Bill Gates and Aliko Dangote are feeding Nigeria to death

By Gugulethu Hughes

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.

No human being, dead or alive, holds a fetish-like penchant for controlling Africa’s destiny like Bill Gates does. His obsession to control Africa is so unique that it goes beyond wanting to pillage African mineral resources. It’s more inclined towards “feeding” Africans. To the unsuspecting eye, Bill Gates is a godsend philanthropist rescuing us from our poverty, but in essence, the man is condemning us to a life of death.

Yes, a life of diseased death. The food and farming methods he bankrolls in Africa are not healthy for the African population. His GMO infested food and plants are enough to act as a catalyst for African population reduction and sterilization of our female gender.

As the commercial adage goes, if you want to conquer Africa, you must conquer Nigeria first – in Aliko Dangote, Bill Gates scored a strategically-positioned Nigerian that he has been able to groom in his ways. So sinister is the pair’s agenda that they are the marvel of indoctrinated Nigerians who make up the bulk of the population, as is the case with all Africans.

The sad part is Aliko Dangote himself is too unintelligent to notice that he is being used as a pawn in an agenda that seeks to annihilate his own people. As a black person, you’d need to be intellectually bankrupt to partner with Bill Gates. To that end, Aliko Dangote is one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s biggest stumbling blocks.

Aliko Dangote ranks as Africa’s richest man and top billionaire while Bill Gates ranks as one of the world’s top billionaires. Having all started their businesses in the 1970s, the two messiahs have an interesting story to tell about how they first met. It was love at first sight and has blossomed into what now seems to be a lifetime friendship. Writing in his blog, Gates said this about their friendship,

“Have you ever met someone new and immediately felt like you could talk to them for hours? That happened the first time I met Aliko Dangote. A couple years ago, he and I ended up going to the same event in New York. A mutual friend suggested that I meet him because he knew we were both super interested in global health. So, we made sure to sit next to each other at dinner…As soon as we shook hands, it was clear we had a ton in common. We both started successful businesses in the late 1970s. For our second act in life, we both chose to start foundations aimed at improving health and education. (Today, the Dangote Foundation is the largest such organization in sub-Saharan Africa.) That first meeting sparked the beginning of a fruitful friendship. In 2016, our foundations announced a joint, five-year $100 million commitment to reducing malnutrition in Nigeria. Malnutrition is the greatest health inequity in the world. It’s responsible for nearly half of all under 5 deaths in Nigeria (and around the world). Even if you survive to adulthood, your chances of dying are much higher, and your quality of life is greatly reduced. One of the ways our foundations are working together to fight malnutrition is through food fortification. Kids often become malnourished when they don’t get enough micronutrients—vitamins and minerals—to digest their food properly. One way to correct this is by adding micronutrients to the food that families—especially those from low-income households—are purchasing every day. Improving health in Nigeria is critical to making progress in sub-Saharan Africa. The country is home to nearly a quarter of all people living in sub-Saharan Africa, and that population is only going to grow in the future. By solving problems in Nigeria, you can have a huge impact on all of Africa. Aliko Dangote understands this, and that’s why he’s committed to making progress in his home country. Melinda and I are lucky to have him as a partner (and friend!) in improving health…”

In 2018, Bill Gates attended the wedding of Aliko Dangote’s daughter Fatima who was getting married to the son of a former Lagos inspector general. This shows how their admiration for each other had turned the pair into a family, a dangerous family. The Bill Gates Foundation has a project called Goalkeepers, and in 2019 both Bill and Aliko featured on the panel where again they spoke passionately about each other. Aliko Dangote spoke about how Bill Gates was a man intent on improving the health and lives of Africans when he could have spent his money elsewhere. Bill Gates spoke about how Aliko Dangote was a connected man who has relationships with key people, and whenever Bill had an idea, Aliko would get some state governor on the line. Bill Gates went on to say that both him and Aliko conduct video conference calls regularly with more than six Northern State governors in Nigeria where they discuss items such as the healthcare supply chain.

Before breaking down Bill Gates’ 2019 blog post and the Goalkeepers discussion on food and nutrition, it is important to highlight Aliko Dangote’s areas of business interest in Nigeria.

