Previously, Shugaley visited Chad twice and, in particular, held talks with Deby’s team before the presidential elections in May. It has also been linked to the Russian House cultural center in the capital N’Djamena, which recently opened its new headquarters in a ceremony attended by Russian government officials.
US intelligence agencies said last year that they had discovered that Wagner had allegedly organized a plot to kill Debbie but failed to carry it out.
Mr. Serwat suggests that this may have been the reason for Shugalei’s arrest.
Ms Ochieng says Chad may have been concerned about Shugaley’s potential to try to destabilize the country by spreading disinformation.
Shugaley’s foundation denied him as “Wagner’s spy”, externalsaying that Shugalei “knows nothing concrete about the activities of the Wagner group in Africa and only knows the general details of what it has done before.”
Content on social networks, television stations and news sites is supported by Russia deployed to spread a pro-Russian agenda and disinformationespecially in Africa, according to analysts.
An example is Afrique Media TV, which broadcasts from Cameroon, as far as CAR, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and on YouTube, where it has thousands of subscribers and has a large following on Facebook.
Shugalei himself has been teasing his presence in various African countries, sometimes sharing short, low-budget vlog-style videos on Telegram that clearly show his love for the show.
Of the video content aimed at Africans, many take on a fable-like appearance – one called LionBear shows a bear (representing Russia) running around the world to protect a lion (his friend in the Central African Republic) from the pernicious influence of a hyena.
“I don’t think these videos necessarily win people over – people think it’s funny, a joke,” says Ms Ochieng.
