Music shapes entire generations, and they don't even have to be aware while it's happening.
It's like Mohbad (Imole) said: "Music no need permission to enter your spirit. Anyhow anywhere you must to feel it."
Look at the impact of Olu Maintain’s "Yahooze" in 2007. It served as a massive cultural catalyst for the "Yahoo-Yahoo" epidemic we see today.
If a single song can shift the youth's moral ideology so drastically, imagine the geopolitical threat of a global icon doing the exact opposite.
That was Bob Marley. His reggae was the psychological spine of anti-colonial revolutions worldwide.
He sang "Rasta don't work for no CIA" because he knew his art directly threatened Western hegemony (aka Babylon 🤣🤣)— which is precisely why knowledgeable insiders link the CIA to his 1976 assassination attempt.
Look at Fela Kuti. His Afrobeat was an outright declaration of war against neo-colonial puppets. To silence him, the local military government subjected him to over 200 arrests, burned his Kalakuta Republic to the ground, and murdered his mother. If a Nigerian regime used that level of raw military terrorism just to contain one man in Lagos, how hard do you think the global imperial apparatus will clamp down when an artist stands in the way of their entire global agenda?
This brings us to the ultimate end game: Geopolitics and demographic management.
By 2050, Africa will hold the fastest-growing youth population on earth. Nearly 1 out of every 4 people in the world will be African, and 1 out of 6 African will be Nigerian, with 1 out of every 25 random human on earth being Nigerian.
In the cold calculus of Western intelligence, a hyper-conscious, politically literate African youth population is an existential risk to Western hegemony and resource control.
More importantly, you must know that the mortal fear of the West is that if they fell out of power, others would do to them what they've done around the world for centuries.
So they figure that if a demographic giant wakes up to the frequency of Felas and Marleys, they will become completely ungovernable.
So how do you control a population that massive without deploying armies? You do it through the algorithm. You fund and amplify a modern, sanitized music industry that rewards escapism, hyper-individualism, and material wealth over consciousness.
By filtering out the revolutionary spark, the global imperial apparatus achieves ultimate containment and neutralization. They don't need to assassinate the prophets anymore ("how long shall they kill our prophets...?"); they just use music and entertainment to turn a potential revolutionary generation into completely redolent, bio-pliable 'fauna'.
THERE IS A GAME INSIDE THE GAME
Nigerians are funny people.
Tell them entertainment can be used to influence society, and they will laugh and say, “Abeg, na music.”
Tell them films can shape political thinking, they will say, “Na film, relax.”
Tell them foreign powers can use culture to influence a country, they will call you a conspiracy theorist.
Meanwhile, the same Nigerians will buy a shoe because Rihanna wore it, copy American slang, human hair, relationships, fashion, politics and even mannerisms.
But somehow, the media does not influence them. Osisko!
I have worked in entertainment for years. So I know one thing very clearly:
Entertainment is never just entertainment.
America knows this very well.
The United States openly uses what it calls cultural diplomacy. Music, film, journalism, scholarships, fellowships, festivals and creative-industry programmes are all part of how countries build influence abroad.
Even the U.S. State Department has programmes specifically using film and music to advance American foreign-policy objectives.
So this thing is not hidden.
Na we dey pretend not to understand.
And it goes beyond Hollywood.
Some Nigerian filmmakers attend American-funded programmes.
Some Nigerian journalists and news organisations receive grants, fellowships or institutional support from American organisations.
Some Nigerian music executives and creatives are brought into American mentorship and industry programmes.
Some Nigerian record labels and entertainment companies have received foreign investment or entered partnerships with major American companies.
Does that automatically mean they are CIA agents?
Of course not.
But does money, access, training, distribution and international recognition create influence?
Use your tongue to count your teeth.
America doesn't need to enter a Nigerian newsroom and say, “Write this.” Or call an artist and say, “Sing that.”
Modern influence is smarter than that.
Funders decide what they fund.
Platforms decide what they promote.
Festivals decide what they celebrate.
Labels decide who gets an international push.
Streaming platforms decide what appears on your screen.
Algorithms decide what millions of Nigerians repeatedly see.
