The trend is unmistakable. Burkina Faso is on the radar of travel documentary filmmakers, and the coincidence seems at least a bit suspicious.
Some have suggested that this is a clearly sponsored media campaign, especially considering how most of the documentaries were released within just weeks or months of each other (especially between March and June this year). I know this is not far-fetched, as someone who has done some research into foreign influence operations in Africa. Russia, which is Burkina Faso’s new foreign power-chaperone, is infamous for its wide disinformation and propaganda network and is known to pay people to promote anti-West, pro-junta, and pro-Kremlin narratives. We’ve seen examples in the Central African Republic, Ghana, Nigeria, and other places.
However, others argue that the content creators are merely chasing a trending controversial topic that is sure to get them clicks. This could be right, too. Many of the travel documentaries have a substantial number of views. Wode Maya’s video — Flying To Meet The President Of Burkina Faso🇧🇫 — has attracted five million views and is the second most popular of the over 1,500 videos he has released on his YouTube channel since 2013. Tayo Aina’s video (released less than a fortnight ago) — I Investigated Africa’s Most Wanted President: Ibrahim Traoré — has been viewed over 1.6 million times and is also one of his greatest successes. Despite having only about 38,000 subscribers, one of EfyaKimora’s Burkina Faso videos has been viewed over 247,000 times and is by far her best-performing content since she opened shop in 2019. So, definitely, people are curious about what’s going on in Burkina Faso and this man called Ibrahim Traore, who has come to liberate the black race.
Which is it then? If it is a sponsored media campaign, are there telltale signs? Can we find the fingerprints of sock puppet accounts under those videos or some other fishy patterns? I thought I’d roll up my OSINT sleeves and do some digging. I started scraping comments on recent travel documentaries from seven YouTube content creators: Afam Orji, EfyaKimora, Menapolee, Prisca Oriade, Steven Ndukwu, Tayo Aina, and Wode Maya. With the right tools, Russian propaganda networks and echo chambers on Twitter can easily be identified. Perhaps we could apply the same formula to YouTube replies.
I collected 16,907 comments from the videos and checked to see if a bunch of the accounts could be found replying to multiple videos in a way that seemed unnatural. I found 32 accounts that commented on at least three of the seven videos and 239 accounts that commented on at least two. I started looking into the comments they left, but they didn’t seem out of the ordinary. It could well be that all these accounts just love engaging content about Burkina Faso. The data from the YouTube replies doesn’t meet the burden of proof for coordinated inauthentic behaviour, but it would still be interesting to see how these videos are amplified on platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, and Twitter by the regular Russian propaganda networks.
Another thing I set out to do was to view the videos themselves and look for patterns in the people they talked to and the places they went. Were there government officials masquerading as regular civilians? What else can we observe?
This was when I noted that the video formats were vastly different. Some of the content creators did not really rely on fixers or seem to have any actual plan. They simply travelled to Burkina Faso, held up their camera, and tried to talk to people — though they did not speak French — and released lightly edited videos. This was the chaotic approach mostly adopted by Afam Orji, EfyaKimora, menapolee, and Prisca Oriade. I also saw that some of these videos weren’t full of praise for the Burkinabe military government.
One of Menapolee’s videos has at least one person complaining about worsening economic conditions: a medical doctor who got laid off and now works as a commercial biker. In another video, he criticised how soldiers seized and occupied properties owned by previous government officials, describing it as unfortunate. He tends to give his videos unrelated clickbait titles like “Americans are Afraid Of Ibrahim Traore Of Burkina Faso” and “I Investigated Why American’s Want Ibrahim Traore Of Burkina Faso Out!” and then just talks about real estate or something else the entire time.
Steven Ndukwu’s video was also pretty balanced. Though he promoted the unsubstantiated claim that Traore had survived 18 assassination attempts and the disinformation that the Captain-President rejected IMF loans, he still acknowledged that a lot of misinformation and AI-generated propaganda had been spreading pertaining to developments in Burkina Faso and should be treated with caution. He also highlighted both the trumpeted achievements of Ibrahim Traore and the criticisms against him, such as the suppression of freedom of expression, the stifling of civil society, and his prolonged stay in power. “It seems Moscow is the new Paris, but it is unclear what price comes with that relationship,” he reflected. Though he titled the video “Finally visiting Ibrahim Traoré to Investigate Burkina Faso PART 1”, he didn’t actually visit the country (an unusual format on his channel) and instead relied on footage from Wode Maya’s documentary while promising to release a second part.
Honestly, if anyone paid for some of these videos, they should demand a refund.
Some of the more complex on-the-ground travel documentaries were sensational in the way they presented facts. But that is to be expected. They are not journalists, and you can see the same approach adopted in many of their other videos. Clickbait headlines and exaggerated claims are the norm in this universe, not the exception. Wode Maya released a video titled “I’m Quitting YouTube😭” in April 2024 just to get people to sign up for a two-way tourism experience between Ghana and Barbados organised by a travel agency. This was him advancing Marcus Garvey’s legacy, he said. Another video titled “I Lost My Father…” wasn’t really about him losing his father. It’s the tool of the trade. Tayo Aina, too, likes using headlines like “A Side of Canada The Media Won’t Show You!” and “The Jamaica They Don’t Want You to See” even if the content is disconnected, simply because those tend to get the most views.
Wode Maya constantly refers to Traore as “His Excellency” in his video, which is full of drama and excessive praise. But he has had a long history of anti-French, anti-imperialist, and pan-African posturing, so this checks out. The caption across many of his videos is this: “the image of Africa has been distorted around the world & we are changing the narrative via YouTube videos one country at [a] time. Until the history of Africa is told by Africans, the story of greatness will always glorify the imperialists!”
Both Wode and Tayo Aina’s videos featured visits to the Itaouha EV assembly plant and interviews with Patrick Pare, founder and CEO of LetsGo, an electric vehicle car e-hailing service provider. Those are the only two significant overlaps I could find.
There was something else about Wode’s documentary that felt a little out of place. Not all his interviews were with random Burkinabe citizens. He repeatedly interviewed two unidentified praise-singing men, who also served as his local guides. One night, towards the start of the video, he spoke to a group of men, who reportedly slept on the street to protect President Traore “because of the love of the country”. The person he spoke to particularly was one young man, wearing a white short-sleeve shirt. He interviewed the same young man again on another day about the government’s road construction project.
In the night scene about the civilian volunteer watchmen, we can see another man standing at the back, nestled between Wode and the group representative. We would see that man four more times in the documentary speaking glowingly about Burkina Faso’s development — first at the EV assembly plant, then at the road construction scene, somewhere else where he mentions Ouagadougou’s milk processing factory, and finally he talks about the redesigned gowns adopted by lawyers and judges in the country. Both men could be seen in other parts of the documentary as well, including during the road trip to the tomato processing plant.
Using PimEyes, a face recognition search engine, I was able to identify the two men as Venceslas Raoul Kiemdé and Tamboura Tamson. Kiemdé is the CEO of Burkina FX Trading and, according to his YouTube channel, a “millionaire trader”. Tamson, on the other hand, describes himself as a pan-Africanist blogger who provides “first-hand updates” on the AES (Alliance of Sahel States), with an IT background. His Facebook page, with over 73,000 followers, is full of promotional videos and posts for Burkina Faso and the AES countries.
I have to say that if I were hiring travel content creators for some PR work, the better approach would just be to pay for their logistics, give them a handsome sum of money, and tell them to do whatever they would ordinarily do. If you micromanage too much, the patterns will ultimately show. But if they are given a free hand, it all looks very natural and spontaneous. Even if the videos do not come out exactly as you would have hoped, you still get some good publicity, coming from people already with a lot of clout and perceived to be neutral.
On a general note, given enough time, the line between propaganda and reality begins to blur. By this, I mean two things.
One is that, already, when I search for “Ibrahim Traore speeches” on YouTube, I have a hell of a difficult time telling which video is real from which has been thrown together using generative AI. It reminds me of the Party’s contradictory slogan in 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The admixture of truth with falsehood is a great tool in the hands of dictators. At the end of the day, for you to control people, it doesn’t matter what is true and what is false. The only thing that matters is ideas. Sell people the promise of heaven and they will murder every ideal that gets in their way.
The second interpretation is this: when you pull enough strings, the puppet starts to dance by itself. Just as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently said about feminism, the job of propaganda is to make itself redundant. You don’t want to constantly tell people what to think, you want them to take the baton from you and happily run with it. That’s already happening with the military alliance in the Sahel. Millions of Africans genuinely believe this is the solution to underdevelopment on the continent; they truly want a Traore-like person to overthrow their government. So, you would find paid propagandists and such people using exactly the same language — and that’s when you know the disinformation campaign is succeeding.
That’s when you have a problem on your hands.