When I first started working with white colleagues abroad, I didn’t realize how big of a culture shift it would be. Back home in Nigeria, there are phrases and expressions that are so normal, you don’t even think twice. But in a new environment, one wrong word, one casual
Oyibo literally never has any new tricks.
This was always the game plan. Aggressively promote a hoax like "Cote d'Ivoire coup" or "AI Beyonce singing for Ibrahim Traore," and hope that people bite the bait (nobody did this time around), then come out and make a big show of "debunking" the hoax that they themselves created.
And of course mention Ibrahim Traore's name - because he was the actual target of this western disinformation operation.
It's called Strawmanning and this fellow I quoted is an CIA agent who does this rubbish for a living.
Until you learn to stop seeing what is happening and start seeing what is going on, you will continue to be confounded by seemingly "dumb" decisions like this.
The same way I used to write caustic BhsinessDay columns calling Buhari "stupid" for banning rice imports despite having low local rice production capacity leading to crazy food inflation; locking Southern borders for 17 months despite having a 9-figure USD land trade surplus; and destroying Nigeria's economy with a 5-week lockdown in response to a virus that was 2.2 times less deadly than malaria.
I could see that these things happening were "stupid" in that they made no sense from the point of view of a Nigeria leader. No matter how corrupt or foolish a Nigerian leader is, it definitely doesn't benefit them to risk rebellion by making Nigerians physically starve and suffer for no reason. So my naive assumption was that they must be *really* "stupid" for doing these things which were of zero benefit to them or Nigerians.
But once you start seeing it for what it is - foreign-directed economic warfare that installs puppet leadership in growing African economies and gives it specific instructions to destroy wealth and wealth-creation so that these economies remain stuck in an infinite loop of exporting cheap natural resources to those who installed the puppets, it all makes perfect sense.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Have you asked yourself who came up with the idea of locking all of Nigeria’s economically productive Southern borders with trade surpluses for 17 months, while leaving the Northern ones open (so as to prevent total rebellion in the north)? Who calculated that exactly 17 months of this "own goal" would be long enough to destroy all of Nigeria’s supply chains along that West African corridor (established over decades), which is something most Nigerian exporters have never recovered from? Who calculated that exactly 5 weeks was how long it would take to use a spurious lockdown to bring Nigeria to the brink of total economic ruin, to the point where people started looting warehouses and FIRS started begging on Twitter for companies to pay tax because the Federation account was nearly empty? In both instances, who knew exactly when and where to release the pressure valve just before hunger completely overwhelmed Nigeria's social cowardice and resulted in a national rebellion? Who has the data that helps them know exactly how far to push Nigerians without hitting their breaking point, so that a revolution never happens while they continue to die slowly and by a thousand cuts?
Which is why I no longer waste energy calling out Buhari or his successor. Neither of them was "stupid" and neither of them has ever been in charge of making any real decisions. They answer to the oyibo people who put them there, and those are the people who are the actual enemy. The blackface puppets are just there to absorb our frustration and serve as convenient hate figures.
If we don't stop the Americans from interfering in our politics, the merry-go-round will just repeat itself in 2027 and 2031, and we'll have a new State Department puppet to hate. Maybe that one will ban importation of machinery, used cars and spare parts, while making sure that local manufacturing remains expensive, so that Nigerians can go back to using donkey carts, and oyibo people can keep getting cheap Nigerian oil to drive, sail and fly to their hearts content.
That's the point we're trying to make. These fantastic sums of money are real, and they are being pumped into African countries in a completely clandestine and unaccountable manner - we quite literally DON'T KNOW where the money goes. Not even those involved in the funded spaces know! This is by definition, a severe national security threat.
$1 billion is enough money to destabilise ANY African country through funding subversive activity, terrorist/separatist/rebel activity, or just by distorting the economy. Assuming an average expenditure of $6,000 per man, $1 billion can build you a well-armed fighting force of 160,000 men - enough to overwhelm any African military except perhaps Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa.
$1 billion is enough money to take over the information space of ANY African country if the funder intends to carry out social and political subversion. With that kind of money, it is possible to buy the entire Nigerian traditional and social media space for 2 or 3 years, which means the funder gets that much time to socially engineer the target society in any way whatsoever that they see fit.
There's a reason why every developed country's government wants full visibility over the flow of money into, within, and out of their financial system. They know, based on their adventures in Africa and the Global South, that money is the most potent tool with which to destabilise a country or subvert its internal power structures. This is why for example when Muammar Gaddafi tried to deliver foreign aid worth $1 billion to a prominent organisation in the African American community, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets and Control blocked the payment. https://t.co/dSzPy42PYz
If the US government blocked $1 billion in foreign aid to a disadvantaged American community because its intelligence community believes that $1 billion is enough to potentially destabilise a country as powerful as the USA, imagine what that kind of money can do - or has been doing - in the context of much poorer, much less powerful African countries. Think about the $824 million that USAID supposedly spent in Nigeria in 2023 alone - what subversive activity did that money openly or clandestinely fund?
Forget the cover stories about treating HIV patients and buying mosquito nets - because we know that's not where the actual bulk of the money goes. Think about the implications of allowing powerful foreign entities to pump black money into your country, completely devoid of any oversight, corporate governance, or visibility over who the money is even paid to. Think about the implications of USAID Nigeria regularly sending out payments of N700m+ to recipients marked as "UNDISCLOSED" and "MISCELLANEOUS."
WHERE is this money going? WHAT is it doing there? Because when people within the system like @MikeBenzCyber tell you that this is exactly how the US intelligence community uses foreign aid/NGO finance as slush funds for secret operations (like training and funding terrorists/rebels/separatists), some brain-dead Nigerians who mistake their ability to vomit English for intelligence start asking dumb questions like "Did the villagers identify the white men dropping weapons from helicopters for terrorists in the Sahel as Americans?"
2022 is in history books and no moment will define 2022 like this moment, and no moment is 2023 and future will match it for me. How fortunate I was to live and experience this moment in my life. Happy New Year everybody! 🎉
Video🎥 Via @Stav10M