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Power in Nigeria

DECEMBER 2014

SCL was made up of ten to fifteen full-time employees—some British, some Canadian, an Australian, three Lithuanians, and an Israeli among them—and I made my rounds to meet them and learn a little more. Each was my age or a bit older, most with master’s degrees, but also many with PhDs. All had already amassed impressive experience working in the for-profit and nonprofit worlds, in everything from banking to high-tech to the oil and gas industry to running humanitarian programs across Africa.

They had come to the company because it offered them the unique opportunity to work at a place in Europe that had the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up. They were supremely hardworking and serious. Their tone was subdued and professional, with an undercurrent of urgency that, though quiet, seemed more characteristically New York than London. They worked long hours and gave 200 percent of themselves. Some had been embedded in the recent American election campaigns and had just returned to the London office to a hero’s welcome. They’d been living for a year in offices in Oregon and North Carolina and Colorado, where the most contested races had been. Those who’d stayed behind in London had worked just as hard, as experts on the countries where the SCL Group also did business.

Each of my colleagues possessed highly specialized skill sets that gave him or her very specific roles in the company.

Kieran, the director of communications, whom I had met during my interview, did everything from political party branding to global messaging strategy. His list of advertising awards was impressive, and his work in corporate branding was better than most I had seen. After Alexander, he’d been with the company the longest, and he showed me a thirty-strong shelf of political party manifestos and platforms SCL had written and he’d designed.

Though with the company for only a few years, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown—Pere, for short; pronounced “Perry”—a Canadian, had already worked in multiple countries, handling elections, running focus groups, gathering data, and organizing locals. He had recently been in Ghana, working on the enormous public health project Alexander had told me about. Pere helped orient me to what it was like to be embedded in foreign campaigns in places other than the United States. In developing nations, logistics could be a nightmare. Even getting access to certain regions was difficult; roads could be washed out or nonexistent. But most problems, he said with a grin, were with people, such as when local pollsters and canvassers didn’t show up or simply blew off their jobs after a first paycheck.

Jordan Kleiner was a jovial Brit with an enormous peacock tattoo on his chest. His job was to make sense of the company’s research and serve as liaison between the research team and the communications and operations teams. He also acted as a kind of bridge between the data people and the creatives, and he knew how to translate research into effective copy and images.

To a new person on the inside, the team comprised big thinkers and problem solvers who were politically liberal and who, in the early winter of 2014, didn’t seem terribly bothered by the fact that the company had taken on conservative clients—in part, I think, because they hadn’t gotten in too deep yet. The American midterms had introduced them to hawks and eccentrics, but it might have been possible for them to think of the latter as one-offs, and the company was only just beginning to secure contracts for the Republican primaries.

At the time, the mood in the office was cheerful, the camaraderie strong, and the members of the group uncompetitive with one another, as there were so few of them and their jobs didn’t overlap too often.

The SCL and Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision. The opportunity open to them was the equivalent of that at Facebook in the early days, and it hadn’t taken Facebook too many years to go public to the tune of an $18 billion valuation. Alexander wanted a similar outcome, and as Millennials, the staff looked to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby as a model of remarkable innovation in spaces no one had even thought to occupy until the company came along.

Cambridge Analytica was based on the same idealistic notion of “connectivity” and “engagement” that had fueled Facebook. The company’s raison d’être was to boost engagement in uncharted territory, and those who worked there clearly believed, as those at Facebook had, that they were building something real that the world simply didn’t yet know it couldn’t do without.

Alexander occupied one glass box at the front of the office, and the data scientists occupied one at the back. Theirs was filled with computer stations where the company’s small team of scientists were glued to multiple screens.

Some were eccentric and kept to themselves. One, a Romanian with dark brown eyes, looked up from his work only from time to time. His specialty was research design; he could break up a country into regions and make statistically accurate samples of populations others could use to identify target audiences. Another Lithuanian, who dressed like a posh Brit, often coming to work in a smoking jacket, specialized in data collection and strategy.

The two codirectors of Data Analytics were Dr. Alexander Tayler, a taciturn, ginger-haired Australian, and Dr. Jack Gillett, a dark-haired, friendly Englishman. Tayler and Gillett had been classmates at Cambridge University and, after graduation, each had spent a few years as cogs in the wheels of larger outfits—Gillett at the Royal Bank of Scotland and Tayler at Schlumberger, an oil field services company. Both had come to SCL for the opportunity to design cutting-edge data programs and run their own shop.

Tayler and Gillett had at their disposal a robust but supple database that gave the company a great advantage whenever it had to run a new political campaign. Usually, every time a campaign begins, those in charge of data have to build a database from scratch or buy a database from a vendor. SCL’s database was its own, and it could buy more and more data sets and model those data points more accurately with each client project. While I would later learn the true cost of this “advantage,” and the legal wrangling it took to convince clients to share their data with SCL permanently, for now it seemed to me an incredibly benign and powerful tool.

On the first Obama campaign, we’d had no advanced predictive analytics at all. In the six intervening years, things had changed so much. Alexander said that data was an incredible “natural resource.” It was the “new oil,” available in vast quantities, and Cambridge Analytica was on track to become the largest and most influential data and analytics firm in the world. It was an unprecedented opportunity for those with an adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit. There were claims to be staked, data to mine. And it was a honeymoon period in a completely new industry. It was the equivalent, Alexander said, of the “Wild West.”

Alexander wasn’t in the office very often. The company had just achieved a massive political upset in America, winning an unheard-of thirty-three out of forty-four races in the U.S. midterms. A 75 percent success rate for a communications agency coming in from the outside for the first time was astounding, and Alexander was out and about, using the company’s success to drum up new business. I understood him to be flying here and there to meet Bill Gates and others like him when in America and, when in London, entertaining British billionaires such as Sir Martin Sorrell.

The SCL office wasn’t the sort of place where one brought important businessmen or heads of state. The space itself was dingy and windowless, dark even at noon. Its carpet was a worn-in industrial gray, its drop ceilings pockmarked, uneven, and curiously stained. With the exception of the two glass boxes, one for Alexander and the other for the data scientists, it consisted of a single room of roughly a thousand square feet into which the entire staff was crammed, clustered at two sets of pushed-together desks. The only other private meeting space was a tiny room of about eight by ten feet, with a table, a couple of chairs, and no ventilation; it was dubbed “the Sweat Box.” While his employees packed into “the Sweat Box” like sardines, Alexander preferred to entertain potential clients at a nearby swanky bar or restaurant.

When I finally had a chance to sit down with him in his office in the second week of December, he and I talked about various projects I could pursue. He made it clear that if I wanted to chase social or humanitarian projects, I had to bring in money to fund them. He gave me his blessing to continue my work on post-Ebola Africa, a project I was interested in doing with the World Health Organization and the governments of Liberia and Sierra Leone. With Chester’s help, and with his unrivaled Rolodex of contacts, I would approach each and see if I could get a literal buy-in.

Alexander also suggested that I look into upcoming elections. He asked me to follow up with Chester’s prime minister and with the Central Asian men he had pitched at the sushi restaurant where he and I first met. We looked at other leads as well. Some were mine, and some were connections that I had through Chester and other worldly friends.

In contacting clients, I needed to determine three things right away, Alexander said. The first was “Is there a need?”—meaning was there a project? The second was “Do you have a budget?” And the third, which was as important as the second, was “Are you on a time line?” If someone didn’t have a time line, then there was no urgency to go ahead with the project and, regardless of how much money the client had, the lead would probably go nowhere.

I needed a title, Alexander said, something that “sounded impressive but that’s not too overinflated.” It wasn’t meaningful in-house, he explained, just a tag of sorts by which I could identify myself when addressing clients.

