Tag: news

Why I Voted the Way I Did in 2024 (And Why That Should Worry All of Us)

Given SHINGANGE

I could not vote on 27 April 1994. I was not yet 18. The same thing happened again in 1999 — election day came, and once more I was underage, even though I would later vote in that year’s local government elections. Like many South Africans of my generation, my political consciousness was formed long before I was legally allowed to participate. That distance between lived politics and formal participation has never really closed — and it matters more now than it did then.

When I finally did vote in 1999, I voted for the ANC. At the time, that choice required no justification. The movement still carried moral authority, historical legitimacy, and overwhelming public trust. But what is less often acknowledged is how quickly discomfort set in afterwards. From the national elections that followed, I never again voted for the ANC — not because another party persuaded me, and not because I had disengaged from the country’s future, but because something already felt misaligned. Even then, it seemed that the story and the reality were starting to drift apart.

Around 2010, while I was living in Bloemfontein, I shared my frustration with my mentor, AZ. His response was direct and necessary: it is easy to criticise from the sidelines; eventually you have to decide whether you are prepared to get involved. I took that seriously. I attended branch meetings. I tried to engage. What I encountered, however, was a political language and culture that felt disconnected from the problems I believed we should be confronting. I walked away, not in anger, but in quiet disappointment.

My political exposure did not come only through voting. In 2008, after resigning from the SANDF, I joined Sebra, a construction financing company owned by Kobus van Loggerenberg — KvL to those who knew him. He was a progressive white Afrikaner, a former SRC president at the University of the Free State in the 1980s, and someone shaped by difficult political choices during apartheid. He was also a principled man. May his soul continue to rest in peace.

At the time, the UFS was dealing with the Reitz 4 incident, where black workers were humiliated by white students in what became a national scandal. Sebra’s shareholders decided to support non-white student formations contesting the SRC elections, and my first real task at the company was to manage the campaign funds. What I witnessed during that period was instructive: fragmented organisations — SASCO, the YCL, and the ANC Youth League — had to be pushed to work together just to stand a chance.

They did not win the SRC presidency that year. But something important shifted. For the first time, these formations believed that institutional power was not permanently closed to them. That belief mattered. The following year, in 2009, that groundwork paid off. The same collective went on to win the SRC elections, and Moses Masitha became the first black SRC president at the University of the Free State.

That outcome reinforced a lesson that has stayed with me: politics is rarely about immediate victory. It is about coordination, persistence, and understanding the environment you are operating in — especially when institutions are stacked against you.

Around the same period, AZ invited me to be part of a delegation visiting the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The group consisted of academics and professionals selected for what they were doing and what they might still contribute. The visit was not ideological. It was about exposure — about observing how other states thought about development, power, and sovereignty. I returned home with a broader lens and a deeper unease. South Africa, to me, appeared increasingly unprepared for the kind of world it was entering.

For years after that, I remained disengaged from ANC electoral politics.

Then came 2024 — and with it, a rupture that cannot be explained through traditional political analysis.

By then, the country had effectively lost control over its information environment. Social media was no longer just a platform for expression; it had become an operational domain. Disinformation, misinformation, coordinated influence campaigns, algorithmic amplification, and deliberate cognitive manipulation were no longer abstract concepts. They were observable, measurable, and increasingly sophisticated. What concerned me was not ordinary political contestation, but the erosion of South Africa’s information sovereignty.

This was not one party out-campaigning another. It was something more corrosive: sustained efforts, amplified through digital platforms and media ecosystems, aimed at eroding trust, inflaming division, and normalising instability. Many of these narratives did not originate organically within South African society. They were engineered to exploit our fractures.

I have explored these dynamics in depth in a recent series on this blog focused specifically on influence operations. That series looks at how these campaigns are designed, how they spread through digital systems, and why societies like ours are particularly vulnerable. This article is not a repetition of that work. It is a personal reflection shaped by it.

I voted for the ANC in 2024 not because it had suddenly become virtuous, competent, or deserving of renewed loyalty. I voted defensively. “Better the devil you know” is an uncomfortable phrase, but it captures the logic. Some of the forces shaping our political environment do not care about governance, service delivery, or justice. They care about disruption. A lawless, fragmented South Africa serves interests that are not our own.

The outcome — a Government of National Unity — should not reassure us. If anything, it should alarm us. What we witnessed was a probing exercise. The gaps were identified. The vulnerabilities mapped. And the campaigns for the next electoral cycle have already begun.

This is not a message to the ANC. It is a warning to all political parties and to society at large. Influence operations do not target parties; they target populations. They exploit grievances, identities, historical wounds, and economic pain. In a hyper-connected society like ours, no political formation is immune.

Our failure is that we are still thinking in outdated terms. We celebrate connectivity but ignore content. We talk about democracy while failing to grasp algorithmic warfare. We rely on old institutional structures to confront threats that are hybrid, asymmetric, and cognitive in nature. We are trying to solve twenty-first-century problems with twentieth-century tools.

The most dangerous failure, however, is not technical — it is intellectual. We are not honest enough to admit that we are out of our depth. Influence operations and cognitive warfare are specialised domains. They demand expertise, humility, and the willingness to listen to people who understand how these systems work.

That is all that is required of us right now: honesty about our limitations, and the courage to let those who know what they are doing help us think clearly. Anything less is not neutrality. It is negligence.

Hidden Digital Dependency and the Case for a National Technology Dependency Audit in South Africa

Given SHINGANGE

Abstract

South Africa’s rapid digital transformation has been enabled largely through the adoption of foreign-owned and foreign-governed digital technologies, including cloud platforms, software ecosystems, cybersecurity tools, and global payment networks. While these technologies have improved efficiency, scale, and service delivery, they have also introduced a less visible but strategically significant risk: hidden digital dependency. This article argues that South Africa’s most serious digital vulnerability does not arise from overt hardware procurement or isolated vendor choices, but from embedded dependencies in control planes, identity systems, software update mechanisms, cybersecurity supply chains, and cross-border data governance regimes that lie beyond South Africa’s legal and political authority. Drawing on international political economy and security literature, particularly the concept of weaponised interdependence, and grounding the analysis in South Africa’s cybersecurity, data, and infrastructure governance frameworks, the article demonstrates that current national preparedness is fragmented and insufficient. It advances the case for a National Technology Dependency Audit as a proportionate, governance-aligned instrument to restore visibility, prioritise risk, and strengthen national resilience without pursuing technological isolation. The article concludes that resilient interdependence, rather than digital autarky, should be South Africa’s strategic objective in an increasingly contested digital environment.

Keywords: digital sovereignty; hidden digital dependency; weaponised interdependence; cybersecurity supply chains; cloud governance; South Africa.

1. Introduction

Digital infrastructure has become foundational to modern state capacity. In South Africa, digital systems underpin revenue collection, social grant disbursement, banking and payments, aviation and logistics, healthcare delivery, municipal services, and political communication. The state’s ability to govern, regulate, and deliver services increasingly assumes uninterrupted access to global digital platforms and networks. Yet this assumption is rarely interrogated at the level of national risk.

South Africa’s digital modernisation has been shaped primarily by pragmatic considerations: cost efficiency, scalability, skills availability, and speed of deployment. As a result, government departments, state-owned enterprises, and systemically important private-sector actors have adopted foreign cloud platforms, software ecosystems, and cybersecurity services as default infrastructure. While this trajectory has produced tangible short-term benefits, it has also created long-term structural dependencies that remain poorly understood within policy and security circles.

This article argues that South Africa faces a growing problem of hidden digital dependency, and that the absence of a national technology dependency audit represents a strategic governance failure. Existing policy instruments recognise aspects of digital risk, but they do not provide a consolidated national view of where foreign control intersects with critical digital functions. Without such visibility, preparedness remains reactive, fragmented, and overly dependent on assumptions of benign continuity.

2. Conceptualising hidden digital dependency

Hidden digital dependency refers to reliance on foreign-owned or foreign-governed digital capabilities that are essential to national continuity but are not treated as strategic dependencies. Modern digital architectures deliberately abstract control. Users interact with applications and dashboards, while authority over identity, encryption, updates, availability, and compliance resides elsewhere.

These dependencies typically manifest across several layers:

  • control-plane governance in cloud platforms,
  • identity and authentication services,
  • encryption key management and certificate authorities,
  • software update and patching ecosystems,
  • proprietary application programming interfaces and data formats, and
  • cross-border data governance regimes.

The critical distinction is between operational use and strategic control. A system may be hosted locally, staffed locally, and paid for locally, yet remain subject to external decisions regarding access, lawful disclosure, or termination. This distinction explains why digital dependency is a national security and sovereignty issue rather than a purely technical or commercial concern.

3. Weaponised interdependence and digital power

The concept of weaponised interdependence provides a useful analytical lens for understanding why hidden digital dependency matters at state level. Farrell and Newman argue that global economic and information networks are structured around hubs and chokepoints, and that actors who control these nodes can exploit them for coercive purposes. Power is often exercised indirectly, through private intermediaries complying with domestic law, export controls, or risk-averse corporate policies.

In the digital domain, these hubs include cloud control planes, dominant operating systems, app distribution platforms, global payment networks, and cybersecurity service providers. Control over these nodes enables surveillance, denial of access, and influence through standards and ecosystem rules.

For South Africa, the key issue is asymmetry. Dependence on a small number of global technology ecosystems concentrates risk and creates latent leverage, regardless of political intent. Even in the absence of formal sanctions, export controls, compliance overreach, and platform governance decisions can constrain access to essential services during periods of geopolitical stress. In this sense, hidden digital dependency constitutes a standing condition of vulnerability rather than a contingent threat.

4. South Africa’s digital governance architecture and its limits

South Africa is not without relevant policy instruments. The National Cybersecurity Policy Framework positions cybersecurity as a national interest and calls for the protection of critical information infrastructure. The Protection of Personal Information Act establishes principles for lawful processing and data protection. The Cybercrimes Act provides mechanisms for criminal investigation and cooperation. The National Policy on Data and Cloud articulates ambitions for a data-driven economy and provides policy direction on cloud adoption.

However, these instruments operate largely in silos. None mandates a systematic assessment of foreign technology dependency across critical national functions. Cybersecurity governance focuses on coordination and incident response rather than structural dependency. Data policy prioritises economic opportunity and inclusion rather than control and jurisdiction. Procurement decisions remain decentralised and sector-specific.

The result is fragmented preparedness. No single authority is responsible for understanding how foreign control, legal jurisdiction, and platform governance intersect across the national digital ecosystem. This fragmentation creates blind spots that only become visible during crises.

5. National security implications of hidden digital dependency

Hidden digital dependency generates several interrelated categories of national security risk.

First, jurisdictional risk arises when foreign legal regimes can compel technology providers to disclose data or restrict services through corporate entities, irrespective of where data is physically stored. Data location does not equate to data control.

Second, availability risk emerges when access to platforms, identity services, or software updates is degraded or denied due to compliance actions, geopolitical disruption, or corporate policy changes. Modern cloud platforms integrate identity, security monitoring, and administrative control into a single dependency stack.

Third, integrity risk arises from software supply chain compromise. Trusted update mechanisms and centrally managed platforms can be exploited or withdrawn, creating systemic exposure across multiple institutions simultaneously.

Fourth, lock-in risk constrains policy autonomy. Proprietary platforms and data formats raise switching costs and narrow exit options, creating indirect coercion even in the absence of explicit restrictions.

Finally, strategic leverage risk arises when concentrated dependency becomes a bargaining chip during diplomatic or economic disputes. South Africa’s current preparedness does not adequately address these risks because it treats them as isolated technical issues rather than interconnected structural vulnerabilities.

6. Sectoral exposure in South Africa

Hidden digital dependency is not evenly distributed. Its impact varies across sectors.

In government administration, digital identity and access management underpin grants, payroll, licensing, and secure communications. External governance of authentication services, certificate authorities, or key management creates a single point of failure for the digital state.

In financial systems, payment rails, clearing mechanisms, and fraud detection tools rely on global networks governed externally. International experience demonstrates that financial messaging and settlement access can be restricted rapidly, with cascading economic effects.

In aviation, transport, and logistics, air traffic management, port operations, and cargo systems depend on specialised software, satellite navigation, and real-time data exchange subject to export controls and certification regimes.

In health and social services, cloud-hosted systems process sensitive data and support social stability. Dependency without contingency planning magnifies both operational and political risk.

Across sectors, dependency mapping is typically treated as an operational concern rather than a strategic one, reinforcing the need for a national-level assessment.

7. Cloud governance, data sovereignty, and control

Cloud computing sits at the centre of South Africa’s hidden dependency problem. Policy debate has focused largely on data residency and economic development. Yet scholarship and policy analysis consistently demonstrate that data location does not equal control. Jurisdiction follows corporate domicile and legal obligation, not server geography.

While POPIA addresses personal information protection, it does not resolve conflicts of law or address national security data, metadata, or platform telemetry. International best practice emphasises control-plane independence, transparency in lawful access procedures, and tested exit mechanisms. These factors are not systematically assessed in South Africa’s current governance approach.

8. Cybersecurity supply chains as a dependency vector

Cybersecurity tooling itself introduces dependency. South African institutions increasingly rely on foreign-managed platforms for endpoint protection, threat detection, and incident response. These tools often require privileged access and centralised update mechanisms.

Supply chain incidents documented internationally demonstrate how compromise or withdrawal of trusted vendors can cascade across multiple organisations. Treating cybersecurity procurement as a routine operational matter overlooks jurisdictional exposure, export control risk, and platform governance. A credible dependency audit must therefore include defensive technologies, not only productive systems.

9. Sanctions, export controls, and platform governance

Contemporary sanctions and export controls increasingly target technology ecosystems rather than individual goods. Export controls on advanced computing, software, and components operate upstream, affecting entire supply chains. At the same time, platform governance increasingly functions as de facto sanctions enforcement, with access constrained through terms of service and compliance risk.

Denial can occur without formal designation of a country or institution, creating grey-zone exposure for non-aligned states. For South Africa, neutrality does not eliminate risk. Visibility and mitigation are therefore essential.

10. Why current preparedness is inadequate

South Africa’s preparedness gap is structural rather than technical. Accountability is fragmented across departments. Compliance with international standards is often mistaken for resilience. Most critically, preparedness is built on an implicit assumption of continuity in global digital access.

In an environment characterised by strategic competition, sanctions, and platform power, this assumption is no longer defensible. Preparedness that assumes continuity is not preparedness at all.

11. The case for a National Technology Dependency Audit

A National Technology Dependency Audit provides a structured means of restoring visibility. It identifies which digital capabilities are essential to national continuity, where foreign control is embedded, under what legal and contractual conditions access is governed, and what the impact of disruption would be.

