Did Cambridge Analytica (CA), the British data analysis firm that reportedly swung the Brexit votes for the “Leave” (European Union) camp in the UK and helped propel Donald Trump to the White House in the US – both by exploiting voter fears and anxieties interfered in the electoral process of Nigeria and Kenya? That’s the question many people are asking as the next Nigerian elections scheduled for early 2019 is fast approaching.
CA, the controversial data politics firm founded in 2013 has before the recent Facebook scandal run “psychological-operations” in war zones, “advised” dictators in Asia, led “counter-terrorism missions” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia and have “swing” elections in far places as India and Latvia. But CA only came to the public domain following revelations by Christopher Wylie, a former CA employee whose testimony to British lawmakers helped unveil how the personal data of 87 million Facebook users (including that of Facebook founder and CEO – Mark Zuckerberg) were harvested and used – and the shady workings of a company he described as one “that goes around the world undermining institutions in countries that are still struggling with weak institutions”.
To complicate things further for CA, Britain’s Channel 4 aired an investigative reporting that showed Mark Turnbull, managing director for CA and its sister company SCL (Strategic Communication Laboratories) boasting on how the company helped Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta secure the presidency in 2013 and 2017 respectively.
CA in both Nigeria and Kenya where in the words of Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan commentator “election manipulation is a matter of life and death” have gone to unethical lengths to target two veteran opposition candidates – Muhammadu Buhari in the Nigerian election of 2015 and Raila Odinga in the Kenyan elections of 2013 and 2017.
In Nigeria, Wylie’s testimony to British lawmakers, that a Nigerian billionaire (still unknown) hired CA to support the Jonathan-led PDP administration during the 2015 elections is alarming. The company with the help of an Israeli spy firm “Black Cube” hacked President Muhammadu Buhari, then an opposition candidate in 2015 to obtain his medical records and personal emails.
This was later used to spread fake news and anti-Muslim sentiment against Buhari who was depicted as a supporter of Shariah law and someone that would suppress dissenters and negotiate with “terrorists” – thereby slip Nigeria into anarchy.
“It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind”, that’s how another former employee tagged the dirty tricks the company he once worked for go about the world doing in order to influence elections in their client’s favour.
As Nyabola noted, “CA, of course, did not invent this type of amoral interference in Africa – as it is pervasive and as old as the relationship between Africa and the West”. She argues that CA only benefitted from technology to replicate and exacerbates the biases and behavior that exists offline. The sad truth is African lives continue to mean little in the pursuit of profit (since politicians continue to spend money on these “consultants” and “spin doctors”).
Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas in their new book How to rig an election argued that in the digital age, democracy is becoming a delusion as democracy is being hijacked around the world since uninformed voters are [manipulatively] replaced by misinformed ones.
Even though CA’s manipulative tactics during the polls of 2015 did not have an influence on the outcome of the elections, the fact remains that such incendiary messages and videos circulated on social media help create the hate speech dilemma Nigeria is currently in, which by extension could be exploited yet again during the 2019 polls if precautionary mechanisms are not put in place.
Nigerians will love to hear truthfully from the PDP if in their desperate attempts to remain in power led them to collude with a foreign firm to undermine Nigeria’s democracy? And whether they are part and parcel of those that helped create the hate speech and fake news atmosphere Nigeria is currently facing?
The government also has to do enough to prevent such thing from repeating itself in Nigeria. Such foreign firms as Cambridge Analytica that go around the world undermining the people’s will should not be allowed to operate in the most populous nation in Africa or any other viable democracy worldwide.
Labaran Yusuf, Jos, Plateau State
