LONDON: Disinformation campaigns on social media, sometimes instigated by external countries, have fueled poor governance in parts of Africa, Nigeria’s foreign minister said on Wednesday.

Speaking during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yusuf Tuggar said that while social media could have a positive effect on governance and improving transparency, disinformation spread on its platforms was something Nigeria was having to deal with.

He pointed to countries neighboring or near to Nigeria where foreign powers had been blamed for sophisticated social media campaigns that helped to swell support for military regimes.

Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso underwent military coups in recent years and broke away from the Economic Community of West African States — ECOWAS — last year to form their own alliance.

Disinformation or misinformation had a “deleterious effect on governments and governance, and sometimes it’s even destructive,” Tuggar said during a panel on the threat of poor governance.

“It’s so sophisticated, and then sometimes you also have external interference where you have other states sponsoring such attacks, if you will, on others.”

While he did not name any countries in particular, Tuggar said that this was something Nigeria was contending with in discussions about the three countries leaving ECOWAS. Nigeria is the most powerful member of the economic bloc, which is regarded as having helped to improve financial and political stability in the region.

“That sort of negative campaign sways public opinion one way or the other, and if you’re relying on votes on openness and transparency, then, you know, it’s not a fair game,” Tuggar said.

A study released last year by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is based at the US Department of Defense, found Russia to be the leading source of disinformation in Africa, with West Africa and the Sahel the most targeted.

Tuggar’s comments came as the panel discussed how leaders could tackle the poor level of governance globally that is blamed for eroding global cooperation and stalling progress on critical social, economic and environmental issues.

Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, said that good governance was about whether people could continue to trust you when you got things wrong.

“Resilience in leadership takes legitimacy as well as effectiveness,” she said. “Legitimacy is about the trust you engender among those you govern or those that you lead in your company.”

Johan Andresen, chairman of the Norwegian private investment company Ferd, said that good governance needed to be handled in two ways — risk and responsibility.

“You have to have management of the risks in the organizations, but you should also try to experiment with how much responsibility can you actually take,” he said.

DUBAI: Political will is crucial for bridging the global gender gap and protecting women from pressing challenges, a panel of experts told the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.

Panelists acknowledged some progress in advancing female political representation, as 15.5 percent of heads of state around the world have been women over the past decade.

However, they called for more concerted efforts to bridge the gender gap in political power. According to WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report, it will take 168 years to reach gender parity, but if every economy had a gender-balanced Cabinet, global gender parity could be within reach in 54 years.

Alicia Barcena Ibarra, Mexico’s secretary of environment and natural resources, stressed that building women’s economic autonomy was key to advancing their political representation.

“When women have economic autonomy, it’s easier for them to participate on many fronts because when they are dependent on economic terms, that’s when they are vulnerable to corruption, dependency and abuse,” Ibarra said.

In Mexico, the first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected in October last year in a historic moment for the country. Under law, Congress now has to include 50 percent women, paving the way for the the first woman to lead the country’s Supreme Court, as well as the first female governor of the central bank.

While these strides on the political level have reflected positively on women’s social participation and inspired a young generation of Mexicans, Ibarra said that it revealed the pressure on women to perform.

Complementing her sentiments, Francois Valerian, chair of Transparency International, said that the lack of financial resources for women compared to men made females more vulnerable to abuses of power, state corruption and climate change.

“Pakistan’s floods, for example, left many women and children in need to receive aid,” said Valerian, calling for parity in political power to solve these issues at the community level.

Even during elections, women needed more financial resources for their campaigns “because they have less money, they are outsiders, and need to convince people they are to be trusted. Also, they need money for their safety in many countries,” Valerian said, as he urged governments to empower women to run for election through dedicating funds for this.

Therese Kayikwamba Wagner, minister of state and minister of foreign affairs of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, stressed that gender parity was necessary in all sectors to advance peacemaking and peacebuilding initiatives. So far, women’s inclusion had been achieved at the grassroot level.

She said that women needed to be included in decision-making and negotiating peace at the top level to ensure female concerns were well represented.

“There’s a need to think about how do we make sure that this is a cross-cutting approach and not just women at the local level who then have to own what is decided at the top level,” Wagner said.

At the UN General Assembly last year, only 19 speakers were women, including five heads of state and three heads of government, according to UN figures.

Wagner said that the starting point should be international organizations reflecting the progress on gender equality, and called for a female UN secretary-general.

“I think all our eyes are shifting toward Latin America because of the geographic rotation, with a lot of expectations that a continent that has distinguished itself with so many women that have assumed positions of leadership will also help us achieve that important milestone,” she said.

In peacemaking, the role of both genders was necessary for progress. “We don’t want only women or only men. We need both because they have complementary visions,” Mexico’s Ibarra said.