The audit is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It does not ban technology or dictate suppliers. Its value lies in enabling evidence-based prioritisation, coordination across sectors, and informed decision-making.

12. Addressing objections

Claims that dependency audits deter investment misunderstand investor preferences for predictable governance. Concerns about isolation or censorship reflect governance risk, not inevitability. The objective is not digital autarky, but resilient interdependence: maintaining global connectivity while preserving national capability.

13. Conclusion

Hidden digital dependency is a present condition for South Africa, not a hypothetical future risk. Existing policies acknowledge aspects of digital risk but do not address foreign control holistically. A National Technology Dependency Audit is a proportionate, policy-aligned response that transforms intuition into evidence and reaction into preparation.

In an increasingly contested digital environment, South Africa’s strategic objective should not be control over global technology systems, but the capacity to govern, decide, and function under pressure. Without a dependency audit, that capacity remains uncertain.

References (Harvard)

BIS (2019). Export Administration Regulations and Entity List Amendments.

Couldry, N. and Mejias, U. (2019). The Costs of Connection. Stanford University Press.

Cory, N. (2017). Cross-Border Data Flows. ITIF.

DCDT (2024). National Policy on Data and Cloud. Government of South Africa.

Deibert, R. (2013). Black Code. Oxford University Press.

Drezner, D. (2015). Economic Statecraft. Princeton University Press.

ENISA (2021). Threat Landscape for Supply Chain Attacks.

Farrell, H. and Newman, A. (2019). ‘Weaponized Interdependence’, International Security, 44(1), 42–79.

Government of South Africa (2013). Protection of Personal Information Act.

Government of South Africa (2015). National Cybersecurity Policy Framework.

Government of South Africa (2019). Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.

Government of South Africa (2020). Cybercrimes Act.

Kello, L. (2017). The Virtual Weapon and International Order. Yale University Press.

Mueller, M. (2017). Will the Internet Fragment? Polity.

NIST (2022). Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (SP 800-161 Rev.1).

OECD (2020). Digital Security Risk Management.

Schneider, F. (2019). Cloud Sovereignty. SWP.

UNCTAD (2021). Digital Economy Report.

World Economic Forum (2023). Global Cybersecurity Outlook.

Article 2: Why South Africa Is Structurally Vulnerable to Influence Operations

Given SHINGANGE

Influence operations do not succeed because societies are careless or uninformed. They succeed because societies are structurally exposed. South Africa is one such society, not because it is uniquely weak, but because its historical, social, and institutional conditions create fertile ground for cognitive manipulation.

This vulnerability is not primarily technological. It cannot be explained by social media alone, nor solved through platform regulation or content moderation. It is rooted in long-standing fractures, unresolved grievances, and declining trust in authority. Until these structural conditions are acknowledged explicitly, responses to influence operations will remain superficial, reactive, and misdirected.

Understanding structural vulnerability is uncomfortable because it forces inward reflection rather than outward blame. But without this honesty, resilience remains rhetorical.

Influence follows fractures, not platforms

A common analytical error is to treat influence operations as a product of digital platforms. Platforms matter, but they do not determine what resonates. Influence operations follow fractures, not technologies.

In South Africa, several fractures are persistent and deeply embedded. Economic inequality remains extreme and highly visible. Unemployment, particularly among young people, is chronic. Service delivery failures are experienced daily and locally. Corruption has shifted from scandal to expectation. Political promises frequently collapse into administrative incapacity.

These conditions generate frustration, resentment, and mistrust. Influence operations do not invent grievances. They identify where emotional pressure already exists and apply narrative force.

Focusing too narrowly on platforms obscures the real drivers of vulnerability. Platforms amplify what societies already feel; they do not create those feelings from nothing.

Lived experience as a narrative battleground

In South Africa, political narratives intersect directly with lived experience. This is a critical distinction.

When electricity fails, water is unreliable, housing is inadequate, or safety deteriorates, people do not experience these as abstract governance challenges. They experience them as personal neglect. Narratives that frame these failures as intentional, inevitable, or evidence of systemic betrayal resonate quickly because they align with daily reality.

Influence operations exploit this alignment. They do not contradict lived experience; they reinterpret it. They shift the question from “why is this failing?” to “who is responsible and why should they be trusted?”

Once that shift occurs, the space for institutional explanation narrows sharply. Technical responses sound evasive. Structural complexity sounds like excuse. Emotionally satisfying narratives outperform accurate ones.

Inequality and the politics of comparison

South Africa’s inequality does more than produce hardship. It produces constant comparison.

People compare themselves to neighbours, communities, municipalities, provinces, and imagined alternatives. Digital platforms intensify this by placing unequal realities side by side without context. The result is not only frustration, but moral interpretation. Inequality becomes evidence of injustice, exclusion, or deliberate neglect.