The man made his big break in the cement industry after convincing then-President Olusegun Obasanjo to have cement produced locally instead of imported. That is how Dangote Cement was born. From there, Aliko expanded into other commodities like food and fertilizer to the extent that he enjoys an almost monopoly position in Africa’s most populous country today. 

In his blog post, Bill Gates stated he was intent on attacking malnutrition through food fortification. The World Health Organization defines food fortification as the “practice of deliberately increasing the content of one or more micronutrients (i.e., vitamins and minerals) in a food or condiment to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply and provide a public health benefit with minimal risk to health. As well as increasing the nutritional content of staple foods, the addition of micronutrients can help to restore the micronutrient content lost during processing.”

This idea of increasing food’s nutritional value through fortification sounds like a noble idea. However, this practice could have adverse impacts for some consumers. In India, a study detailed how fortified rice consumption led to some adverse side effects for members of the Adivasi tribe that had sickle cell anemia.

In the Goalkeepers discussion on food and nutrition, Aliko Dangote spoke passionately about what Dangote Foods was doing in the area of food vitamin fortification in all the Dangote Foods product lines. He also thanked Bill and Melinda Gates for making a majority of food producers in Nigeria sign a contract committing to fortifying their various product lines.

The Dangote Foundation, in association with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, developed an integrated nutrition program to feed millions of children with fortified rice. Dangote went as far as lobbying the Nigerian government to make it mandatory for all rice consumed in Nigeria to be fortified. The Dangote Foundation also integrated smallholder farmers into its crop production supply chain and even arranged financing from banks to finance the operation of those farmers while the Foundation supplies them with rice seedlings, fertilizers, and farm implements. The smallholder farmers in turn get to supply their rice produce back into the Dangote Food supply chain. The same model is used in sugarcane production.

In practice, Bill Gates and Aliko Dangote will control the Monsanto web of food production and supply at all levels. They provide GMO seedlings and urea fertilizer, whose excessive use eventually leads to soil degradation, groundwater and air pollution.

As recent as 2019, Bill Gates was quoted saying to President Buhari, “Thank you for putting together a cabinet that excites us…” In return, President Buhari lauded the pair for their “service to humanity.” Bill Gates presents himself as an expert on Nigerian food and health issues, while Dangote is the impressionable student drawing inspiration from master Gates and using his proximity to key politicians to expand his and Bill Gates’ empire.

A 2021 study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy concluded that the “drastic increase in demand for nitrogen-based fertilizers could see greenhouse gas emissions from their use rise to levels that are equivalent to the annual emissions of the entire commercial aviation sector.” Researcher Timothy Wise stated that 10% of direct emission comes from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers applied to crops.

In fingering Bill Gates, who is also the founder of the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, he referred to a statement he made in his “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” book. The statement from Bill Gates reads, “To grow crops you want tons of nitrogen- way more than you will ever find in a natural setting…”

The Dangote fertilizer has a nitrogen content of 46%+. Writing in his GatesNotes blog in an article titled “Why I love fertilizer”, Bill Gates stated that he had never been shy about his passion for fertilizer and how he considers it a magical innovation that’s responsible for saving millions of lives from hunger and lifting millions more out of poverty while boosting agricultural productivity.

“So, you can imagine my delight when I recently stepped into a warehouse in Tanzania and got a glimpse of thousands of tons of fertilizer piled as high as snow drifts…Watching workers fill bags with the tiny white pellets containing nitrogen, phosphorous, and other plant nutrients was a powerful reminder of how every ounce of fertilizer has the potential to transform lives in Africa…” wrote Gates.

In 2020, Gates-owned Breakthrough Energy Ventures led a $100 million funding round for Bay Area startup Pivot Bio that will help scale up output of a technology that uses microbes to deliver nitrogen to corn. On its website, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation states that it has a goal to reduce poverty for millions of farming communities in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and made Zimbabwean Enock Chikava as its interim director for agricultural development. 

The activities of Bill Gates and his foundation in the area of crop production have not been without criticism. U.S. Right to Know, a non-profit investigative public health group working globally to expose corporate wrongdoing and government failures that threaten our health, environment, and food systems, has on numerous occasions criticized Bill Gates’ onslaught on food production and provision. In 2021, the director of the non-profit think tank Food First eviscerated Bill Gates and various organizations’ approach to food production.