I suggested “Special Advisor,” which Alexander liked because it reflected my part-time status and was sufficiently vague. I liked it because it was the title given to UN envoys whose jobs I coveted, such as “Special Advisor on Human Rights.”

Now all I had to do was earn it.

In my early days as a street fund-raiser in Chicago, when I had all of sixty seconds to persuade someone to hand me over their credit card information and sign them up to make monthly donations to a charity they’d never heard of, I’d become inured to rejection and unafraid of approaching strangers. And in my more recent work, I’d called up ambassadors and other dignitaries and foreign businesspeople and had spent many days a week sometimes in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. I could talk with a businessman who had been born under the Raj or a prime minister who ran any nation, big or small.

It was with such boldness that in December 2014, I reached out to Prince Idris bin al-Senussi, of Libya, a country I had come to know intimately, face-to-face. A friend had kindly made the introduction for me. The prince had some friends who needed our help. The Nigerian presidential election was just a few months away, the prince said, and the men, very wealthy Nigerian oil industry billionaires who were aligned with the incumbent, were terrified that their candidate would lose. “The men are very religious,” Prince Idris said. “They fear for their lives and the lives of their families” if the incumbent doesn’t prevail, he told me.

I told the prince that SCL had done election work in Nigeria in 2007. This thrilled him. He wanted to make an introduction right away. Could Alexander and I fly immediately to Madrid to meet the Nigerians?

Alexander was more than game, but skeptical of my beginner’s prowess. He had a slight scheduling conflict and couldn’t get there right away. I would have to read through as many case studies as I could, put together a proposal for the Nigerians, and then fly into Madrid alone first. Alexander would arrive only on the second day, at which point he’d pitch them more formally. Was I up for the challenge of doing everything else that was involved before he got there?

I was terrified and excited all at once. This would be the first time I’d represent the company, and my understanding of the depth and breadth of it was still so shallow. I had been on the job for a little more than two weeks. I also knew next to nothing about Nigeria, except that it was the most populous country in Africa, with a quarter of a billion people. I had only beginner-level knowledge of its history and the present state of its politics, not to mention the issues and players in its imminent presidential election. Still, even this early, a viable contract seemed to be in front of me, one, Alexander had told me, that could be worth millions. The Nigerian prospect met all the criteria: it was a clear project, the clients had money, and the time line was urgent. Yes, I told Alexander. I’d go to Madrid.

In advance of the meeting, I made my way around the SCL office looking for any information I could find on the 2007 Nigerian campaign—there wasn’t much on it, so I pored over documents and case studies from other projects around the world. I pulled an all-nighter and threw together a proposal with a junior member of staff. It was sufficient as a start, especially under the rushed conditions, but with the election scheduled for February 14, 2015, there was so little time left that we didn’t even expect to win the contract—not that this deterred me in the least.

The situation in Nigeria was complex. The potential clients were backing a man named Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent president. Jonathan was a Christian and a progressive, my human rights attorney friend John Jones QC informed me, a leader who had brought substantial reforms to the Federation of Nigeria since taking office in 2010. He was seen by some as a champion of youth and the underprivileged; he had worked to clean up environmental disasters, including lead poisoning that had killed some four hundred children in an impoverished region of the country; and he had endeavored to stabilize the nation’s energy sector by privatizing its wholly unreliable power grid. But his administration was corrupt, and he had recently become unpopular when he failed the country in a number of ways, not the least of which was his very public inability to bring home two hundred schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram. Not long before, he had been accused of masterminding a terrorist bombing. But as my friend John Jones informed me, in the election, Jonathan was the lesser of two evils.

The alternative was Muhammadu Buhari.

In three decades, Buhari had been involved in two military coups. In the first, he was appointed provincial governor, and in the second he claimed the presidency. Under his repressive rule, he had voiced support for Sharia law and persecuted both scholars and journalists. Various groups had filed complaints against him at the international criminal court, accusing him of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity (which Buhari denied and in the end the ICC did not pursue the complaints).¹ In fact, according to international law, if the accusations were true, it should have been illegal for him to run for president at all. John agreed with the prince and his oilmen friends that if Buhari won, the country could descend into violence.² With not much time left until the election, it was an imperfect situation, but as a human rights activist, I felt assured that at least SCL would be on the better side of the fence.

Alexander arranged for me to entertain the Nigerians at a luxury hotel, directing me to host them for a lavish meal. I’d never been given so much responsibility with so much hanging in the balance.

When I arrived in Madrid, I found Prince Idris waiting with only one Nigerian, and even he was not the one I had expected. The clients, it appeared, had flown in a representative to take the meeting. He was a tall, looming, thick-bodied man of early middle age, but I could see that he was terribly nervous, which made me feel better.

I made it through the first day, showing our potential client the proposal and talking through the basics of what I understood SCL could do for his boss. The company offered services such as opinion polling, caste and tribe research, opposition research, and even “competitive intelligence”—that is, state-of-the-art information gathering that could be used to research candidates’ personal and financial backgrounds and explore historic party dealings or “hidden activities.” I wasn’t so naïve as to think that this wasn’t negative campaigning, but I knew that at this late stage in the game, it might be necessary to show results quickly.

There was no time to do what SCL called a “party audit,” a census to collect members’ details, including their polling station and political affiliation. Nor could we clearly identify swing voters. But we could do strong get-out-the-vote work in regions where there was already great support for Goodluck Jonathan. And if we achieved a wide enough margin, that would serve to quell mistrust in the results and perhaps prevent violence in the postelection period.

I was relieved when Alexander arrived on the second day to do the formal pitch. To see him in full pitch mode was undeniably a thing of beauty. He was eloquence and elegance personified. He was self-assured and unhalting in his delivery, an appealing figure in his crisp navy suit and silk tie and more charismatic than most gentlemen one would ever meet. I regarded him with warmth and a degree of admiration that it had not occurred to me before I would ever feel for him.

The start of his pitch included much the same material he covered when Chester and I visited the SCL office back in October—the same slides with pictures of beaches and signs about sharks, the same points about Mad Men, the same top-down-versus-bottom-up creativity and blanket versus targeted advertising based on scientific and psychological research, but it felt more fluid, theatrical, and persuasive now. It seemed effortless, as perfectly managed and choreographed as the best TED Talk. With the small remote control firmly in his hand, Alexander, it seemed to me, had his finger on a button that had the potential to control the world.

The billionaires’ representative was rapt, and he leaned in, as did the prince, and nodded from time to time approvingly. And when Alexander got to the part of the presentation about how the company had the ability to, as he put it, “address individual villages or apartment blocks, even zoom right down to particular people,” their eyes widened.

How SCL did that was just a part of what made it different from all other election companies in the world. It was not an advertising firm, Alexander said, but a psychologically astute and scientifically precise communications company.

“The biggest mistake the political campaigns and communication campaigns face is starting where they are and not where they want to be,” Alexander said. “They tend to start with a preconceived idea of what is required. And that’s normally based on the subject matter.”

So, he said, SCL often walked into situations where clients tried to tell it what to do. Usually, a client’s idea was that they needed posters everywhere and TV adverts, Alexander said.

“Well,” he asked, “how do you know that that’s the right thing to do?”

The client raised his eyebrows.

“Because we’re not interested in the president or the party or whoever the client is,” Alexander said dismissively. “We’re interested in the audience.” He paused for a second for effect and pulled up a slide. On it was a picture of an audience in a movie theater staring up at the screen.

“The way to illustrate this,” he said, pointing to the slide, “is you want to sell more Coca-Cola in a movie theater, yeah?”

The client nodded.

“You ask an advertising agency what their plan is, and they’ll say, ‘You need more Coke at point of sale, you need Coke branding, you need a Coke advert before the main movie.” Alexander shook his head. “And it’s all about Coke,” he said. And that’s the problem with political campaigns.

