By Frank Tietie
David Icke, a former broadcaster with the BBC is a world renowned conspiracy theorist whose works are no doubt well researched but with very bizarre conclusions. He is not a man whose ideas can be ignored so easily, especially with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of Femi Fani-Kayode’s references in his early articles while outside government sparked my greater interest in David Icke’s writings. Since then I have downloaded and read several of his books and articles, in addition to watching his videocasts.
Icke believes the virus known as COVID-19 was created or rather, its symptoms were created in China with the bombardments of radiation from 5g networks and that the said symptoms of the virus are naturally related to the common flu. That by responding to the media hype of the virus, people who offer to get tested, are actually given the virus in the process for which they actually get sick and possibly die. He therefore urges people not to go for testing. He believes that anyone who exhibits such symptoms attributed to the virus will get well if given the standard treatment for the common flu.
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Typical of many of us Nigerians, one Joseph Okechukwu who lives in the USA has been using David Icke’s ideas without the courtesy of giving him the credit, to terrorize the people who listen to him and watch his fifth rate videos on Facebook.
In Africa and particularly, Nigeria, some people, especially preachers peep into other scholars’ research works or highly advanced ideas and often present such ideas as their own in order to be respected and to exercise influence with control on others, the very thing David Icke and his followers accuse the Freemasons or members of the illuminati, of doing- controlling people with secret knowledge.
David Icke has been trending big time, recently on LondonReal TV. He fills arenas across the world with massive crowds who have subscribed to his theory that the world is manipulated and ruled by a tiny 1% of the 1% of the population of the world.
Many of the facts Icke presents are unassailable. His positions are hardly countered by those he accuses of trying to enslave the world. He has in some of his publications in the past not minced words about the person of Bill Gates, for example. He claims that Gates’ vaccines programmes have sinister objectives which are to make human beings perpetually sick and to be enslaved to dependence on drugs developed by the “big pharma” companies.
Also, Icke has not spared American billionaire, George Soros, originally from Hungary and the founder of Open Society Initiatives which include OSIWA and OSISA. He accuses Soros of working for an evil agenda to cause global unrest and corrupt the human race.
Icke goes on further to describe Mark Zuckerberg as a small boy who fronts for the men in dark suits behind the dark. For him, Google is a global surveillance machine which is preparing the human race to be taken over by artificial intelligence.
Icke proposes and supports strange theories such as shape shifting by some world leaders who possess uncanny abilities and malevolent intentions. All of these he claims work towards the ultimate dictatorship of artificial intelligence over all the inhabitants of the earth.
Icke’s theories attempt to give rational explanations to the pervasive neo-cultures of paedophelia, homosexuality, transvestism, the transgender movement, the growing use of GMOs and what he calls the ruse of climate change. He theorizes that the goal of these perversions is to destroy human identity and pollute the human DNA. He explains the roles of the Late paedophile, Jimmy Saville of the BBC and recently that of the late Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophilic sex trafficker that was reported to have committed suicide in a US prison. Icke believes he was killed by the “big boys” in the American government.
His conclusion is that this tiny group of manipulators who run the affairs of the earth, and occasionally meet at Davos, Switzerland under the aegis of World Economic Forum, actually control the world’s economy, the military and the media if every country in order to create an Orwellian state as described in the novel, Nineteen Eighty Four which was written by George Orwell of the Animal Farm fame. Icke predicted from the book that a pandemic will be created to cause people to panic and be so willing to give up their human rights to a central authority which will in turn become a dictator in order to provide solutions. Does the current lockdown across majors cities of the world resemble that kind of scenario?
Icke recommends that everyone should take time to watch The Matrix, a film starring Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fisburne and Carrie Anne-Moss. He believes the film is a documentary of how the world really is. Incidentally, the film, a triology was produced and directed by the Wachowski Brothers who are now transgender females- strange!
In all of these, who is telling the truth? Who verifies claims made by government officials across the world that Icke has accused of trying to create a new world order? These officials have not been able to respond to Icke. What if he is correct or even partially correct in his postulations?
While a lot of things are happening in the world which affect us in Africa, we don’t have our original and homegrown explanations or perspectives.Thus, we can’t even dream of African solutions in such state of affairs.
Some time ago, the Centre for Democracy & Development (CDD) organized a talk shop at its office in Abuja where it bemoaned the lack of think-tanks in Africa. How can we have African solutions without research and development? Why won’t Africa and Africans be tossed to and fro, as guinea pigs and cannon folder in a world we can’t see through African eyes?
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a list of donations by some Nigerian billionaires and religious organizations has just been released, totalling nearly 50 billon Naira in grants to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. This is commendable but to what end? To buy testing kits madein nowhere? Will the donations be used to understand the virus and stop its spread or used as economic pallitives to the suffering mass of Nigerians owing to the many coming lockdowns?
Most of these benevolent donors who are being applauded have never before now, for example, considered giving such amounts of money as research grants to the microbiology and biochemistry departments of University of Benin (formerly Midwest Institute of Technology) to carry bout research on human immunology. University of Benin was meant to be Nigeria’s academic hub for research and development in science and technology. Today, it is a shadow of its dream.
The other day, a Nigerian oil magnate, Mohammed Indimi from Borno State was reported to have donated 4.2 billion Naira to an American university. He later claimed it was just 900,000 US Dollars. He made the money from Nigeria but overlooked UNIMAID, ABU, UNIBEN, UNILAG, UNN, UI & UNILAG and chose to give such a huge grant to an American university. He said he and his company had given several grants to many other Nigerian universities before. Those grants neither made news nor any impact probably, because they were much smaller and comparably insignificant in amount of money.
It is either Indimi believes that Nigerian researchers have coconut heads with skewed motives, lacking basic skills and only having useless paper qualifications or he, as a Nigerian billionaire posseses such a morbid hatred for his own country to deprive its institutions of such a grant in preference for an American university.
Large budgetary allocations and TETFUND grants are given annually to Nigerian universities and institutions of higher learning yet we don’t have Nigerian solutions to Nigerian problems. What we get in return are harvests of unending strikes by lecturers who have nothing to show in terms of research for much of the earlier expenditure on higher education in Nigeria. Are we surprised that we import everything including a COVID-19 pandemic?
When Maurice Iwu, a professor of pharmacy claimed he had a solution to the COVID-19 scourge, a state government managed to appoint him to chair a response committee to the coming crisis. Nothing much has been heard about verifying his bold assertions except for the hushed report that some foreign institute is looking into it. Come on! Must we in Africa be subjected to the command, control and endorsement of the other side of the world?
When Nigerian NGOs and government agencies receive foreign grants, do such grants encourage research in public health sciences and medicine?
Now tell me why people won’t be tempted to turn to conspiracy theorists to provide answers to such implausibilities? There is obviously more than meets the eye in all these happenings.
It is up to us as a people and country to understand what is going on and to take independent stance on these global issues. This follow-follow and cut and paste approach that we have adopted leaves too much out of our control both as individuals and a government.
These are times for homegrown explanations and approaches. Even if they are mythological, the kind of which Wole Soyinka has developed has been named a Nobel Laureate, let’s develop our own ideas and philosophy of research in order for us to have our own original African perspectives.
▪ Tietie, Nigerian lawyer & Public Affairs Commentator, writes from Abuja, Nigeria.