And repeated exposure eventually becomes culture.
That is the real power of media.
If I can control what your children watch, what your youth dance to, who they admire, what lifestyle they desire, what country they dream of escaping to and what values they consider sophisticated, why exactly do I need to invade your country?
You will colonise yourself.
Voluntarily.
This is why I laugh when people say entertainment is “just entertainment.”
Entertainment is business, culture, propaganda, diplomacy, social engineering and entertainment is soft power.
Sometimes it is all of them at the same time.
The problem is not that America understands this. The problem is that Nigeria does not.
America promotes American interests.
China promotes Chinese interests.
France promotes French interests.
Britain promotes British interests.
Nigeria?
We are still arguing on Twitter about tribes, jollof and Davido vs. Wizkid😂
Meanwhile, our music, films, news, platforms, distribution channels and cultural gateways are increasingly connected to foreign money and foreign institutions.
And we are expected not to ask questions?
Please.
Follow the money.
Follow the ownership.
Follow the distribution.
Follow the platforms.
Follow the grants.
Follow the fellowships.
Follow who controls access.
Then draw your own conclusions.
Because, like I wrote under that angry music executive’s post:
“Well, well. There’s a game inside a game. You might have been played without knowing it.”
And knowing Nigerians, some people will still finish reading this and say:
“Abeg, na just entertainment.”
Exactly. Ptcheewwwww
One day you will know that your American dream is America's dream.
As the incumbent SSG of Anambra under @PeterObi at the time he left office on 17 March, 2014, I had the honour of personally being present when Peter Obi signed the attached handover letter. I was also present, when Gov. Willie Obiano received and signed an acknowledgement for his own copy of the letter, complete with the annexed certified bank statements, related documents and the Handover Report. The letter listed assets and liabilities - in black and red.
During the nationally televised Anambra 2017 governorhip debate on Sunday 12, November, 2017, organized by Channels Television, Gov. Willie Obiano asserted surprisingly that there were no funds left by the Obi Administration. I recall asking him on national television, how as a certified accountant and auditor he would sign off and accept financial documents, for which he now was expressing reservations. He then publicly acknowleged for the first time that some specified funds were in place and asked what was the use of saving money, when there was work to be done. As Gov. Darius Ishaku of Taraba would later confirm to members of the Nigerian press corps, Gov. Obiano had disclosed to him that his predecessor (Gov. Obi) had indeed left huge sums, which enabled him to independently build the Anambra Airport at Umueri.
If Gov. Obiano to whom Peter Obi handed over to in 2014 would eventually acknowledge -implicitly and explicitly - that Gov. Peter Obi indeed left the stipulated funds; a fact that was also publicly corroborated by Gov. Alex Otti, in his capacity as an ex- banker, what then, one may ask, is the beef and grouse of the incumbent Anambra State Government?
Go Figure!
CHIEF MOSHOOD KASHIMAWO OLAWALE ABIOLA already proposed the simple and straightforward solution to the OIL SUBSIDY brouhaha over three decades ago... Daddy, may your beautiful soul continue to rest in peace SIR...
@OlayinkaLere It is no longer uncommon to see ethnic bigotry being practiced openly by a public official, whose livelihood is being financed by the federation's account. This is beyond distateful!
Mike Benz Links CIA, U.S. State Department, UK Soft Power Funding To African Musicians And Record Labels
In this video, taken from a March 22, 2026 livestream, former US State Department official Mike Benz spotlights Nigeria's Chocolate City Music Group as one of the beneficiaries under the US State Department's little-known 'American Music Mentorship Programme' - a semi-clandestine US soft power/influence operation that co-opts music artists and record labels around the world into service to American political objectives.
Later this week, The Spearhead's @Big_Mck will be releasing a long-form piece addressing the revelations from the livestream and the wider implications of American foreign influence operations embedding themselves into cultural spaces across Africa and its diaspora.
Don't forget to follow The Spearhead
Debunking the Phantom Debts and Ecological Loan Fallacy
My attention has been drawn to trending claims by the Anambra State Government that my administration left behind inherited debts, including a ₦2 billion ecological loan, contractor liabilities, and unpaid salaries, gratuities, and pensions. This is completely false.