“But,” he went on, clicking to another slide—this one showed images zooming left, right, and center, all of Coca-Cola advertising and branding, all quickly becoming overwhelming—“If you stop and look at the target audience and ask questions like ‘Under what circumstances would they drink more Coke?’ and you research them, you might find that they’re more likely to drink a Coke when they’re thirsty.”

Again, he paused.

“So,” he continued, “what you want to do,” he said, clicking to another slide, “is simply turn up the temperature … in the auditorium.”

The image on the slide was of a cartoon-like thermometer, the mercury in red, risen to almost bursting.

The solution, Alexander said, isn’t in the advert. “The solution is in the audience.” He paused again to make sure this had sunk in.

The solution is in the audience, I thought. It had never occurred to me to think this way.

It was a stunning moment, as eye-opening to me as what he had said in his initial presentation to Chester and me about the worthlessness of blanket advertising. Here was a brilliant concept: to get people to act, you created the conditions under which they would be more likely to do what you wanted them to do. The simplicity of the concept blew my mind.

Alexander said that SCL had done this again and again across the world.

In Trinidad and Tobago in 2010, he said, pulling up slides, the company had addressed that nation’s “mixed ethnicity.” (Half the nation was Indian, the other half Afro-Caribbean.) “Political leaders from one group there,” he said, “had difficulty making their messages resonate with those outside it.” SCL had therefore designed an ambitious program of political graffiti that it disseminated as campaign messages. And the youth vote had turned out in droves.

Brilliant, I thought. Getting out the youth vote was so difficult during elections.

In Bogotá, Colombia, in 2011, SCL had found that in a country with rampant corruption, the general population mistrusted all the candidates who were running, so SCL “enlisted others” to endorse the candidates instead. Having locals vouching for the candidate was highly effective, with no trace of the candidate’s face him- or herself.

How quickly could the Nigerians see results from SCL if it were to work in the upcoming election? the representative wanted to know.

I knew what Alexander was going to say, because I had read about it in the SCL brochures: SCL’s services were “results oriented.” The company always worked with its clients to ensure that the effects of its services were “readily identifiable and measurable.”

The representative looked pleased.

After the presentation, Alexander and I had dinner together. We spoke about the Nigerian campaign and all the other campaigns he’d done through the years, and I realized that Alexander Nix could likely be the most experienced elections consultant in the world. I began to see him as an important mentor. And while it had been difficult to get to know him in the first few weeks of the job, now he invited me to come out and visit his family or come see him play in a polo match. I was surprised when I realized that both sounded quite nice, in fact.

Then, on the day we flew back to London together, he and I had a sweet moment that almost made me feel like his equal. In keeping with the frugal SCL tradition, we had tickets in economy class, but before we boarded, he invited me to join him in the business class lounge, where we toasted our future success and drank a free glass of champagne. Cheers, we said, to the future.

Back in London, Christmas was approaching. At the company holiday party, a Prohibition-themed event, I wore a flapper’s dress with a pair of long, white gloves I’d borrowed from a dear friend who worked in costuming. I mingled with everyone I could—Pere; Sabhita; and Harris McCloud, a blond-haired, blue-eyed political messaging expert from Canada. I spoke with a few of the data scientists, including Dr. Eyal Kazin and Tadas Jucikas, Alex Tayler’s right and left hands. I wasn’t part of the team just yet; I was new, a curiosity, and it was quite hard to introduce myself in such a noisy venue. Still, I mingled and chatted with people as much as I could. Alexander wasn’t there; he was in Ghana with Ceris, to see if he could revive discussions with that country’s president. I envied his having work to occupy his mind.

Suddenly, one of the data scientists I hadn’t met yet came up to say hello. “So, how goes it in the elections-fixing business?” he asked.

I had no idea how to reply. I stood there for a moment looking at him, at the drink he was holding: an ice-cold, freshly shaken espresso martini. I was drinking the same; the glass would’ve been too cold to hold without my long, white gloves. Despite our icy beverages, I remember feeling the temperature in the room rise uncomfortably.

