Chief Chocolate

I was going to do a "you people are very stupid and unteachable" post addressing the reaction to my recent comments about Uber. I was going to put out a whole research piece explaining how Emil Michael, Uber's former Chief Business Officer who led the company through its hyper scaling period from 2013 to 2017 during which time it took in nearly $20bn of investment, is now the U.S. Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and the Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Department of War, in addition to another role he previously held as Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense. I was going to explain the concept of a "revolving door" between Silicon Valley and the US security and intelligence community - something that should be common knowledge for any internet user over the age of 14. I was going to reference Uber's own publicly available legal notice where it openly states that it maintains a 24/7 emergency data request backend, built specifically for the U.S. government to pull any data Uber has harvested without a court order or any legal process. I was going to mention how Uber's own public website states that the data it harvests includes GPS/location information, pickup and drop-off locations, trip dates and times, rider and driver identities, phone numbers and email addresses, IP and device information, billing information, communications between riders and drivers, customer-service records, and vehicle/license-plate information. I was going to do a frame-by-frame breakdown of how such data collected in large volumes can be extremely valuable to security and intelligence actors, and how Edward Snowden's whistleblower efforts outlined how such surveillance is funded by U.S. DefSec entities including the NSA, DoW, CIA and DHS. I was going to explain that when the Chief Business Officer at an unprofitable tech startup is somehow able to direct 20 BILLION United States Dollars of investment into that startup which has never showed any clear path to breaking even, and he then leaves that role and becomes the Chief Technology Officer at the Department of War, which has full access to the 24/7 data request backend at the tech startup which is still burning infinite amounts of "investor" funds without any visible route to profitability, you really don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what is going on. I was going to do all that and more, it then I stopped and reminded myself that the majority of this audience cannot differentiate "I'm" from "Am", and they're at church today praying to a god whom they visualise as a white Nordic man who doesn't look anything like them. What would be the point of wasting all that explanation and indignation on undereducated, colonised people who don't know their arse from their elbow? My public education efforts aren't really for you - they're for your children. It's your children that have hope. For most of you, fate has already been sealed. Your lives are going to be short and brutal no matter what. You're here to eat, shit, fuck, and die at 55 if you're lucky to make it that far. It's really not your fault💔

For the Africans not paying attention, this means that politically exposed African public officials with US residency like Ken Ofori-Atta and Oyindamola Tinubu who have moved stolen African money into the US via their US-registered companies are no longer required to declare ownership of those companies, and there is no longer any legal way to find out that they own those companies. The US government which is funding all these stupid NGOs in Nairobi and Abuja to fill your head with nonsense is the same US government that has just openly given the green light to every kleptocrat in Africa to come and launder the money stolen from you in America. After throwing peanuts at Boniface Mwangi, Yele Sowore, Aisha Yesufu, Martha Karua, Samson Itodo, Yemi Adamolekun etc to parrot "hOld yOuR lEaDerS aCcoUntAbLe aNd sToP bLaMinG wHiTe PeOplE", this is what they're doing with the leaders in question. Whenever you wake up...

I'll also say this as someone who grew up on the nice side of the barbed wire fences and high gates in the very nice part of town where the Nigerian 0.1% live - learn to touch grass and worry about yourself because rich people really do not care about you. Like, at all. The Nigerian rich don't even like each other. They barely tolerate one another and make practical alliances to preserve wealth and influence. And now that the economy is too small to support all the children of the Nigerian 0.1%, nearly everyone I grew up with in the nice, leafy part of town now lives in Toronto or London or wherever. You, Mr N250k/month Union Bank contract staff are not part of rich people's thinking at all. At. All. The rich have no plans for you. They have no plans to create opportunities for you. They have no plans to fix the things they broke on their way to building that N1bn townhouse in Parkview Estate. They have no plans to contribute towards making society better. If Satan came from Hell with a tail and horns growing out of his head and he ran for political office, the rich would all go make deals with him - because in the world of the rich, the only thing that matters is their own interests, and making sure that they never, EVER have to live like you or next to you. So all this simping and vicarious fawning over wealth and fame that you people do everyday is the most redundant thing in the world - the rich have no intention of expanding their circle to let you in, and they have no intention of enabling the conditions for you to create your own independent circle of wealth. The only thing the rich need from you is to be poor and obedient, so that your labour can be cheap, plentiful and replaceable. Statistically as a Nigerian, you will NEVER be rich or close to it. You will NEVER live in Maitama. 99.99% of Nigerians who have existed since 1960 have prayed and fantasised about becoming rich, and 99.99% of those prayers and fantasies never came true. That's just math. You will never be a rich and famous celebrity. You will never be a successful content creator. You will never make millions shilling crypto, trading Forex, sports betting, or whatever the fuck is the latest quick wealth fantasy in town. It's just not going to happen. That being the case, a much more constructive use of your time would be to fight for the material elevation of what you actually have, where you actually have it. Instead of daydreaming about the N300m house in Lekki that 3 generations of your family cannot buy, get involved in a local effort to give your own immediate neighbourhood a facelift, or a political campaign to pressure the state to build high quality social housing. If you hate being harassed without consequence online, instead of vicariously enjoying how a celebrity has used their wealth and influence to jail someone for making a horrid tweet, fight for a judiciary and legal system that is transparent and accessible to all, so that a singer living in the UK on a global talent visa doesn't get to have more access to your Nigerian justice system than you who lives in Nigeria 24/7. Instead of building your mental architecture around the false idea of being a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" who will someday take your rightful place on Banana Island, touch grass tonight and accept that it will never happen, and what you need to do instead is fight for where you are to become a better, more liveable place that you no longer wish to escape from. Stop cosplaying as rich folk. Stop cooing and fawning over rich folk. Stop daydreaming about someday "blowing up" and buying a house next to Burna Boy. Rich people have no intention of sharing their world with you. Free yourself from the tyranny of living vicariously through people who don't care that you exist. Them no really send any part of your papa at all.

You people already have 1,000 other apps to farm your TikTok dances and low-IQ, sexually suggestive "content". Why must you have this one too? So people who just want to have ONE app for serious, high-register conversation cannot have it? Twitter was already by far the smallest of all the major social media apps - why did you have to ruin it just so you could turn into a bot-ridden, AI slop-filled Snap-Book-Tok-Gram?

I remember back in 2006 when my older brother was a 5th year medical student at Korle Bu and he caused a big family quarrel during a brief holiday in Lagos where he mentioned casually that he regularly administered blood transfusions to his patients. My dad believed that as a Jehovah Witness, my brother should decline to take part in any medical procedure involving blood transfusion on religious grounds. He didn't even want to know whether such a refusal was even possible under the terms of medical practise (it isn't) - all he knew was that 12 white men in Brooklyn who regularly spoke to "Jehovah" had decreed it so, and how dare us children from a JW family not prioritise those instructions over everything else. And because he convinced himself that his placenta was tied to these stupid Jehovah's Witnesses, he went on to lose his whole family that he spent decades building an empire for, and he died rich, miserable and alone. His first child got married and didn't even inform him because she knew he wouldn't approve. His 2nd child (my brother) invited him to his wedding and he declined because the bride was Catholic. His 4th child (me) got married and he was also absent, and he never met any of the 2 grandchildren he had before he died confused and heartbroken. And after thoroughly fucking up his life, the cult just wakes up one day and changes the entire fundamental doctrine that made him go to war with his own children. There is no way to quantify the damage that has been caused here, and even if there were, oyibo man is definitely never going to pay. As in my dad's case and in the case of every other brainwashed, spiritually lost black person, African wey no gree get sense, na oyibo go kill am. All we can do is cry over spilled milk now.