosques, radio call-in shows and WhatsApp groups.

The EEAS describes FIMI as a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour that threatens or can harm values, procedures and political processes. In West Africa, the scale is large. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies linked 80 of the 189 disinformation campaigns it mapped on the continent to Russia, about 40%.

Research by the Atlantic Council's DFRLab on West Africa, with case studies on Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Niger, found that anti-France and pro-Russia sentiment surged together, presenting Russia as an alternative to Western aid.

Fact-checking alone cannot stop this. The Africa Center noted that Facebook declined to remove coordinated networks operating in the Sahel . Press freedom has also shrunk. Juntas have suspended or closed more than a dozen media outlets, and RSF has called the Sahel a "zone of no free information" .

A correction from a distant institution rarely travels as far as the lie, and it often arrives in a tone the audience does not trust. What matters is who is speaking.

That is why local trust is the first line of defence. Three things carry it:

Communities. Families, youth groups, traditional authorities and religious leaders decide in practice whether a rumour is believed or dismissed. A community that knows its own leaders and media is harder to deceive.

Local-language media. Across the Sahel, millions of people get their news in Fulfulde, Bambara, Songhai, Zarma, Tamasheq and Mooré rather than in English or French. Foreign influence operations know this and invest in these languages.

Local radio and online platforms reach people that international media do not, so local journalists must match that investment with credible, accurate reporting.

Trusted voices. Teachers, imams, market leaders and respected broadcasters can slow a false narrative before it spreads. Training them in verification and media literacy costs far less than repairing a damaged public mind later.

For policymakers and partners, the lesson is practical. Resilience cannot be imported as a finished product. It has to be built with local journalists, community leaders and civil society, in their languages and on their terms. Support should go to community radio, verification networks and media literacy programmes, not only to monitoring centres abroad.

The conference asks "Who shapes what we believe?" In West Africa the answer is whoever our communities already trust. Our task is to make sure that trust is well-founded and well-defended.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/Science communicator, Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,United States Institute of Peace (USIP), [email protected] +233555275880

References
EEAS, 2nd Report on FIMI Threats: A Framework for Networked Defence, January 2024, eeas.europa.eu

Africa Center for Strategic Studies, "Mapping a Surge of Disinformation in Africa", March 2024, africacenter.org

Jean Le Roux and Tessa Knight, "The disinformation landscape in West Africa and beyond", Atlantic Council DFRLab, 2023, dfrlab.org

Africa Center for Strategic Studies, "Mapping Disinformation in Africa", April 2022, africacenter.org

RSF, 2024 World Press Freedom Index, as reported by ADF Magazine, adf-magazine.com