Building peace by disrupting lies
A West African journalist, contracted to spread disinformation, charts a path out of fear and instability through contrition.
Ephrem Yalike Ngonzo, who was recruited by Kremlin-backed Wagner forces to spread Russian propaganda in Central African Republic, sorts through CAR newspapers during a visit to South Africa in 2022.
Forbidden Stories via AP
Surveys of public attitudes about democracy in Africa reveal a contradiction. “Growing majorities call for government accountability and the rule of law,” Afrobarometer reports, yet “Opposition to military rule has weakened.”
One not-so-hidden explanation for this is disinformation. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington has tracked a fourfold increase in sophisticated campaigns of deception across nearly 40 countries on the continent since 2022. They attack the credibility of elections, undermine health systems, and promote autocratic leaders. Russia is behind nearly half of them.
A new voice has now pierced that fog of dishonesty. “I helped keep my country in chaos,” said Ephrem Yalike Ngonzo, a journalist in the Central African Republic paid to spread false information provided by a Russian contact. “I want to denounce everything, to make amends, to free myself from my shame and my regrets,” he told the French paper Le Monde last week.
Societies that have turned to truth commissions to chart healing paths out of conflict have sometimes held up remorse as a standard for judging the sincerity of people atoning for the harm they have caused. Mr. Ngonzo’s desire “to make amends” points to what some experts in conflict mediation see as a deeper, more transformative commitment.
“Remorse is a genuine empathy-based expression of one’s regret over hurting someone else,” clinical psychologist Dr. George Simon has observed. “Contrition is that very rare but absolutely essential feature of changing one’s life for the better. It requires a true metanoia or ‘change of heart.’ And even more importantly, it requires work – a lot of very hard, humble, committed work.”
Contrition may be the common element in the diversity of conflict-solving approaches that turn perpetrators of harm into restorers of community. That includes former guerrillas in Colombia now protecting farmers and forests and gang members working as conflict disrupters in Chicago.
Mr. Ngonzo offered a detailed, inside account of how Moscow cultivates African journalists and activists through the Wagner paramilitary group and other Russian agents. They are lured with money and then entrapped in fear, he explained. Convinced of the harm he was causing, he slipped away quietly, arriving in Paris in June after moving furtively through neighboring African countries. He was helped onward by European civil society groups that defend whistleblowers in Africa.
When a lie is exposed, the world is no longer quite the same. Mr. Ngonzo has marked a route for others from dishonesty to conscience that the sowers of disinformation may note. Motivated by contrition, he is “no longer afraid.”