We systematically liquidated historical gratuities and arrears dating back several years, amounting to over ₦35 billion. At the point of handover, the state owed nothing in salaries, gratuities, or pensions, nor did we owe anything to any contractor for projects duly executed and certified.
The ₦2 billion ecological fund in question was released barely three months before the end of my tenure for the Oko/Umuchiana erosion crisis. Despite pressure to spend the money, I refused, insisting that it should be left for my successor because government is a continuum and the funds were tied to a specific project.
The money was therefore left 100 per cent intact in First Bank, in Account No. 2018779464, with a balance of over ₦2.13 billion.
It is important to stress that funds tied to specific projects or set aside for particular purposes were not even included in the over ₦75 billion in savings we left behind.
If anybody can establish anything to the contrary, I will stop campaigning. -PO
This video.
Genuinely I'm actually surprised and confused. why is CIA funding it?
@DavidHundeyin keeps talking about CIA.
I low-key might start believing if they are the reason why Africa is still like this
Desmond Idiot's foolishness is a shared mental illness btw.
This is how Ogun State lawmakers & local government chairmen go to beg their Governor when they've "offended him".
Let's make it clear.
This isn't about cultural respect, this is political vassalage.
Innalillahi💔 who are bandits sponsors??😭
This video allegedly shows money and motorcycles being stocked and arranged for bandits. It also captures several Fulani bandits, their passports, and the late Bashari Maniya, a repentant bandit, alongside other evidence, all inside a house reportedly owned by Shehu Buba Umar, a Nigerian politician and senator representing Bauchi South under the APC. According to reports and the voice in the background, the young man who recorded the video has gone missing after repenting and exposing this evidence of bandits gathering in the senator’s house as alleged..
For the record, Uber never made or intended to make money in Nigeria. Anyone who is familiar with Uber's core business model knew this since 2015. Uber's business model is to enter a market, set its fares well below those of the existing traditional taxis, burn VC money to absorb the losses while driving taxis out of the market, then raise prices after it becomes a monopoly.
That model needs a large middle market segment to work - people who don't own or drive their own cars but have enough discretionary income to regularly pay for comfy private transport. In Lagos and Abuja, there are only maybe a couple of hundred thousand people within that income segment. People above it who own their own cars and/or have their own personal driver don't need a ride hailing service, and the vast majority below it who don't, generally aren't willing to pay even the VC-subsidised "cheap" fares because what is considered "cheap" in San Francisco is definitely not cheap in Bariga.
In the ideal market, Uber is only competing against the traditional taxi. In the extremely price-sensitive environment of Nigeria, the opportunity cost of taking an Uber in the minds of the addressable market is the cost savings one can make from taking a danfo, BRT bus, korope, keke, okada, or even literally walking instead. All the VC dollars in the world cannot subsidise a trip made in a low-capacity, air-conditioned, 4-wheeled car into ever becoming cheaper than a bus or rickshaw trip over the same distance. The only people who were regularly and predictably using Uber to get around were a small minority of well-heeled, mainly female customers who chose not to own or drive their own vehicle for various reasons - and this was far too small a market segment to build the Uber business model on. The mathematics made no sense from day 1.
Also from a driver and cars POV, Uber is known to operate like a pyramid scheme. It depends on a constant stream of new drivers and cars being onboarded onto the platform to replace the drivers and car owners who drop out in vast numbers everyday after realising that after fuel, repairs and depreciation costs in Nigeria, it is mathematically impossible to make any real money on Uber. The best one can do with it (as I did for 3 months in 2016) is just use it to temporarily get by - but the fuel costs will eat nearly half of whatever you make, the repairs will be expensive and incessant, and your car will be transformed into a pile of moving metal trash with next to no resale value.