Influence operations leverage this interpretive layer. Narratives frame inequality not simply as a policy failure, but as proof that the system benefits some at the expense of others. This framing deepens resentment and accelerates polarisation.

Once inequality is moralised in this way, compromise becomes difficult. Governance challenges are recast as existential conflicts.

Racism as a latent identity fracture

Racism remains one of South Africa’s most enduring and emotionally charged fractures, not always visible in daily discourse, but never absent from collective memory. It functions less as a constant explicit conflict and more as a latent identity fault line that can be activated under conditions of stress.

Importantly, racism in this context is not only about overt prejudice or individual attitudes. It is embedded in historical experience, spatial inequality, economic exclusion, and perceived patterns of advantage and disadvantage. These experiences are carried forward through narrative, memory, and identity.

Influence operations exploit this latent quality. Racial framing does not need to be explicit to be effective. It can be implied through language, imagery, selective emphasis, or comparison. Narratives that suggest group-based blame, intentional exclusion, or inherited injustice resonate quickly because they connect present frustration to historical explanation.

This makes racial narratives particularly powerful during elections. They compress complex structural problems into emotionally legible stories and discourage nuance, because challenging the narrative can feel like denying lived experience.

The strategic risk is not that racism suddenly “returns” during elections. It is that unresolved racial identity tensions provide a ready-made emotional infrastructure for influence.

Language, identity, and segmented influence

South Africa’s linguistic and cultural diversity is often celebrated as a strength. Strategically, it also enables segmented influence.

Narratives can be tailored by language, region, generation, class, and political identity. The same issue can be framed differently for different audiences, each version optimised for emotional resonance rather than shared understanding.

This segmentation fragments the information environment. Communities mobilise around parallel narratives that do not fully overlap. Disagreement becomes not only factual, but interpretive. Institutions struggle to communicate coherently across these divides.

Fragmentation weakens collective sense-making and lowers the threshold for manipulation.

Literacy, information processing, and cognitive load

Another often overlooked source of structural vulnerability is uneven literacy, not only in basic reading and writing, but in media literacy, digital literacy, and civic literacy.

South Africa’s information environment assumes levels of fluency that are not evenly distributed. Many citizens navigate political information across multiple languages, informal channels, and low-trust environments. Under these conditions, complex explanations struggle to compete with simplified narratives that rely on emotion, repetition, and familiar framing.

Influence operations exploit this asymmetry. They reduce complexity, personalise blame, and rely on emotionally intuitive cues rather than detailed argument. This is not a reflection of intelligence or engagement, but of cognitive load. When people are overwhelmed, they gravitate toward messages that are easier to process and emotionally coherent.

Uneven literacy also increases reliance on social trust networks. Information is evaluated not only on content, but on who shared it and how it feels. This makes segmented influence more effective and correction more difficult.

The result is not uniform misinformation, but uneven vulnerability.

Declining institutional trust as a force multiplier

Influence operations accelerate where trust is low. In South Africa, confidence in political parties, local government, law enforcement, and public institutions has eroded steadily.

As trust declines, authority shifts. People rely more on peer networks, community figures, and emotionally resonant narratives. Credibility is anchored in perceived authenticity rather than institutional role.

This is a force multiplier for influence operations. Narratives no longer require institutional validation to spread. In some cases, institutional denial reinforces belief by appearing defensive or disconnected.

Once trust collapses, correction becomes difficult. Evidence is discounted. Motives are assumed.

Algorithmic amplification and outrage economics

Digital platforms reward reaction. Content that provokes anger, fear, certainty, or moral judgement travels faster than content that explains complexity.

This creates an economy of outrage. Extreme positions gain visibility. Moderation struggles. Nuance is crowded out.

Influence operations do not need to dominate the information space. They need only to shape its emotional tone.

Why local government elections magnify vulnerability

Local government elections sit at the intersection of these dynamics.

They are emotionally proximate, tied to daily life, embedded in community identity, and less consistently scrutinised. Narratives spread through informal channels where verification is weak and trust is relational.

Influence operations can operate below national radar while producing immediate effects: protests, delegitimised councillors, contested outcomes, and community instability.

Local disruption does not need to scale nationally to be strategically effective.

Structural vulnerability is not public failure

It is tempting to interpret vulnerability as public ignorance or irresponsibility. This is inaccurate and counterproductive.

Structural vulnerability reflects historical inequality, socio-economic stress, governance failure, and information overload. Citizens responding emotionally to these conditions are not failing democracy. Democracy is failing to protect them from manipulation in a high-pressure environment.

Recognising vulnerability is not an insult. It is preparation.

Toward resilience grounded in realism

The solution is not censorship, surveillance, or panic. It is realism.

Resilience begins with acknowledging that South Africa’s exposure is structural. It requires institutions to treat cognitive risk as part of electoral integrity, political actors to compete without weaponising fracture irresponsibly, and public discourse that recognises emotion without surrendering to it.

Without this realism, technical interventions will fail. With it, preparation becomes possible.

