By Wole Olujobi
As Nigeria races towards another election cycle in her democratic journey, and also as gladiators brace to have a field day over opponents in political contests, it is time for a harvest of blackmail by combatants, to have an edge in the ensuing political battles for the soul of the nation.
It is indeed time for breathtaking blackmail stunts that humble the hardest of the hearts and amaze the toughest of the faces in the game of malice to ruin fellow human beings.
But beyond the waggish stratagem in political contests, interpersonal hostilities also fuel acrimonious squabbles, particularly the sorts that hurt the victims or expose blackmailers to public ridicule, which, in turn, according to experts, often goad blackmailers into a more desperate and complex tactics to fight back in order to sustain the limelight.
This is more dangerous than the blackmail crusted on an attempt at a seasonal political advantage. Quite often, the object is to douse the fire stoked by previous misconduct of the blackmailers. To achieve their aim, they recruit erstwhile victims for a more complex blackmail that invariably complicates worse image problems for the victims, who may have unwittingly made themselves available in a complex game in which the prey now braces to save the predator. All these shenanigans in an attempt by blackmailers to cover their tracks!
Experts in psychology and sociology of moral decadence posit that in achieving this fraud, blackmailers divise webs of tactics, including romancing their erstwhile victims. In audacious cunning, they plot resolution of previous schism with their victims and seek to create a facade of amity and comradeship and use the resultant image-boosting advantage to achieve more sinister and duplicitous results. Through this tactic, the public misinterprets this rogue method to deliver a permanent verdict of guilt on the unsuspecting victims who make themselves available for a devious scheme that completely ruins their image.
Indeed, the period of election provides a fertile ground for blackmailers to reap borderless advantage over other partisans.
According to forensic analysts adept at transcribing psychological warfare, the script can be very complex in an equally complicated social and political milieu where people taken for granted for decency soil their hands and become victims of blackmailers. But because of the political expediency of the times, the erstwhile blackmail victims often forge a symphony conference to sing with his tormentor-in-chief in a perfidious orchestra led by the blackmailers themselves for the main purpose of saving face. And so in an intricate force of nature where expediency offsets logic, there is a sense in which a predator can also be a toast of the prey in a game where the genuinely hunted now becomes the accidental hunter for his erstwhile blackmailers. Victims often fall. That is the complex power of blackmail!
But then the commonality of interest rules the roost here, for when the victims of burglary sit in court with the burglars in wild revelry, then a lot of water must have passed under the bridge.
Experts also assert that the most dangerous blackmail is to set on a revenge mission by blackmailers to have their victims in their bags, as these victims must be brought down for the blackmailers to save their skins and existence fraught with despicable conducts and idiosyncrasies consistent with the desperate lifestyles of consummate hustlers.
In this instance, they manipulate their victims by using their emotions against them. This involves issues for which their victims are renowned as a matter of principle or nature. They manipulate the process to concoct such blackmail to appear real and the unsuspecting public now hold the innocent victims culpable.
There are other several methods to the malady motivated by desperation to maintain the limelight while victims battle with the consequences of their vicious blackmail. This includes coralling their erstwhile victims into an elaborate image laundering scheme in a psychology of madness fueled by depravity that invariably compounds image problems for such victims.
By far the most heinous in the blackmailers’ bags of tricks to win their battles is to devise devious means to sustain their evil plots.
In what Deepfakes and Digital Deception defines as disingenous, in this digital age, the internet and cyber applications are tools available for blackmailers to ply their trade.
Even though this odious manipulation is one of the oldest crimes in human history, its tactics have evolved in line with advances in technology.
Traditionally, blackmail is about threats to expose people’s secrets or damage their reputations. However, with the globalisation of the internet and social media, these same tactics have been digitised and amplified. Cybercriminals and professional blackmailers now have access to an unprecedented amount of personal data, which they can use to threaten individuals from all corners of the globe.
One of the ways personal information is weaponised is through the theft or leakage of intimate contents: photos, videos, and even private conversations. These contents can either be stolen, shared, or coerced from victims or altogether electronically generated and manipulated to create perpetual damaging consequences.
Cybercriminals and desperate individuals are deploying these new and modern blackmail tactics to manipulate their victims, leveraging recent advancements in technology to enhance the effectiveness of their schemes, including editing their victims out of context, for maximum effect.
Instances are various footages of Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore seen and heard purportedly making reckless statements in his anti-West stance. Presidents Donald Trump of USA and Vladimir Putin of Russia are online in electronically synchronised recordings that can hardly be faulted, saying what they did not actually say. Images are also morphed and voices cloned through electronic manipulations to put innocent people in trouble. Events and scenes are electronically generated and synchronised to give effect to actual reality from the farcical and grotesque world of fiction.
All these are tools that desperate blackmailers use to ruin the lives of their fellow men. Such victims are doomed to a life of sorrow, complete disorientation and failing health, thus the shadows of themselves if not given opportunity to hear their own sides of the story.
For instance, Deepfakes and Digital Deception explains that artificial intelligence (AI) is being leveraged for blackmail tactics.
It clarifies that AI deepfakes are videos or audios that use artificial intelligence to create hyper-realistic contents. These tools allow cybercriminals to create fake videos or audio clips of someone saying or doing something they never actually did. When used in combination with other blackmail tactics, this can be a powerful tool for effective cyber scams, as the fabricated videos or audios appear real. In instances where they are culpable, blackmailers deploy the contents of their creations for more sinister motives to ruin the reputations of their victims in order to save themselves.
The challenge with these callous tactics is that they are incredibly difficult to detect and disprove, making them a potent weapon in the hands of blackmailers. As this technology continues to improve, it becomes harder for victims, the public and even the authorities to differentiate between reality and scam. This accounts for why the courts scarcely admit video and audio contents as evidence in lawsuits. Justice Ayo Salami is my witness in his “trial” over the purported Ekiti election petition case.
The consequences of blackmail are invariably at variance with the purport of political engagements that emphasise public good far above impish attempts at dragging others in the mud of infamy. Politics is supposed to be a code for social and economic engineering, including a moral re-armament device to redirect the nation to the path of growth from the years of waste and human mismanagement.
Unfortunately, blackmail and campaign messages compete for space in election season, particularly now that a three-in-one cast of rebels, the most beautiful of the absolute disasters of the past and other nomadic politicians that ruined Nigeria, are coalescing and mobilising with cutlasses and fists (the fists of fury) on fluid platforms to seize the throat of Nigeria that they have since turned into a casino in a gamble moderated by the conclave of Nigerian epicures rooted in PDP. (“Same politicians wey spoil Nigeria before”! Apologies to Abami Eda Fela Anikulapo-Kuti).
Like a theme song, blackmail has a rhythm so sonorous that shapes the forms and contents of hostilities among partisans in political theatre, even as ordinary people are spectators scammed into a fiction couched in reality props.
Another opportunity is here for Nigeria to light up the space for a more prosperous future as the clock ticks for the next general elections instead of pursuing the paths of perfidy for fellow compatriots. Let it be a light-out for blackmail anthem in the dance hall of political contests that nail innocent partisans into the coffin of eternal pains and infamy.
Were you once caught in the webs of blackmailers’ tricks? Or you have brain-wrenching tales to tell? I have mine. Yet, I come in peace!
* Olujobi, journalist and politician, writes from Ado-Ekiti
