ALL “KNOWLEDGE” or “apprehension of truth” is, ultimately, information or awareness that enables the solution of some perceived problem(s). Human begins of societies also become aware autonomously or are persuaded by extraneous forces, of the existence of problems. These are processes of intellection, education and culturisation – becoming knowledgeable, becoming cultured.
Is Gates, Dangote, or Musk (in any imaginable way), for example, complicit, or may any of or all of them be complicit, in doing-in groups of human beings (Africans, Americans, Asians, etc.) in the world? This sort of question had also been asked about many other “philanthropists” who are invariably big, even global, businessmen including other Nigerian or non-Nigerian millionaires and billionaires.
When a people or a country is under siege from internal and external exploiting forces, as we have witnessed in the case of Nigeria and many African countries, the controlling forces tend to maintain their hegemony by debilitating public purpose in those countries and recruiting segments of the polity who are objective victims, to side with the illusionists on the side of the hegemony. Some of the captured elite, the recruits, become the activists of the hegemonists as employees of corporations, state bureaucrats or simply enablers in the media.
For businessmen and women, the fundamental objective is profit; anything that enhances profit is legitimate even if it’s not legal; they, oftentimes, pay to avoid following the law – lower wages for workers, seizure of land, destruction of the environment, paying the lawmakers and law-enforcement agencies to make favourable laws and escape consequences of criminal activities. They fund political parties to install favourable economic polices including those that carry out massacres and genocides today; and in Africa, the Americas and Asia during colonial conquests and even in today’s neo-colonial set-ups!
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Businessmen and women may also go out of their way, quite infrequently, to insist on legitimate and legal processes especially when their business is not endangered fundamentally or when strategic business and profit considerations so dictate.
Since the rise of capitalism in Europe, the so-called voyages of “discovery” around the world had enabled huge wealth accumulation and orchestrated major disasters and crimes against humanity – slave trade, massacres and genocides in Africa and the Americas, major World Wars and regional wars, colonial conquests and settler colony, apartheid (USA, Canada, Israel, South Africa, etc.), neo-colonialism and continued dependency of the peripheries of capitalism on the metropolises occasioned by unending and ruthless exploitation of former colonies, globalization under neo-liberal capitalism, the enhanced trans-nationalization of corporate power, had generally developed the underdevelopment of the peripheries like Nigeria.
This underdevelopment is accomplished through varieties of exploitative and unequal exchange mechanisms including debt slavery, export promotion instead of local value addition (export even of man-power), enhancement of cultural dependence, conspiracy of foreign forces and their local agencies including regime changes where local leaders reject exploitative foreign dictations!
State actors (USAID, UK-aid, DfID, Japan International Cooperative Agency, Swedish International Development Agency, etc.) and non-state actors (transnational corporations, transnational NGOs, etc. – Ford, Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, Rockefeller, Moffet, etc.) have collaborated closely in the invariably ambiguous relations that maintain The Myth of Development: the Non-viable Economies, of the 21st Century, the tittle of Oswaldo de Rivero’s book (Zed, 2001).
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The real tell-tale pointer to the appropriateness of the tittle of de Rivero’s book is the shift, in about mid-1990s, from aid for development to aid for poverty alleviation/eradication. Meaning? Fifty years after Breton Woods and its underlying aid paradigm, poverty (read exploitation and underdevelopment) had escalated among the alleged recipients of aid!
The foregoing is why it is amazing that observations of the culpability, if not direct complicity of corporations and companies (pharmaceutical companies, vaccine companies, tech companies, herbicide and pesticide companies) in various crimes against humanity, are quite often dismissed by those who ought to know! Given all the direct and circumstantial evidence of the complicity of big corporations including Meta, Google and Bill Gates’ Microsoft in crimes against humanity, how can we be comfortable that the philanthropy of the leading lights of these conspiracies are altruistic and salutary?
Force and conquests are however never sufficient, efficient, or effective to sustain exploitation and humiliation of beleaguered peoples. Hence the deployment of philanthropy and pretentious empathy through donations, gifts, “humanitarian” service and pretences to altruism by invading governmental (State) forces and their non-state accomplices including religious and commercial institutions on behalf of who state actors visit violence and exercise control to start with.
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Throughout the progress of capitalist accumulation around the globe, the home country of corporations facilitates the power and profit of corporations because the two are mutually reinforcing. Indeed, the leading lights of capitalism move freely from government offices to corporations, institutions, companies, etc.
Wars, hot and/or cold, are orchestrated to keep private organizations and the so-called military-industrial complexes happy. It is estimated that as of today, the US military-industrial complex needs $50 billion annually “to keep its shareholders happy”!
Evidence had mounted massively that aid from state actors and state actor institutions serve largely as instruments of control, hegemony and power projection by the donor agencies. NGO funding by organisations like Ford, Rockefeller, Bill and Melinda Gates, etc., collaborate directly with US universities, state institutions like USAID and others to set agendas that dictate economic and cultural (as education) agenda for client states like Nigeria. Usman’s For the Liberation of Nigeria (New Beacon Books, London, 1979), for example, showed that the foundations of today’s asphyxiation of public-funded higher education were already laid in the mid-1970s by US government and non-government agencies!
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As we already noted above, resources from donors, funders, grant-giving NGOs and non-state actors come from, enhance, and project, corporate profit. Most of the philanthropy of donors touted as activities flowing from altruism is of dubious credibility! And to the extent that they are hooked on to state actors and institutions like UKaid and USAID, their goals are congruent in pursuit of economic and social policies that subvert the independence and viability of client states (like Nigeria) on issues like industry, agriculture generally (including food security), education and culture.