There was no real business case for Uber Nigeria, and this was known as far back as 2015 just 1 year after launch. The real reason it stayed another 11 years after the entire initial set of drivers and car owners pulled out citing everything I just said, is that its real business in Nigeria was not ride hailing, but **data gathering.**
Uber is part of the US military industrial complex, like every other thing out of Silicon Valley. Edward Snowden's leaked files already showed us that the American NSA uses Uber, Lyft etc as its "God's Eye" system, giving the US government round the clock surveillance access into where people go, what routes they use, what items they buy, what social relationships they have etc. Thinking of Uber as just a ride hailing app is like thinking of Google as just a search engine.
Over 12 years in Lagos and Abuja, the data Uber has collected would have given whoever gathered it some extremely useful, and possibly dangerous insights into whoever might be a person of interest. The data would include people's home address, work addresses, which Airbnbs they book to meet their side pieces, which takeaway restaurant they order from, what pharmacy they buy condoms or morning after pills from, what routes they take to work and back, where their kids go to school...
I'm willing to bet that the decision to end Uber's presence in Nigeria was not sudden at all, but merely the expiration of whatever US government contract it was executing.
At this stage in our historical awakening, we as Africans must immediately stop referring to the 1994 Rwandan genocide as merely an "ancient tribal war."
First of all, this narrative is historically inaccurate and criminally misleading.
The Hutus and Tutsis are not two different ethnic tribes: they belong to the exact same cultural group, speak the exact same language, inhabit the exact same geographic regions, practice the exact same spiritual religions, observe the exact same traditions, and have historically intermarried for centuries.
The historical distinction between a Hutu and a Tutsi was strictly a matter of economic class, perfectly analogous to the difference between a wealthy, cattle-owning Alhaji and a landless agricultural worker in Northern Nigeria. "Tutsi" was originally nothing more than a social title assigned to those who owned herds of cattle, held land rights, and controlled the local means of production, while "Hutu" simply referred to agrarian farmers, subsistence cultivators, and manual laborers. This class distinction was fluid rather than permanent: a wealthy Hutu who accumulated significant cattle and land through social mobility automatically underwent the cultural process of Kwihutura and became a Tutsi, while an impoverished Tutsi who lost his livestock and wealth tumbled down the social ladder to become a Hutu.
Even with these fluid class distinctions, Hutus and Tutsis lived harmoniously, coexisted peacefully, and continuously intermarried across generations.
But when German and subsequently Belgian imperialists invaded Rwanda, their colonial minds could not comprehend how a sophisticated Black African civilization could construct such an organized, highly structured, and centralized kingdom. To explain away this African achievement, they introduced the pseudoscientific "Hamitic Hypothesis."
They brainwashed the Tutsi elites into believing they were not purely Black Africans, but rather superior Cushitic descendants of Europe with lighter skin, refined features, and natural intelligence, while characterizing the Hutus as typical "Bantu Africans" who were allegedly shorter, darker, less intelligent, and suited only for backbreaking manual labor. The Belgian colonizers did not merely preach this racist theory: they constructed their entire colonial administration around it.
In 1933, the Belgians issued mandatory ethnic identity cards, permanently freezing what was once a fluid economic class into rigid, unchangeable racial categories. This myth was systematically taught in Catholic mission schools, where generations of Tutsi children were brainwashed into believing they were natural-born aristocrats destined to govern, while Hutu children were conditioned to believe they were born to be exploited laborers. Naturally, this divide-and-rule strategy perfectly served the extraction interests of the European masters, as Hutus performed unpaid forced labor in the coffee fields while Tutsis served as intermediate colonial overseers, ensuring that raw agricultural wealth flowed seamlessly to Western metropoles.
The fundamental problem for the colonizers, however, arose when the educated Tutsi elite, utilizing their Western education, began developing anti-colonial consciousness, organizing political parties, and fiercely demanding immediate national independence. Deeply threatened by this nationalist defiance, the Belgian colonial administration and the Catholic Church executed a sudden, cynical, and hypocritical geopolitical pivot. They completely abandoned the Tutsi monarchy and shifted their total support to the Hutu majority. Overnight, the colonial narrative was inverted: instead of being praised as "superior civilizers," Tutsis were suddenly re-framed as alien "foreign invaders" and feudal parasites who had brutally oppressed the "indigenous" Hutus for centuries. During the 1959 to 1962 transition to independence, Belgian military officers actively assisted Hutu political elites in seizing power, orchestrating widespread political violence, burning Tutsi villages, and driving hundreds of thousands of Tutsis into permanent exile.