Article 1: Elections Are No Longer Just Political. They Are Cognitive

Given SHINGANGE

South Africa is moving toward the 2026 local government elections with an outdated understanding of how political power is contested. We still speak as if elections are mainly decided by party structures, policy promises, door-to-door campaigning, rallies, and media debates. Those tools still matter, but they no longer explain outcomes on their own, and in some cases, they are no longer decisive.

A modern election is also a contest over perception, emotion, identity, and trust. It is a contest over what people believe is happening, what they feel is at stake, who they blame, who they fear, and what they think is “obviously true”. This is the cognitive domain, where influence operations thrive.

If we continue to treat electoral manipulation as a problem of “fake news” alone, we will remain exposed. We will also respond in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and with the wrong tools. The result will not necessarily be a dramatic collapse. It will be gradual erosion, a slow weakening of public trust, social cohesion, and democratic legitimacy, often without a single headline moment that forces the country to wake up.

This article is the conceptual foundation for a series on influence operations and democratic resilience ahead of the 2026 local government elections. Before we can talk about policy responses, party readiness, or public resilience, we must first get the concepts right. If the concepts are wrong, everything built on them will be weak.

The problem with the “fake news” frame

South Africa’s public conversation about manipulation and elections is too often trapped in a narrow frame: fake news, misinformation, disinformation. This language is convenient because it suggests a simple problem with a simple fix: remove the lies, flag the posts, fact-check the claims, suspend the accounts. It also allows institutions to present the challenge as a content-moderation issue rather than a broader strategic threat.

But the fake news frame is incomplete and, in some cases, misleading.

The most effective influence operations do not depend on fabricated stories. Many rely on selective truth, edited context, emotional framing, strategic timing, repetition, and amplification through familiar voices. A true incident can be framed to provoke panic, rage, humiliation, or hatred. A genuine grievance can be escalated into a moral war. A real policy failure can be used to delegitimise the entire idea of governance, not simply a particular party or municipal leadership.

In other words, influence is often about impact, not accuracy.

This matters because if we keep looking only for lies, we will miss the more sophisticated operations that use truth as raw material. If we keep believing that fact-checking is the primary defence, we will discover too late that facts do not easily defeat identity threats, emotional narratives, or group belonging.

We must upgrade the frame.

What influence operations actually are

Influence operations are deliberate efforts to shape perception, attitudes, and behavior at scale. They are designed to steer how audiences interpret reality, what they feel about it, and what they choose to do next. They work best when the target audience does not realise they are being influenced, or when influence feels natural, inevitable, and self-generated.

Influence operations are not only external threats. They are not only foreign. They are not only malicious. They are methods, and methods are used by different actors for different reasons. States, political campaigns, activist networks, commercial actors, and opportunistic groups use them. This does not mean all actors are equivalent, or that intent does not matter. It means that if we want to understand the environment honestly, we must accept that influencing behaviour is part of modern political competition and social contestation.

A crucial point must be stated clearly: influence operations do not create divisions from nothing. They identify pre-existing fractures and apply pressure. They exploit what is already emotionally charged, socially sensitive, or institutionally fragile.

In a society with deep inequality, high unemployment, persistent service delivery failures, historical trauma, and declining trust in institutions, the terrain is already prepared. This is not a moral judgment about citizens. It is a strategic assessment of the operating environment.

Persuasion, propaganda, and influence are not the same thing.

To build conceptual clarity, it helps to distinguish between persuasion, propaganda, and influence operations. These terms are often used interchangeably in South African commentary, which creates confusion and poor decision-making.

Persuasion is open. It is explicit. It is the normal activity of democratic politics. A party or candidate presents ideas and asks voters to agree, support, or participate. The audience understands that it is being persuaded. There is no requirement for concealment. Persuasion can be honest or dishonest, but its defining feature is that it is visible and transactional.

Propaganda is more ideological and directive. It tends to push a worldview, demand loyalty, suppress alternatives, and simplify reality into rigid binaries. Propaganda often seeks dominance rather than debate. It is not always covert, but it typically aims to shape what is acceptable to think and say, and to marginalise competing frames.

Influence operations are different. They are adaptive, indirect, and often covert or deniable. They do not primarily tell people what to think. They guide people toward conclusions they feel they reached independently. They work by shaping the environment in which people think, through emotional cues, social proof, selective exposure, and identity framing.

This distinction matters because the defences differ. If you think the problem is persuasion, you focus on counter-messaging and debate. If you think the problem is propaganda, you focus on media plurality and civic education. If you understand the problem as influence operations, you must address the cognitive and social conditions that make manipulation effective, not only the content itself.

The cognitive domain is the decisive terrain.

Conflict has evolved. In earlier eras, the decisive battlefield was physical. Later, it expanded into the digital domain, networks, systems, and infrastructure. Today, one of the most decisive terrains is cognitive, the domain of perception, emotion, identity, and trust.

The cognitive domain includes beliefs, emotional triggers, moral frameworks, social identity, and sensemaking. It is where people decide what is real, what matters, who is legitimate, and what action feels necessary.

