Here Are 5 African Dictators Who Paid Donald Trump’s Chief Campaigner Millions To Clean Their Image
Donald Trump’s campaign and candidacy has attracted criticism and admonishion world over. Yet every new day, there is always a new angle or person about that just manages to bring the campaign even to new lows.
After the plagiarism debacle, discussions now are focused on his right hand man campaigner Paul Manafort. Mr. Manafort seen by many to be the powerful person in Trump’s new campaign ever since he was appointed is quite a formidable person. He has decades of experience in lobbying and managing campaigns.
However, it is the nature of his clients who have cast him and with extension Donald Trump in bad light. His list of clients includes dictators all over the world and arm dealers. Along with partners of his firm he embarked on lobbying for funds and aids for dictators and business deals with arms dealers as well as changing their public image especially in the Western media. For his effort he was paid millions and he amassed a fortune. As his partner says, their firm worked on the basis ‘dictators are in the eyes of the beholder.
Here are five African dictators and rebels who worked and paid for his services according to report by American Bridge 21st Century.
Jonas Savimbi
Manafort’s firm represented Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi, making over $600,000 in 1985 alone. Savimbi and his UNITA army engaged in a decades-long civil war that terrorized and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, with UNITA engaging in bodily mutilations, sexual slavery, child kidnapping, and witch burning. Sambivi funded his role in the gruesome civil war with proceeds of smuggled diamonds, aid from apartheid South Africa, and aid from the United States.
Mobutu Sese Seko
Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko retained Manafort’s firm in 1989 for $1 million annually to help address his PR issues: at the time, he was one of Africa’s most corrupt leaders, he had one of the worst human rights records, and his regime regularly engaged in torture, detainment, and rape.
Sani Abacha
Manafort’s firm was hired to lobby on behalf of Nigeria and Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha in 1998. Manafort signed the contract himself and personally handled the account of President Abacha. His role was to present Nigeria as an emerging progressive democracy to American influencers in order to improve bilateral affairs between the countries, but just the year before, the U.S. State Department had outlined how the Abacha regime had engaged in persistent torture and abuse of detainees.
Daniel Arap Moi
Manafort’s firm represented the Kenyan government from 1990 to 1993, a period during which it received $38.3 million in U.S. aid. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kenya’s dictatorial president Daniel arap Moi had silenced political opponents who supported a multi-party democracy with sham trials, torture, and indefinite detention. He also forcibly relocated thousands of people from an ethnic minority. The U.S. government briefly froze military aid in response to human rights abuses in 1990, but ultimately restored that aid by 1991, leading a State Department official to admit that “we compromised our human rights policy in Kenya somewhat.”
Said Barre
By 1992, Manafort’s firm was making $450,000 per year from now-deposed Somalian dictator Said Barre, whose official ideology of “scientific socialism” was responsible for numerous human rights abuses and had left the country on the edge of mass starvation by the time of his ouster.
