TD David Hundeyin has put it on his X feed in black and white: Omoyele Sowore and a cast of Nigeria’s professional revolutionaries are paid by the CIA, and he says he has the proof.
His exhibit is a letter, pulled from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in which CIA Director William Casey tells Ed Meese at the White House that Langley wants a “National Endowment” set up for “free institutions” abroad, on one condition: that the Agency “should not get out front” or “appear to be a sponsor or advocate.”
Let me say plainly what many in Abuja and Lagos will not. That letter is genuine. I checked it.
And it confirms something Washington has spent forty years denying: that the National Endowment for Democracy was conceived inside the CIA as a laundering machine for influence, a way to fund “civil society” abroad with fingerprints wiped clean.
NED’s own founding president admitted in 1991 that what they do openly today the CIA once did covertly.
So when Nigerians ask who bankrolls the endless “democracy” workshops, the media grants and the ready‑made protest movements, the honest answer is that the pipe was laid in Langley.
Now to Sowore.
Sahara Reporters has lived for years on American foundation money, Ford, Omidyar, MacArthur, millions of dollars, and nobody in that newsroom has ever fully explained to Nigerians why Manhattan philanthropists care so much about our politics.
That is a legitimate question, and Hundeyin is right to ask it.
But here is the problem, and I say this as someone who did his national service inside the Shagari presidency and knows how intelligence money actually moves.
A 1983 letter about the CIA’s plumbing is not a payslip with Sowore’s name on it.
Hundeyin says he has proof. Then publish it. Grant numbers. Wire transfers. Names of handlers.
If it exists, it is the biggest political story in Nigeria since June 12 and I will put my own name behind it.
If it does not, then a man who has built his reputation on exposing forged documents has just handed his enemies a genuine one and stretched it past breaking.
Nigeria is drowning in foreign money on every side, the APC’s consultants, the PDP’s fixers, the NGO industrial complex.
The people demanding proof from the government cannot be exempt from providing it themselves.
Sowore, open your books. Hundeyin, drop the second document. The rest of us are waiting.
