Elections & Lithium Mining: Why is the US Suddenly Running 'Get Out the Vote Ads' in Nigeria?
00:11 GMT 25.02.2023 (Updated: 06:29 GMT 25.02.2023)
© AP Photo / Juan Karita
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Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and largest economy is set to hold national elections on Saturday, February 25.
On Thursday, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, shared a video on her Twitter feed showing herself, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and USAID Administrator Samatha Power asking the people of Nigeria to vote and “make your voices heard, to choose your future.”
The video is produced in the typical modern government public service announcement, with quick cuts and colorful backgrounds. It proclaims that the US government “does not support any individual candidate for office,” but instead says that the United States, as a fellow democratic nation “strongly support[s] a peaceful election that reflects the will of the people of Nigeria.”
Nigeria – your vote matters!
— Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (@USAmbUN) February 24, 2023
Go to https://t.co/didV1espQG to prepare to vote. pic.twitter.com/Tfu4AgaP28
On the face of it, the video is non-offensive and promotes an idea virtually no one could oppose: a free and open election in Nigeria. But, if the Twitter comments are any barometer, few people believe that the US government’s intentions in Nigeria are so innocuous.
I think the world is done with your "humanitarians concerns" in their countries pic.twitter.com/HZxBGOz51C
— Engel Martínez ☭🇲🇽 (@engmac18) February 24, 2023
Nigeria’s elections are none of your business.
— Samira (@SameeraKhan) February 24, 2023
— Sprocket 🍅 (@sprocketjsc) February 24, 2023
Are you done hurting the Ukraines. Please allow us to enjoy the peace we have. We are not interested in your protection.
— CobiSark (@CobiSark) February 24, 2023
Nigerians have reason to be suspicious too. Thomas-Greenfield has a history of working with think tanks that have promoted coups and influenced elections worldwide.
She was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a group whose stated goal at its 1921 foundation was to reject “isolationist” policies that were gaining popularity in the post-World War I United States. Its founding members, according to the CFR’s website, “focused on exerting behind-the-scenes influence designed to encourage sustained US involvement in the world.”
Funded in part by the likes of Blackrock, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Google, and JP Morgan, its mission has changed little in the last 102 years since its founding. In addition to advocating for US involvement overseas, it has also fought against government regulation, collective bargaining, and anything that would get in the way of profits for corporations.
That is not all for Thomas-Greenfield. She also served on the board of directors for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Despite its benign name, the NED was created after several illegal, secret CIA coups and election-influencing programs were discovered. The Regan administration created the NED in 1983 essentially to continue the CIA’s work but in the open.
While the NED is officially a non-profit organization, it is almost entirely funded by the US government and its early members were shockingly open about the agency’s early aims. In 1986, the then-president of NED was quoted in the New York Times as saying:
“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly. It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”
Then in 1991, Allen Weinstein, who helped write the legislation that enabled NED’s creation all but said the organization was continuing the CIA’s programs of election influence.
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” Weinstein told the Washington Post.
The NED has been linked to coups, coup attempts, or election meddling in Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, and most recently Venezuela.
While Power does not have any connections to think tanks like Thomas-Greenfield (outside of membership in the National Security Action think tank that was set up to oppose Trump’s foreign policies and disbanded in 2021), the agency she works for has likewise been linked to coups and election meddling in a multitude of countries. It was expelled from Russia after being accused of interfering in elections by the Russian government.
The NED was also linked to the so-called Arab Spring uprising in 2011, funded Juan Guaidó’s failed coup attempt in Venezuela, the 2014 “color revolution” in Ukraine, and multiple other regime changes around the world.
Blinken needs no introduction, he is the secretary of state and has been working with President Joe Biden since the then-senator’s 2008 presidential campaign. He supported regime change in Iraq and Libya, and also advocated for the United States and Europe to “isolate” Russia since at least 2014. Blinken is essentially an extension of Biden and is arguably the most visible member of his cabinet.
It is also worth pointing out that, according to The Intercept, the United States supported at least seven coups in Africa over an 18-month period ending in March 2022.
While the past associations of the officials in the video showcase why the Nigerian people should be suspicious of their aims, none of that explains what those aims are.
So What's Behind the Initiative?
What their aims are is impossible to know for certain unless each of them were injected with truth serum and forced to answer questions. But the first thing that comes to mind is that Nigeria has made some recent discoveries that make it a more attractive locale for business interests in the United States.
Whenever the United States becomes interested in the “democracy” of a nation, the knee-jerk reaction is to assume that it has something to do with oil, the lifeblood of not only the American economy but its military as well.
While Nigeria is relatively rich in oil, that has been known for a long time and doesn’t account for a sudden growth in interest now.
What could, however, is that Nigeria recently discovered a potentially massive deposit of Lithium. Thought to be the gasoline of the future, lithium is used in batteries that power our phones, laptops, and crucially, electric vehicles. Lithium demand and production have been exploding. Some 540,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent was produced in 2021 - and that number is expected to explode to 1.5 million tons by 2025 and 3 million tons by 2030.
9 February 2023, 15:11 GMT
While it is unknown exactly how rich Nigeria is in lithium, it undoubtedly has a lot of it. Samples from the deposits found last year have a lithium concentration between 1% and 13%. Typically, commercial exploration and mining begin when samples of just 0.4% are discovered.
Last year, US-based electric vehicle company Tesla put in a bid for a contract to mine some of that Lithium, but the Nigerian government denied them. Nigeria, like most African countries, has a history of foreign powers exploiting them for their national resources while offering little value to the people of Nigeria.
To prevent that from happening with the newly-discovered Lithium and other materials like nickel, Nigeria passed a ban on exporting raw materials from the country. To win the contract, Tesla had to agree to build a battery factory in the country.
The ban was designed to bring jobs to Nigeria and raise tax revenue for its government. “Anything that is mined in Nigeria must have value addition to the country,” Minister of Mines and Steel Development Olamilekan Adegbite said at a recent summit in Abuja. Tesla was not allowed to mine the lithium in Nigeria.
A company out of China, which agreed to process the lithium and build car batteries in Nigeria, was picked to build Nigeria’s first lithium mine five months after Tesla’s bid was rejected.
Fellow African nation Zimbabwe, which also recently discovered lithium deposits, enacted a similar ban on raw material exports last year.
The idea that the United States government may be influencing elections to benefit corporations in the country is not an outlandish one. The term “banana republic” comes from South American countries that were essentially run by fruit companies based out of the United States. Most famously, US troops invaded Honduras seven times between 1903 and 1925 to ensure those companies maintained control of the nation’s banana exports.
Could the United States, whose companies invested $24 billion in electric vehicle battery technology in 2021, and whose government just passed an infrastructure law that earmarked $7 billion “to ensure domestic manufacturers have the critical minerals and other components necessary to make batteries,” be interested in making a “Lithium Republic” in Nigeria?
Could Biden, who promised to ensure electric vehicle production jobs remain in the United States, be concerned about Nigeria’s raw export ban?
There is no way to know, but it seems more likely than Blinken suddenly becoming interested in Nigeria’s voter turnout.
