The Western powers cannot exert the influence they once had on the African continent, former Libyan Information Minister Moussa Ibrahim has said. Africans are waking up to the West’s neo-colonialist agenda, he said in an interview with RT on Friday.
This comes after Washington imposed yet another round of sanctions on the Russian news outlet and its parent companies. The head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), James Rubin, accused RT of undermining international support for Ukraine.
“One of the reasons… why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as one might expect… is because of the broad scope and reach of RT,” Rubin said.
The reason the US media is losing traction in Africa is the way it depicts the realities of the Global South, compared with how RT shows them, Ibrahim, the executive secretary the African Legacy Foundation, explained.
“And we can see very clearly that the West falsifies our narrative, the West tries to hijack our history, hijack our daily affairs, political and economic issues,” Ibrahim said, adding that the West tries to make these issues “sound as if they are serving the very neo-colonialist narrative that the West wants to establish globally.”
“They talk about democracy and human rights because they want to use this narrative as a tool for hegemony and control,” he said, also highlighting the US military presence in Africa.
We can see how the American military… is dominating most of West Africa and actually is the very army that… funded and trained the very terrorist organizations that it now declaims it’s fighting against.
On the other hand, RT coverage rings true to Africans that Ibrahim speaks to in the course of his work, he said. “I can tell you that the everyday African can hear himself or herself, her own narrative, in the RT stories and issues and news, more than with CNN or Fox News or the BBC or other Western outlets.”
RT is “doing a very good job being truthful to the realities of Africa,” Ibrahim added. When Africans realize this, they choose “to side with a new world in which Africa has a place,” rather than siding with “Russia as such,” he explained.
Meanwhile, the US, instead of focusing on internal issues such as “illegal immigration and poverty, homelessness, health and education issues,” attempts to divert public attention toward a “foreign enemy” with these latest sanctions on RT, Ibrahim said.
Watch the full interview here: