What an Extradition Trial Reveals About Moscow’s Influence in Africa

What Benin's Failed Coup Reveals About Russia's Network in Africa

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Africa Brief:

What an Extradition Trial Reveals About Moscow’s Influence in Africa

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Africa Brief

Lagos-based Nosmot Gbadamosi reports from across Africa on what’s driving policy, economics, and culture in the world’s fastest-growing and youngest continent. Sign up for the latest news, expert analysis, and data insights. Delivered Wednesday.

What an Extradition Trial Reveals About Moscow’s Influence in Africa

New details have emerged about a network of pro-Russian actors in the Sahel and beyond.

!Gbadamosi-Nosmot-foreign-policy-columnist10

*Gbadamosi-Nosmot-foreign-policy-columnist10*

*Nosmot Gbadamosi*

By **Nosmot Gbadamosi**, a multimedia journalist and the writer of *Foreign Policy*’s weekly Africa Brief.

!People in a crowd hold up banners; one waves a Russian flag with the Russian state symbol on it.

*People in a crowd hold up banners; one waves a Russian flag with the Russian state symbol on it.*

A demonstrator holds a flag with the emblem of Russia during a march in support of the Russian presence in the country, seen in Bangui, Central African Republic, on March 22, 2023. Barbara Debout/AFP via Getty Images

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*

August 26, 2026, 3:50 PM

Welcome to *Foreign Policy*’s Africa Brief*.*

The highlights this week: Benin’s failed coup highlights a network of **pro-Russian actors** across the continent, the dispute over **Zambia’s fraught election** continues, and the **Tanzanian government** suspends an independent newspaper.

Welcome to *Foreign Policy*’s Africa Brief*.*

The highlights this week: Benin’s failed coup highlights a network of **pro-Russian actors** across the continent, the dispute over **Zambia’s fraught election** continues, and the **Tanzanian government** suspends an independent newspaper.

*Africa Brief will take a break for the next two weeks. Our regular programming will return on Wednesday, Sept. 16.*

Sign up to receive Africa Brief in your inbox every Wednesday.

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Moscow’s Expanding Network

A coup thwarted in Benin last year has highlighted a network of pro-Russian actors in Africa, according to new details that have emerged from an ongoing extradition trial in South Africa.

The December mutiny, which was led by Lt. Col. Pascal Tigri and included the temporary seizure of the national broadcaster, collapsed within hours following military intervention from neighboring Nigeria. However, subsequent legal proceedings have shed light on how local pro-Russian influencers and movements work to achieve shared aims across African borders.

In its bid to prosecute those involved in the failed coup, Benin filed extradition requests for individuals in a number of African countries. This included Tigri, who fled to Togo—though his exact whereabouts remain unknown—and pro-Russian social media influencer Kemi Seba, who escaped to South Africa.

In April, South African police arrested Seba (whose real name is Stellio Gilles Robert Capo Chichi), who is wanted by Benin for “inciting” the coup. South African prosecutors allege that Russia funded and orchestrated an illegal escape plan for the 45-year-old Seba.

According to South African police, Seba was arrested with more than $18,000. Pretoria’s intelligence has suggested that the cash originated from Russia and was to be paid to Francois van der Merwe, a leader within the Afrikaner white nationalist group Bittereinders, to facilitate cross-border transport of Seba and his 18-year-old son from South Africa into Zimbabwe and on to Europe to carry out terror attacks, according to court documents revealed earlier this month. Seba and his legal team reject the accusations.

All three individuals—Seba, his son, and Merwe—were arrested together. Merwe had previously attended a September gathering of neofascists in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Despite growing up in France, Seba, who has about 1.5 million Facebook followers, has been a highly vocal critic of French neocolonialism in Francophone Africa on social media. He was stripped of his French nationality in July 2024 after he had previously been arrested for allegedly inciting anti-French and antisemitic sentiment. A month later, Niger appointed Seba as a special advisor to Nigerien President Abdourahamane Tchiani and gave him a diplomatic passport.

In December, on the day of the Benin coup attempt, Seba posted a video that he later deleted, which hailed the mutiny as a “day of liberation” and praised the fall of “a clan of predators preying on the economy and freedoms.” He has also widely praised Russia on social media.

Russia has fostered close ties with Benin’s neighboring junta-led nations of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Analysts have suggested that Seba’s pro-coup posts were part of a highly coordinated network of African diaspora influencers that worked to amplify the putschists’ messaging to create a false impression of popular support for the coup.

This appears to be a trend not just in the Sahel, but also across Africa. In 2022, the U.S. State Department accused Russia’s defunct paramilitary Wagner Group of using Seba and other influencers to spread pro-Kremlin narratives. In some cases, fake journalists wrote hundreds of pro-Russian articles in more than a dozen African countries, from Senegal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

While it may be tempting to dismiss Benin’s coup plot and other destabilizing events in Africa as simply Russian orchestrated, Moscow seeds its influence by tapping into systemic problems with democratic backsliding. Ben