This is where influence operations aim, because if you can shape perception and trust, you do not always need to change material conditions. If you can make institutions appear incompetent, illegitimate, or hostile, you can weaken governance without direct confrontation. If you can make communities distrust each other, you can destabilise social cohesion. If you can make citizens believe that outcomes are rigged, regardless of the evidence, you can undermine elections without hacking a single system.

It is important to be disciplined here. Saying elections are cognitive contests does not mean every political message is manipulation, or that citizens are mind-controlled, or that there is always a hidden hand. It means that perception and emotion are strategic variables, and that modern actors treat them accordingly. If institutions and the public refuse to recognise this, they fight with blunt tools against refined methods.

Influence operations are not always about changing votes.

Many people assume influence operations exist to persuade voters to support a particular party or candidate. That can happen, but it is not always the primary objective, and focusing only on vote shifting can blind us to other goals.

Influence operations often aim to disrupt rather than persuade. They may seek to increase confusion, deepen polarisation, exhaust attention, erode trust in institutions, fracture communities, or delegitimise election outcomes. In some cases, the goal is to reduce participation, increase apathy, and drive voters out of democratic engagement.

This is one reason why simplistic responses fail. If the operation is designed to make people believe “nothing is trustworthy” or “everyone is corrupt” or “the system is rigged”, then fact-checking individual claims does not address the core effect. It can even worsen the situation by making institutions look defensive or selective.

A society that loses trust is easier to manipulate, because cynicism becomes the default. When citizens are cynical, they accept claims that confirm their despair, and they reject information that demands patience, nuance, or institutional confidence.

Why elections create ideal conditions for influence

Elections combine several conditions that make societies cognitively vulnerable.

First, elections heighten emotion. People care about identity, belonging, and the future. Campaigns are built to trigger emotion because emotion drives attention and participation. That is not a flaw; it is politics. But it also creates an environment where manipulation can blend into normal campaigning and activism.

Second, elections compress time. People must make decisions quickly. Institutions must respond under pressure. Media cycles accelerate. There is less time for reflection, verification, and calm sensemaking. This is ideal for narratives that demand immediate reaction.

Third, elections create information overload. People are bombarded with claims, promises, scandals, and counterclaims. When information volume increases, attention becomes scarce. Under those conditions, people rely more on cognitive shortcuts, emotional cues, and group identity.

Fourth, elections intensify social comparison and status anxiety. People measure themselves against others, measure communities against other communities, and measure the country against imagined alternatives. This can trigger resentment, humiliation, and moral outrage, all of which are powerful drivers of mobilisation.

These conditions do not guarantee successful influence operations, but they increase the likelihood of success when influence actors exploit them.

Why local government elections are uniquely exposed

Local government elections are particularly vulnerable for reasons that are specific to South Africa’s lived reality.

Local governance is where citizens experience the state most directly. It is the level at which service delivery failures are felt in water, electricity, housing, sanitation, roads, refuse removal, safety, and local economic opportunity. When people feel neglected or disrespected, their anger is not abstract. It is personal.

Local politics is also closer to community identity. It is tied to neighbourhoods, wards, local leaders, and local disputes. This makes narratives more emotionally intense and more difficult to correct, because local information spreads through informal networks, community WhatsApp groups, and everyday social relationships where trust is relational rather than institutional.

Local elections also tend to have less comprehensive scrutiny than national elections. The information environment is more fragmented. Local media may be weaker. National attention is inconsistent. This creates gaps that can be exploited by actors seeking to seed and amplify narratives quickly.

Finally, local elections intersect with community-level mobilisation and protest dynamics. If trust collapses locally, the consequences can be immediate: protests, rejection of councillors, intimidation, violence, and paralysis of local governance. Influence operations do not need to produce a national crisis to be strategically effective. Local instability can be enough.

The uncomfortable truth about who conducts influence operations

Many South Africans are comfortable discussing “foreign interference” because it allows the country to imagine the threat as external and exceptional. Foreign actors can play a role, and it is reasonable to take that possibility seriously. But focusing only on foreign interference can become a form of denial.

Influence operations are also domestic. Political actors use influence techniques. Activist networks use influence techniques. Commercial interests use influence techniques. Opportunistic groups use influence techniques. Sometimes these actors coordinate. Often, they do not need to. Narratives can converge without central control, because different groups see benefit in amplifying the same emotional frames.

This is why influence operations are difficult to attribute and difficult to regulate. The behaviour often appears to be normal political engagement until its effects become destabilising. At that point, the response becomes politically sensitive because any intervention can be framed as suppression, bias, or censorship.

If South Africa wants resilience, it must accept that influence is not a rare anomaly. It is part of the modern environment. The question is how to preserve democratic participation and free expression while reducing vulnerability to manipulation and destabilisation.

Why “more information” is not a solution

A common assumption is that the solution to manipulation is better information. The logic goes like this: if citizens have more accurate information, they will make better decisions. That sounds reasonable, but it is incomplete.

People do not process information like machines. They process information through identity, emotion, trust, and social belonging. When a narrative threatens identity, facts can feel like an attack. When people are emotionally invested, correction can feel insulting. When trust is low, evidence is discounted because the source is assumed to be compromised.

This is why influence operations focus so heavily on trust. If you can undermine trust in institutions, media, and expertise, you can weaken the power of corrective information. If you can create the sense that “everyone lies”, then truth becomes just another weapon in a tribal conflict.

Therefore, resilience cannot be reduced to information supply. It must include cognitive resilience, emotional discipline, and institutional maturity.

The goal is not censorship. The goal is cognitive resilience.

Whenever influence operations are discussed, there is a legitimate fear that the conversation will be used to justify censorship, surveillance, or political control. In South Africa’s context, those concerns are real, and the solution must not become more damaging than the threat.

That said, rejecting censorship does not mean ignoring influence operations. It means we need a better goal.

The correct goal is cognitive resilience, the ability of institutions, political parties, media, and citizens to recognise manipulation, manage emotion responsibly, preserve trust where it is deserved, and sustain democratic participation without drifting into paranoia or cynicism.

Cognitive resilience has several components.

It requires conceptual clarity, knowing what influence operations are, how they work, and what signs to watch for. It requires institutional awareness, recognising that the cognitive domain is part of national stability and electoral integrity. It requires political maturity, where parties compete hard but do not treat societal fractures as acceptable campaign tools. It requires public literacy, in which citizens learn to notice emotional triggers, moral-urgency tactics, and false binaries.

This is not about turning citizens into analysts or demanding perfection from people under stress. It is about building a culture of disciplined sensemaking.

A necessary shift in the questions we ask

As South Africa approaches the 2026 local government elections, the core questions should expand beyond party support and campaign slogans.

We should be asking:

  • Who is shaping the dominant narratives, and why are those narratives resonating now?
  • Who benefits from confusion, polarisation, and mistrust?
  • Which emotions are being amplified, and what behaviors do those emotions drive?
  • Where is institutional trust most fragile, and how is that being exploited?
  • How do communities move from frustration to mobilisation, and what narratives trigger escalation?

These are not academic questions. They are practical questions that determine stability, legitimacy, and the quality of democratic participation.

If we treat elections only as political contests, vulnerability is guaranteed. If we understand elections as cognitive contests as well, preparation becomes possible. That preparation does not require censorship. It requires seriousness.

Why this series exists

This article is the first in a series examining influence operations in the South African context, with a focus on elections and democratic resilience. The series will move from concepts to mechanisms, from vulnerabilities to actor ambiguity, and from risk analysis to practical resilience, for the state, political parties, and citizens.

The intention is not to inflame fear, or to accuse without evidence, or to turn every political disagreement into a security threat. The intention is to bring conceptual clarity to a domain that South Africa cannot afford to misunderstand.

The country has time to prepare for 2026, but that time must be used wisely. Influence operations thrive in denial, confusion, and late reaction. Resilience thrives in early clarity, calm discipline, and institutional maturity.

If South Africa wants elections that strengthen democracy rather than erode it, the cognitive domain cannot be treated as an afterthought. The contest is already underway. The only question is whether we will keep using outdated lenses to interpret it, or learn to s

Series: Influence Operations, Elections, and Cognitive Security

Editor’s Note

Given SHINGANGE

South Africa is approaching the 2026 local government elections amid heightened uncertainty, institutional strain, and social tension. At the same time, the nature of political contestation has changed in ways that are not yet fully understood or openly discussed in the public domain.

This series explores influence operations and cognitive risks affecting elections, governance, and the strength of democracy in South Africa, noting that the public often focuses on visible political contests while overlooking subtler factors that shape perceptions. According to DGAP, most misinformation in this context currently comes from traditional sources rather than AI-driven disinformation.motion, trust, and behaviour at scale.

The articles that follow do not assume malicious intent by default, nor do they seek to attribute blame prematurely. They do not argue for censorship, political control, or the restriction of legitimate dissent. Instead, they aim to clarify concepts, examine structural vulnerabilities, and explore how influence operates in real social conditions, particularly during electoral periods.

This series is written from an independent analytical perspective. It draws on security, risk, and cognitive domains of analysis rather than partisan or activist framings. Where examples are discussed, the focus is on patterns and mechanisms, not on endorsing or condemning specific actors.

The intention is to contribute to a more mature public conversation, one that recognises that democratic participation is shaped not only by policies and institutions, but also by emotion, identity, narrative, and trust. Understanding these dynamics is a prerequisite for strengthening resilience without undermining democratic values.

The 2026 local government elections are not treated here as an isolated event, but as part of a broader trajectory in which elections increasingly unfold in contested cognitive environments. Whether South Africa is prepared for that reality remains an open question.

This series is offered as a starting point for reflection, debate, and preparation.

This note introduces a series of articles examining influence operations and democratic resilience ahead of South Africa’s 2026 local government elections