SO LONG A SILENCE

There is silence on many fronts over Africa’s intelligence operatives, argues Okello Oculi

So long a silence inside the carcass of the Commonwealth was broken - in my view - by British spooks pulling off a fairy tale marriage for one of their royals. The script was a thrill. Find a lass with so intense a charisma and passion for connecting with distressed and disadvantaged persons that she echoes Mother Diana to a promising young man who was once traumatised in his teenage days by her death.

By way of revenge on the snobbishness of those who pushed Diana to her tragic defiance of their rituals and drab mores, throw at them a descendant of victims of British growth into slavery-soaked imperial stature. Her name would be Meghan.

My thoughts went back to the exploits of the Oxford group of undergraduates who figured out that if the Soviet Union was defeated in the World War 11, the Yankees would strut and stomp over Europe, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State had said that Monroe Doctrine considered ‘’its own interest’’: it had no higher or more generous motive in its declaration’’. Kim Philby and his young Communist team at Oxford University chose the alternative of a Cold War dominated by two barbarians.

MI 5’s creative engineering of History gave billions around the world something to cheer and weep about from Westminster Palace grounds to slums in India and Rio.

The genius that lurks in the shadows of operatives of intelligence services deserves more sunlight falling on their leaves. The British have a rich library of them. A case similar to that of the Oxford heroes or villains – depending on one’s political leanings – is that of Cambridge Analytica.

It would appear one lesson leant from the 2008 financial crisis and the social opposition it provoked against big banks and corporations. In the United States, university students took to streets and attacked financial institutions. Their critical review of the American economy and politics sounded shockingly similar to voices of Communism. Their focus on factories exported to China by companies who were making huge profits from exploiting its well-educated and highly disciplined hundreds of millions of workers had left millions of Americans wallowing in poverty. It was cheaper to manufacture merchandise in China and export them to American consumers than to produce them in Detroit or Los Angeles.

People were being driven out of houses because they could no longer afford to pay mortgage fees. Many people in states with cold winters moved to sleep in warm tropical forests in Florida and elsewhere in the South. Many could no longer pay for their children to get college education, and some were lining up for free bowls of soup as their only meal of the day. Youths began to follow socialist rhetoric of Senator Barney Saunders.

Corporate America had protected their selfish interests by fanning fears among ordinary Americans about the Soviet Union taking away their hamburgers and popcorn with communist doctrines. With the fall of communist regimes across Eastern Europe, it would be paradoxical if socialism triumphed in the United States of America. That scent of blood would have tickled noses and ears of intelligence officers. It was telling that the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton, a candidate of big business.

Brilliant computer wizards at Cambridge Analytica were unlikely to be unknown to American, British and Russian intelligence officers. Their offer of tools for ‘Brain Farming’ - or planting emotions and preferred reactions to information into brains - of over 80 million people whose personality profiles they can harvest from the Internet - was likely to be attractive to customers from both conservative and socialist camps.

For the CIA, it was vital to send appeals against ‘’globalisation’’ and its pauperisation of millions of Americans with calls for ‘’America First’’. Russia’s KGB wanted to hit back at claims by the Americans that they had recruited Mikhail Gorbachev, by planting an American president who would roll back globalisation and its anti-people bites. Candidate Hillary Clinton was a mortal enemy of Russia’s interests on the Mediterranean Sea and the Arab Middle East.

In Russia former super-spies had muscled their way into power in Russia. Vladimir Putin and his former warriors of the Soviet Union felt terribly humiliated when hungry wolves from NATO Europe and North America went on a looting spree and humiliation of Russia. It is plausible to assume that the old spooks dusted their eyes and demanded a plan of action for winning a presidential election in the United States.

At a time when President Donald Trump is spitting into faces of his secret service operatives, it is instructive to speculate about the role of Britain’s spooks in orchestrating a thriller for reviving a Commonwealth after the British Council has closed its libraries to those longing for knowledge. Claims of building ‘’Soft Power’’ through the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme became wasting money on parasitism. Meghan and Harry have been invented as carpenters and mechanics for fixing damages.

There is, however, silences on many fronts over Africa’s intelligence operatives notably: promoting knowledge of African affairs by writing books; their budgets including support university researcher on African Diaspora from Australia to Brazil, promoting the law that the security of every African country is a Union of African States. Africa’s novelists and film makers are hearing their sounds of silence.

MEGHAN AND HARRY HAVE BEEN INVENTED AS CARPENTERS AND MECHANICS FOR FIXING DAMAGES