At an ideological level, the article states that, “Gates fails to mention, for example, that hunger is largely due to poverty and inequality, not scarcity. And he seems unaware that the decades-long “green revolution” push for industrial agriculture in India has left a harsh legacy of harm for both the ecosystem and smallholder farmers, who have been protesting in the streets since last year…” 

An open letter appeared on Climate and Capitalism in November 2022, written by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a combination of organizations promoting real food production systems led by real farmers. The letter addressed to Bill Gates stated, among other things, “your assertion that critics of your approach are simply  “singing Kumbaya,” rather than developing meaningful (and fundable) solutions, is extremely disrespectful and dismissive. There are already many ongoing proposals and projects that work to boost productivity and food security–from biofertilizer and biopesticide manufacturing facilities, to agroecological farmer training programs, to experimentation with new water and soil management techniques, low-input farming systems, and  pest-deterring plant species. What you are doing here is gaslighting–presenting practical, ongoing, farmer-led solutions as somehow fanciful or ridiculous, while presenting your own preferred approaches as pragmatic. 

Yet it is your preferred high-tech solutions, including genetic engineering, new breeding technologies, and now digital agriculture, that have in fact consistently failed to reduce hunger or increase food access as promised. And in some cases, the “solutions” you expound as fixes for climate change actually contribute to the biophysical processes driving the problem (e.g. more fossil-fuel based fertilizers, and more fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure to transport them) or exacerbate the political conditions that lead to inequality in food access (e.g. policies and seed breeding initiatives that benefit large corporations and labs, rather than farmers themselves) …e sucker punch is right at the end of the letter and reads,” There is no shortage of practical solutions and innovations by African farmers and organizations. We invite you to step back and learn from those on the ground. At the same time, we invite high profile news outlets to be more cautious about lending credibility to one wealthy white man’s flawed assumptions, hubris, and ignorance, at the expense of people and communities who are living and adapting to these realities as we speak…”

An article in the Scientific American criticized Bill Gates’ activities as well. The article, titled “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africa Needs”, exposes how Bill Gates used the Cornell Alliance for Science to spam the internet and other information channels with pro-genetically modified seeds data while dismissing different approaches as misinformation. CAS gets millions of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to spread information that supports Bill Gates’ goals.

The authors write, “This mission has put our alliance, the largest social movement in Africa, at odds with the CAS and by extension the Gates Foundation. And they are winning. On June 17, 2021, GRAIN, a small non-profit organization based in Barcelona, Spain, tracking the foundation’s grant from 2003 to 2020, reported that, the foundation has granted 6 billion USD, 5 billion of which was supposed to serve Africa.  More worrisome, the CAS, which characterizes AFSA’s interpretation of agroecology as “restrictive” and worse, has succeeded in undermining support for the paradigm among Africa’s scientists and political leaders. Those of us at AFSA, in contrast, see our version of agroecology as liberating—based on farmers’ rights to choose seeds and methods of cultivation, and free of corporate interference and control.” 

The article also exposed the lied about Green Revolution in India being a success, “The truth is, India’s Green Revolution never was the runaway success it was advertised to be, as ongoing protests by the country’s farmers underscore. And in Africa as well, the promises of prosperity through resource-intensive, commercialized agriculture have failed to materialize, according to data on the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) compiled by the Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute. AGRA was launched in 2006 by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation with the stated objective of increasing investment in Africa to reduce poverty and hunger. An analysis of the AGRA data by African and German civil society groups noted that, after 14 years of existence and over a billion dollars of investment, there is no evidence of an increase in income of small-scale producers and no significant enhancement of productivity in the countries that AGRA serves. Instead, the number of undernourished people increased by 31 percent, adverse environmental impacts appear to be considerable and crop diversity has declined.”

If that wasn’t enough, Bill Gates tasked Robert B. Horsch, one of the pioneers of genetic engineering, with overseeing the spread of genetically modified seeds in Sub-Saharan Africa. Robert worked at Monsanto for a quarter of a century developing and pushing genetically modified seeds across the globe as well.

With all the evidence against Bill Gates, the likes of Aliko Dangote have chosen to partner with someone that could annihilate Nigeria’s potential. As Nigerians participate in the farce that is their presidential election, they must know Bill Gates and Aliko Dangote are the kingmakers. Dangote is the one of the biggest criminalities to befall Nigeria.