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Under-fire data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, has confirmed it had been hired by a Nigerian billionaire, who supported ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, to execute a campaign against Muhammadu Buhari in the 2015 general elections.
According to a report, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, SCL Elections, made the confirmation it was hired in the wake of December 2014 to support Jonathan’s campaign on a massive scale.
The report fingered Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica, who would go on to play a public role at the launch of Nigel Farage’s Leave.eu campaign, and a senior strategist on the Donald Trump campaign.
Regarded by colleagues as a prolific networker, in December 2014, Kaiser was introduced to a Nigerian oil billionaire who wanted to fund a covert campaign to support Jonathan, according to the report.
The billionaire wanted total discretion, the report stated.
“We can confirm that SCL Elections was hired in December 2014 to provide advertising and marketing services in support of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign,” the firm confirmed.
However, several confessional statements made by employees of the firm, seven of them, with close knowledge of the campaign, showed that Cambridge Analytica did more than just providing advertising and marketing services in support of the Jonathan campaign.
Employees of Cambridge Analytica, according to the report, actually worked effortlessly and ruthlessly to sway the 2015 general election votes in favour of Jonathan.
Describing how Cambridge Analytica worked with people they believed were Israeli computer hackers, they said the hackers offered Cambridge Analytica access to Buhari’s financial and medical records, and that they had accessed the private emails of two politicians who are now heads of state.
Also, Cambridge Analytica was reported to have used an astonishing and disturbing video to push the campaign, a malicious one, against Buhari.
“Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015. Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all. What would Nigeria look like if Sharia were imposed by Buhari?,” the Guardian UK report quotes the voiceover on the campaign video.
“Its answer to that question is certainly dark. And scary. It’s also graphically, brutally, violent. One minute and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria’s troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack. There are scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in,” the report stated of the campaign video.
According to one of the employees, now a former contractor of the firm, “It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in Buhari regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting”.
According to the Guardian UK, the employees confessed Cambridge Analytica was paid an estimate of N1 billion by the Nigeria billionaire barely six weeks to the elections to sway the votes.
There is no suggestion Jonathan knew of the covert operation.
Meanwhile, SCL Elections has denied the confessional statements, stressing that, they, through the instrument of Cambridge Analytica, only provided advertising and marketing services in support of the campaign.
“During an election campaign, it is normal for SCL Elections to meet with vendors seeking to provide services as a subcontractor.
“SCL Elections did not take possession of or use any personal information from such individuals for any purposes.
“SCL Elections does not use ‘hacked’ or ‘stolen’ data,” the Guardian UK quotes the firm to have said.
The firm went further to say “Members of the SCL Elections team that worked on the Nigeria campaign remained in country throughout the original campaigning period, although the election was rescheduled and SCL was not retained for the entirety of the extended campaign period. Team members left in accordance with the company’s campaign plan”.
Buhari was also fingered in the report.
His team was alleged to have hired AKPD, the firm of former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod, to push slick-social-media-heavy, Obama-esque message of hope in favour of Buhari.
The report, however, notes that there are multiple wider political questions about what went on in the Nigerian election of 2015 and the role western powers played.
“Whether western political campaigners taking lucrative foreign contracts are contributing to the democratic framework of developing countries or helping to destroy them or if they’re experimenting with methods and techniques that they later re-import back to our more developed democracies” is yet to be ascertained.
Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who spoke to the Observer, however, called it “post-colonial blowback”.
The revelations are the latest to focus attention on Cambridge Analytica, whose activities are being investigated in the US by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of inquiry into possible Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election that brought the much-criticized Trump administration to bear.
The firm is under pressure to explain how it came to have unauthorized access to about 50 million of Facebook profiles.
This, in part, has led to the suspension of Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix.