Hundeyin Reacts to VOA’s ‘Fact-Check’ of His X Post on US Military Bases in Africa

Investigative Journalist and Founder of West Africa Weekly, David Hundeyin, has responded to a ‘fact-check’ report by the Voice of America, which attempted to discredit a critical post he made about United States military bases in Africa.

The VOA, in its ‘fact-check’ accused Hundeyin of “misleading millions on X” and then justified the presence of US military bases in Africa.

The exchange follows an unverified report that the United States intended to open a military base in Nigeria. Although, the US, through David Greene, US chargé d’affaires in Nigeria, denied the report.

In Hundeyin’s initial post that was ‘fact-checked’, he opposed any establishment of a US military base in Nigeria, accusing Uncle Sam of being more interested in Africa’s natural resources than in the security and wellbeing of her people.

He said: U.S. foreign policy for Africa (available as a PDF document you can download) states very clearly that the American vision for Africa is for it to “maintain the flow of resources to the global market… The only “threat” to this goal, as far as the U.S. is concerned, is “terrorism,” hence even their defence partnerships are always about countering terror (where it threatens the flow of natural resources to the global market).

Illustrating the priorities of the US in Africa, he stated further: “American foreign policy sees the Uranium in Niger as the valuable asset the country has – not the 21 million ni**ers that inconveniently happen to live there. It sees the oil in Escravos and the lithium in Kogi as the valuable assets in Nigeria – not the 200 million Dicksons and Miriams living there.”

He added that “a U.S. military base anywhere in Africa serves the same purpose that the old colonial military bases did”, which is to protect the free flow of African resources, and not mainly to protect the lives of African people “, which America considers to be less than worthless.”

“There’s a reason why, despite multiple U.S. military involvements in every African conflict you can think of, the conflicts only got worse.” He argues further

He gave an example of how America watched when Liberia slipped into a civil war, even though “they could have ended that war in 5 days if they wanted, but that was not their mission. African resources have more value than African lives.”

The crux of his assertion in the X post is that the US and her military bases are not out to protect African people but to protect and ensure the flow of African resources to the West. The specific resources and places mentioned were illustrations.

The VOA Fact-check

The Voice of America published a Fact-check report on Hundeyin’s assertion in which it extracted a paragraph from the post for verification.

The report, titled “Nigerian journalist misleads millions on X, accusing the US of colonial behaviour in the Sahel”, fact-checked ‘claims’ that “American foreign policy sees the Uranium in Niger… the oil in Escravos and the lithium in Kogi as valuable assets… A U.S. military base anywhere in Africa serves the same purpose that the old colonial military bases did – to protect the flow of African resources, and not the lives of African people, which America considers to be less than worthless,” a quote extracted from Hundeyin’s opinion in his post.

The ‘fact-check’ of a Nigerian journalist’s opinion or illustration presents a praise-singing of America as a better ally for African countries than Russia or China. It declared the assertion in the quoted paragraph as “false”.

The fact-check started by criticising Niger’s welcoming of Russia’s Africa corps as a substitute for the sacked US military base in the country. It went on to highlight the contributions of the US to Niger and other African countries in the form of aides. The ‘fact-check’ also compared the amount of natural resources extracted from Africa by the US with that extracted by China and Russia.

Hundeyin’s Rebuttal

The award-winning Investigative Journalist has reacted to the ‘fact-check’ in another post on X, accusing the VOA of ignoring the main point of his post but fact-checking a paragraph meant for illustration.

The hack piece rather focused on 1 paragraph out 9, where I used the phrases “lithium in Kogi” and “Uranium in Niger” to describe African resources as more important than African people in the eyes of the U.S. Somehow, by stating that the U.S. does not (yet) have a direct interest in Kogi’s lithium, VOA has disproven my entire tweet (ergo, Nigeria’s government should approve a U.S. military base in Nigeria), he wrote.

However, Hundeyin asked the VOA to ‘fact-check’ his investigative report, accusing “the U.S. of turning a Nigerian drug lord into an intelligence asset and giving him political cover for three decades until he became Nigeria’s president last year?”

This video on YouTube contains a more detailed rebuttal by Hundeyin.

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Oluwatobi Odeyinka

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