I don’t recall how I responded; probably with something lighthearted. After all, what was one supposed to say in reply to such a comment? And what was such a comment supposed to mean?

Around the time that I began my consultancy at SCL, I had started dating a lovely Scottish man called Tim. He was different from most of the men I had dated, and he reminded me somehow of Alexander. Tim, too, had attended British boarding schools, and came from old family money. Like Alexander in my professional life, Tim was more conservative than most people in my personal life. He worked in business development, as I had just begun to do. He was a social butterfly, the loudest and happiest person in any room. He dressed formally, in three-piece tweed suits, and was as handsome as any man gracing the cover of GQ.

I didn’t tell my family much about him—not just yet. I hadn’t had a very good experience sharing recent news. After all, when I told my mother about my new job, she had fretted.

“Oh, no,” she said, and told me she hoped I wouldn’t be giving up my PhD. I assured her I had no plans to.

There was really no home to go back to that Christmas. My family had already started packing boxes to leave our home. The idea of even trying was too dreary to contemplate. So, instead, I threw myself into my work at SCL, as if in those few short days between Christmas and the New Year, I might be able to stop things happening far away from crumbling. I followed up on the Nigerians. Perhaps that project would come through. I wanted it to; I wanted something to go right. I wished I could continue working through the holidays, to keep my mind off personal things, but the office was open only until Christmas.

In the end, Tim invited me to his family home in Scotland. Going away seemed a good way to distract myself. Tim’s parents lived in two adjoined turn-of-the-century country cottages surrounded by a perfectly manicured lawn. They were a warm and welcoming group, and I was diverted through Christmas Day with talking and drinking tea and sipping fine wine, with conversation and laughter. They made me feel right at home. Though, given what was going on with my family—something I didn’t share with Tim’s family or even Tim—this made me feel both wonderful and melancholy at the same time.

The house was so deep into the countryside that there was little cell service there. I’d asked Tim’s parents for permission to give out the number for their land line, in case of an emergency. I’d shared the number only with my mother, Alexander, Prince Idris, and the Nigerians. Alexander had said that if things went well in Madrid, we’d possibly be hearing from the prince or the Nigerian representative over the holidays.

“It’s now or never,” he had said before he left for Ghana and then a vacation with his family. The election was just over a month and a half away.

One night the phone rang. Tim’s brother ran to pick it up. I listened from the other room.

“We don’t want any of what you’re sellin’!” I heard him say in a gruff brogue. Tim’s mother was nearby, and I could hear her scrambling to take the receiver from him. She knew I was expecting important calls. When the scuffle was over, Tim’s brother returned to the room I was in, his face bright red.

“Uh, Brittany, it’s for you.” He paused. “It’s … a prince?” he said and shrugged.

Prince Idris. I gathered myself together quickly and picked up the phone. “Good evening, Your Royal Highness,” I said.

He had very good news. He had already called Alexander to tell him, and now he was reaching out to me. The Nigerians wanted to move forward—immediately. And they wanted to talk through the proposal in person. They were in DC.

Alexander, the prince said, was on holiday and couldn’t get away. “You must prepare to go and meet them yourself right away,” Prince Idris said.

After we hung up, I could hardly breathe. Surely SCL wouldn’t send me. They had senior people they could put on this. I was merely a graduate student who’d been working there for only three and a half weeks part time.

Suddenly, the phone rang again. This time it was Alexander. Before I could say anything beyond “hello,” he jumped in.

“Okay, Brits,” he said, using a nickname for me neither he nor anyone else had ever used. “Are you ready to prove yourself? These guys say they are ready to go but want to agree to the deal in person. Always close in person.”

I kept listening.

Everyone else was on vacation or unreachable, Alexander said. “That leaves you, my dear!”

I had no idea if I could really do it.

“If you really want it and you don’t think they are bullshitting us, then it’s now or never,” he continued. “If we close this, I’ll owe you one.”