For nearly 30 years, these Tutsi refugees languished in border camps across Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zaire (now the DRC). In the early 1980s, young Tutsi refugees who grew up in Ugandan camps, most notably Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame, joined the National Resistance Army (NRA) rebel movement led by Yoweri Museveni. They gained extensive, high-level combat experience, intelligence training, and tactical mastery while helping Museveni overthrow the Ugandan government and capture power in 1986. Leveraging these formidable military skills, these seasoned exile fighters formed their own revolutionary movement in 1987: the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In October 1990, the RPF launched a highly organized, full-scale military invasion into northern Rwanda from Uganda to demand their non-negotiable right of return, political representation, and an end to state-sponsored discrimination.
At this critical juncture, while Belgium had originally planted the seeds of division, French imperialism moved aggressively into the center of the picture. The French government, under François Mitterrand, viewed the English-speaking, Uganda-backed RPF as a dangerous "Anglo-Saxon" geopolitical conspiracy designed to strip France of its neocolonial sphere of influence in Francophone.
French officials viewed Juvénal Habyarimana's dictatorial Hutu regime as a vital, submissive client state that had to be defended at all costs. To this end, the French-backed government in Kigali launched a massive, state-directed propaganda campaign, labeling the invading RPF not as freedom fighters coming to end Western imperialism, but as alien invaders, while branding all Tutsis living inside Rwanda as a treacherous "fifth column" and a security threat that had to be eliminated.
But state propaganda alone was not enough to execute a mass slaughter. French military officers, intelligence advisers, and specialized troops directly armed, equipped, and trained the notorious Interahamwe death-squad militias. Between 1990 and 1994, the French government poured millions of dollars in military aid, heavy artillery, intelligence telemetry, and endless shipments of ammunition into the Rwandan military, actively enabling the regime to organize, prepare, and execute the 1994 genocide while attempting to stall the advancing RPF.
So, it was absolutely never an "ancient tribal war." That dishonest, racist narrative was deliberately constructed by European powers and American diplomats as a cynical geopolitical weapon to evade international law.
Under Article 1 of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, all signatory nations (including the US, France, Great Britain, and Belgium) are strictly, legally obligated to intervene, deploy troops, and spend resources to stop a genocide the moment it is officially recognized as such. If Western powers had officially acknowledged the 1994 slaughter as a state-organized, French-backed genocide, they would have been legally compelled to intervene, risk their own soldiers' lives, and expose their own complicity. To escape this binding legal obligation, Western governments, the US State Department, and the United Nations executed a masterclass in bureaucratic gaslighting. The US State Department explicitly instructed its diplomats, press secretaries, and spokespeople in 1994 to avoid using the word "genocide" on the record, demanding they use sanitized phrases like "acts of genocide," "ethnic clashes," or "widespread civil violence." Western media outlets simultaneously framed the systematic, state-executed slaughter of over 800,000 human beings as an "uncontrollable explosion of primitive, tribal hatreds" or a chaotic, senseless African civil war.
In mid-July 1994, the French-backed Hutu regime was decisively defeated, and the capital city of Kigali was captured by Paul Kagame's disciplined RPF forces. Upon taking power, the new RPF government immediately, permanently abolished the colonial ethnic identity cards and outlawed all public categorization by "Hutu," "Tutsi," or "Twa." Under strict new laws, weaponizing ethnic divisionism or publicly framing political, economic, or social issues around tribal identities was made strictly illegal. Under the visionary and institutionalized leadership of Paul Kagame, Rwanda completely rebuilt its shattered infrastructure, eradicated administrative corruption, revolutionized public healthcare, modernized its cities, and transformed itself into one of Africa's fastest-growing economies, cleanest societies, and safest, most technologically sovereign nations.
@papichulo4224 You children of hate and perdition will keep peddling lies and propaganda. Where do the words so purportedly quoted appear in the clip provided? And the simple or mischievous ones commenting won't deign to check whether there's an alignment. No wonder misinformation thrives.