Financial Times’ misadventure in Nigeria By Kenneth-Kaunda Adamu

From all indications, the Financial Times is gradually and consistently becoming an infamous media organisation. For a news organization that was able to do an about face in the recently held US presidential election, Financial Times (FT) must have that imperial confidence that it can and would get away with anything that it does in or to Nigeria. It is not surprising that it’s catastrophic backing of Secretary Hillary Clinton against a mean Donald Trump in spite of ‘her weaknesses’ is enough indication of where FT’s agenda lies as a warmongering propaganda outlet.

Like all devious entities, the publication has waffled its way close enough to suck up to Trump and thereby making itself one of those seeking a Faustian bargain with the president-elect. Suddenly, the same media organization is singing hosanna to the Trump because its operators are aware that no one cares to remember where it once stood so long as it can find more corrosive poison to shove down its readers’ throats.

This confidence perhaps informed its nauseating article in which, like it did Trump, FT tried to place Nigeria in the league of troubled nations it has helped reported into the brink. Between turning facts upon its head and lining up an array of paid experts, Financial Times futilely and in an unwarranted effort attempted to suggest that Nigeria as a nation has failed or that its army has not been able to live up to expectations or that it is committing human rights abuses where it has made progress in routing terrorists.

What is frightening is the way FT had in the past undertaken such campaign of lies, cause disintegration of countries and then distance itself from the evil so committed when it becomes clear that readers have been lied to.

Take for instance when that publication joined the Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) chorus about Iraq’s former dictator, Saddam Hussein, who was later executed with the help of foreign intervention justified with such stories; it turned out the overthrow and subsequent killing of Saddam was to mark the beginning of the Middle-East’s spiral into a death spin. As would be expected, FT through the bloodthirsty goblins it propagates falsehood for continues to claim that ” the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein”.

The FT’s “better world” is the one where it reported Iraq into a nation in the hands of ISIS fanatics and other children of darkness. Since the world has no censure for its and other corporate media transgression in Iraq, the ensuing boldness has seen a repeat of the same ignoble horror in neighboring Syria where corporate wisdom holds it that Bashir al-Assad has no business staying on as the leader of that country after his father. It does not matter that the corporate media runs errand in a country where someone attempted to rule after his brother and his father before that or that a wife wanted to step in post interregnum of her husband – so family perpetration is okay in one place and is bad in another. So FT, being a medium with conscience, saw nothing wrong with having ‘moderate rebels’ given arms that they in turn hand over to hardline terrorists for a toke or under threat of death.

Between the WMD fable and myth of moderate terrorists, the likes of FT found time to visit disaster on the world with their packaging of ‘Arab Spring’ that was celebrated as ordinary people taking their own destinies in their hands. The only trouble?

With the benefit of hindsight the true victims of that disasters were to express preference for their obsessive dictators under whom the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was not able to wave its black flag. But after the liberation as defined by FT and others, the population of the countries that were unlucky enough to believe that propaganda have emptied into Europe and that is if they do not perish in the Mediterranean while trying to get there. Those lucky to arrive and now trapped from struggle for basic existence having discovered that they could not even be accommodated in refugee camps. Sadly, it is the corporate media that is at the verge of mortgaging the collective conscience of many countries and have merely led them by the nose to destroy their home countries and report as the new slave class to the countries of migration.

Whatever is left of the populations of those country are either too radicalized, unskilled or not fit for purpose to be led as slaves that will power the factories owned by FT’s client’s. A new axis must be found for mass migration triggered by violence so over to Africa for the destabilization train. There is no point causing crises in countries with low to moderate population densities since that would require too much logistics. With Egypt’s 90 million population already factored into the Middle East destabilization plot and Ethiopia’s 94 million people to closeted, Nigeria’s 186 million souls provides the perfect pool to supply the next batch of forced migrations to power western factories that have lost production to cheaper wages in the east.

So after setting the stage with fraudulent Amnesty International’s reports of human rights abuses by Nigeria’s military, and refusal of certain nations to sell weapons to Nigeria, the next phase appears to disparage the army to the extent that the insurrectionists they have positioned would have the boldness to attack the army, following which the time tested campaign for a ‘no-fly-zone’ against a ‘repressive government’ can start. The goal would be to allow Boko Haram resurgence, a ferralized Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) as well as the Movement for the Actualisation of Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) would pursue their genocidal intentions and Niger Delta militant would make suicidal bids at their long held ambition. All these will happen under an army that has been cowed with threat of international prosecution as contained in the veiled threat of FT’s article, “Domestic battles expose Nigerian army’s vulnerabilities”.

The losers in these scenarios would be the everyday Nigerians in their millions who neither subscribe to any of the aforementioned murderous group nor read Financial Times or other corporate propaganda rag, the people who would remain invisible to Amnesty International, which by the way is still blissfully unaware of the scale of extra-judicial execution by police departments in the United States.

The winners would be FT with its partners – weapon manufacturers that will offload more inventories with their envisaged crisis in Nigeria, corporations that would gain cheap labourers processed with violence from the raw material source they see in Nigeria; and of course there would be the imperial powers that would like to have their proxies and minions managing the carcass they would leave behind.

Anyone, any Nigerian relishing in the fire being stoked by this propaganda platform must therefore introspect deeply with a view to understanding what the stakes are. For all the countries that organizations like Financial Times have reported into destruction, its stocks have only risen in value as its partners in crime pass money under the table to it in form of advertising while those nations burn and their citizens in quandary.

For some of us and indeed several million other Nigerians, who truly believe in Nigeria irrespective of our current difficulties the conviction is that the government must confront these monsters and not wait till they have ruined our country and this is possible only when Nigerians demand that such actions be taken. We have to end the misadventure of these foreign invaders.

****Adamu K. K writes from Lugard Egalitarian Society for All, (LESA) Lokoja, Kogi State.