Almost as a rule, funders like Ford, Bill and Melinda Gates, etc., will obviously neither advertise nor admit any link or congruence of their activities in client states with strategic, self-serving and sinister goals of state actors!
My 2019 Convocation Lecture at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike (MOUAU) addressed these issues in regard to agriculture, “food security”, environment, dependence, and underdevelopment in countries like Nigeria.
Michael Kwet, visiting fellow of the Information Society Project: “How US Big Tech supports Israel’s AI-powered genocide and apartheid” Al Jazeera 12th May 2024, observed: “Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a statement on social media, extending sympathy to Israelis with mentioning the Palestinians. Other tech executives – including from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – offered their gushing support for Israel as well”.
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It is anybody’s guess who authorized and enabled the “pager murders” of the leaders of the resistance against the US-enabled the unending occupation and genocide in Lebanon, Gaza, West Bank, etc. Isn’t it?
Kwet, in the material cited earlier, further noted: “Amid this AI-assisted genocide, Big Tech in the United States is quietly continuing business as usual with Israel. Intel has announced $25 billion investment in a chip plant located in Israel, while Microsoft a new Azure cloud region in the country”.
Just as they did in 20th century South Africa, today’s largest US-based technology corporations see an opportunity to profit from Israel apartheid a by-product of US-driven digital colonialism”.
When a people or a country is under siege from internal and external exploiting forces, as we have witnessed in the case of Nigeria and many African countries, the controlling forces tend to maintain their hegemony by debilitating public purpose in those countries and recruiting segments of the polity who are objective victims, to side with the illusionists on the side of the hegemony. Some of the captured elite, the recruits, become the activists of the hegemonists as employees of corporations, state bureaucrats or simply enablers in the media.
In these circumstances, the abandonment of public purpose via privatization and auction of public assets, deregulation and enhanced the private accumulation. Government spending on education, infrastructure, public health and environmental crises and public security are reduced. These policies are standard policies canvassed by controlling interests like state actors and their national and international institutions.
By discouraging public-purpose public funding in client states like Nigeria, the public sector (education, health, security, housing, the environment, research in universities and specialized agencies including regulatory agencies) are orphaned! They become dependents and beggars for “beggars”, grants, loans from external and other private funders. Of course, beggars have to be not only subservient to the agenda of their benefactors, they must defend their donors and benefactors. And they must be blind to the crimes of the donors; including those crimes in plain public view such as the genocidal wars, all over the globe; wars that sustained Euro-American imperialism for close to a millennium today.
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The foregoing is why it is amazing that observations of the culpability, if not direct complicity of corporations and companies (pharmaceutical companies, vaccine companies, tech companies, herbicide and pesticide companies) in various crimes against humanity, are quite often dismissed by those who ought to know! Given all the direct and circumstantial evidence of the complicity of big corporations including Meta, Google and Bill Gates’ Microsoft in crimes against humanity, how can we be comfortable that the philanthropy of the leading lights of these conspiracies are altruistic and salutary?
We conclude that capitalism is about accumulation; about profit! Everything else, by people or organisations seeking the private wealth grail, is primarily in the aid of profit! The same organization, in pursuit of profit, will provide facilities at different locations for genocidal projects without any qualm and still continue to be “philanthropy!
If we seek knowledge for advancing the cause of our people, our country and humanity, we must build independent public-purpose capacities, that we are also in charge of, and the fall outs of which we can predict and control. When salesmen and women of “innovation” insist that those who (locally and globally) call for vigilance are all ignoramuses, humanity and especially dominated and dependent peoples are endangered!
While the USA was claiming to be defending freedom in the world during the so-called “World War II”, America’s most powerful corporation (IBM) was supplying the computer wherewithal to facilitate the Nazi Holocaust (see Edwin Black’s 2002 IBM and the Holocaust: How America’s Most Powerful Corporation Helped Nazi Germany Count the Jews; published by Timewarner).
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This same IBM, along with other elements of big tech including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, is currently helping the victims of Nazi Holocaust to visit Zionist Holocaust on Palestinians as they did for centuries in South Africa!
The state of our world, and the increasing helplessness of oppressed peoples, under capitalism have created imperatives for rethinking the “knowledge (culture) industry” as its dominant paradigms are never neutral! What do we know? What are the sources of what we know? How do we know what we know? Who and what decide what we know or don’t know? What forces (class and non-class) determine what we know and don’t know? How do all these define realities and myths for individuals, collectives, peoples, and societies?
I tried to address the various nexuses of the foregoing issues in the Keynote Paper I presented at the 2024 FUT, Akure, Conference of the Genetics Society of Nigeria titled: “Trends in Genetics: Panacea for Sustainable Livelihood and National Development”, which was also the theme of the Conference.
Issues related to call for vigilance regarding the nature of scientific inquiry, the private interests of state actors and non-state actors (including “philanthropists”), “funders” and the overlaps among these interests and commitments, were addressed.
For scientists who insist that scientists and funders are entirely altruistic, I respectfully call their attention to a 2023 interview (Video), “Jeffrey Sachs: US biotech cartel behind Covid origins and cover-up” (//TheGrayzone).
If we seek knowledge for advancing the cause of our people, our country and humanity, we must build independent public-purpose capacities, that we are also in charge of, and the fall outs of which we can predict and control. When salesmen and women of “innovation” insist that those who (locally and globally) call for vigilance are all ignoramuses, humanity and especially dominated and dependent peoples are endangered!
Emeritus Prof. Olorode is Member, Secretariat Collective, Movement for Socialist Transformation (MOST-Nigeria). He can be reached via e-mail: omotoopo@gmail.com
