Africa faces new cyber security threats

The potential for Africa’s next security threat may emerge not from traditional warfare—like invasions, terror strikes, or coups—but through cyberstrikes on power grids, banking disruptions, telecom sabotage, or orchestrated disinformation aimed at toppling a government.

These are potential instruments of grey-zone warfare, a form of strategic competition conducted below the threshold of conventional armed conflict, which introduces another dimension of vulnerability for African governments already confronting insurgencies, organised crime, political instability, and economic insecurity.

Understanding Grey-Zone Warfare

Grey-zone warfare operates between ordinary geopolitical competition and open military confrontation, with the purpose of influencing political decisions, weakening institutions, or gaining strategic advantages without provoking conventional military retaliation.

Hybrid warfare combines different instruments, including cyberattacks, disinformation, economic coercion, sabotage, proxy forces, and covert political interference, making it essential to distinguish genuine hybrid threats from ordinary governance failures.

Misidentifying domestic opposition as foreign interference could itself undermine democratic stability, and for Africa, understanding the distinction is essential to address the complex security environment.

Disinformation as a Strategic Weapon

Information manipulation has become one of the cheapest instruments of modern geopolitical competition, with social media allowing fabricated reports, manipulated videos, and coordinated narratives to circulate rapidly across national borders.

Disinformation can undermine confidence in electoral institutions, inflame ethnic tensions, or portray political opponents as agents of foreign governments, and it rarely succeeds in isolation, instead exploiting existing frustrations involving corruption, unemployment, insecurity, and distrust of political institutions.

The African Centre for Strategic Studies has documented foreign-sponsored disinformation campaigns across the continent, demonstrating how information operations have become intertwined with geopolitical competition.

Credible communication, independent journalism, digital investigation, and accountable institutions remain essential to counter disinformation, and governments cannot defeat hostile narratives through censorship alone.

For instance, in conflict zones, competing information campaigns can exaggerate military victories, conceal defeats, and influence public attitudes towards armed groups, making it challenging for governments to develop effective counter-narratives.

In the middle of this complex situation, it’s clear that African governments need to develop a deep understanding of the role of disinformation in grey-zone warfare, and how it can be used to undermine their stability and sovereignty.

This requires a thorough understanding of the social, economic, and political context in which disinformation campaigns are launched, as well as the development of effective counter-measures that go beyond simple censorship or fact-checking.

By developing such an understanding, African governments can begin to build resilience against disinformation campaigns, and reduce the risk of instability and conflict.

Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, such as electricity networks, telecommunications systems, airports, ports, hospitals, and financial institutions, are another key aspect of grey-zone warfare, and Africa’s expanding digital economy creates opportunities alongside new security vulnerabilities.

A successful cyberattack against one system could disrupt several others, and cybersecurity must therefore become a national-security responsibility rather than remain exclusively an information-technology function.

Consider Nigeria’s banking sector, where a coordinated attack against major payment infrastructure could interrupt salaries, commercial transactions, and essential services without a single conventional weapon being deployed.

Building Resilience Against Hybrid Threats

National security councils should establish protocols for attributing cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to specific actors, and for communicating with the public about these threats.

The African Centre for Strategic Studies has called for increased investment in cybersecurity and hybrid threat research to better understand the evolving nature of these threats.