David Hundeyin's claims are mostly factual but require nuance. Leopold II's rule in Congo caused 1–15 million deaths, with 12 million being a high, debated estimate. A statue of him exists in Brussels, controversial for glorifying his colonial atrocities. Julius Malema's "Kill the Boer" chant is real, ruled not hate speech in South Africa in 2024, though it remains divisive. The hypocrisy argument—honoring Leopold while condemning Malema—has merit but oversimplifies. Leopold's statue reflects Belgium's slow reckoning with its past, while Malema's rhetoric is a current, polarizing issue tied to South Africa's land and race debates. Contexts differ, complicating direct comparison.
This was a story I told in 2021, but some people came together to use noise to distort the narrative surrounding Cornflakes For Jihad and made it sound like the point of that story was to attack Northern Muslims.
Meanwhile, the entire point of the story was that external (Saudi & Qatari) intervention in the religious, economic and political structure of Northern Nigeria over 3 or 4 decades had slowly transformed it into something that it historically was NOT.
My dad served in Sokoto State in 1977, and he always said that the only reason he went back to Lagos afterward was that the Sokoto State Government only offered him a 1-year renewable fixed-term contract, instead of a permanent job like he wanted. Apart from that, he was perfectly comfortable living there as a Christian amidst a very Muslim population - they were not extremists!
Something happened between the 1970s and the 2000s that terraformed an entire region into a tinder box, and that is the story I tried to tell 4 years ago. That is what Cornflakes For Jihad was about! This "extremism" was an external creation!
The Saudis and Qataris under the watchful eyes of their daddy in DC pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Wahhabi extremist projects in North and West Africa via their SPV organisations like the Muslim World League and Eid Charity, and Northern Nigeria was a key victim of this external interference in West Africa.
Where perhaps Cornflakes For Jihad failed was that it didn't go far enough to stress the point that the U.S. State Department was aware of everything that happened every step of the way, and it happily enabled it by quietly letting all the key actors off the hook after initially making some noise and doing some eye service like Ahmed Nasreddin's indictment (which it didn't act on). The reason I didn't go far enough was that at the time I wrote it, I was not yet in a phase of my personal development where I was ready to openly call out the U.S. government for being the world's biggest source and enabler of terrorism. I was still trying to play nice with monsters.
Lessons have been learned since then anyway.