West African social media is abuzz with posts promoting a "brighter future" in partnership with non-Western powers, especially those belonging to the BRICS emerging economies meeting this week in Russia.
Talk of a "new world order" or "multipolar world" is regular fare on dozens of Facebook pages analysed by AFP across Sahel countries in west Africa – most spreading pro-Russian and some pro-Chinese content.
The original BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – last year admitted Iran, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia to the group.
One 16, 000-strong Facebook group created in March 2023 is dubbed "BRICS+Africa for a multipola world", proclaiming in its description: "The multipolar world is coming together with Africa, the continent of the future."
Wooing the global south
Posts show Russian President Vladimir Putin welcoming UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, or hail the reported deployment of North Korean soldiers to back Russia in Ukraine.
Most pages are run by people in Niger, Burkina Faso or Mali.
The chatter echoes Moscow's "overarching story opposing the 'global majority' to the 'Western minority'," said Maxime Audinet, a researcher at the French Defence Ministry's IRSEM think-tank.
"Criticising forms of dependency imposed by the 'West' and promoting a 'new world order' through organisations like BRICS and the G20 – of which Russia wants to be the spokesman – is part of a genuine strategy to woo the global South," Audinet told AFP.
Space to compete fiercely
The plan was laid out in a weighty report last year by Russian political theorist Sergey Karaganov, reshaping Moscow's foreign policy and emphasising Africa as a space to compete fiercely with Western powers.
Several Sahel countries are now run by military juntas that have sought closer ties with Moscow.
"Criticism of the French presence (in the Sahel) has been very useful for years, but now France is gone the narrative is shifting," Audinet said.
Influence operations run by the Wagner group, which has sought to sway West African opinion since 2018, have been taken over since the death of the mercenary outfit's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.
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