GIDEON KETER
Jubilee has contracted the services of global data mining company Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the August presidential election.
The party will also use the British PR firm BTP Advisers that successfully managed the TNA campaign that brought President Uhuru Kenyatta to power in 2013.
Cambridge Analytica is credited with helping President Trump to win the American presidential election last November and with helping the Leave side to win in the Brexit referendum in the UK last June.
It has been described as a “psychological warfare firm”.
CA, a British company, is owned by American billionaire Robert Mercer and alt-right Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
An expose by the Guardian this week claimed that CA, in conjunction with its sister company AggregateIQ in Vancouver, Canada, essentially won the Brexit vote by trawling Facebook and buying up commercial consumer datasets to identify ‘persuadable’ voters whom it then bombarded with more than a billion social media posts and adverts.
The CA website says it is a “global leader in data-driven campaigning with over 25 years of experience, supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents”. Besides Kenya, those countries include Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova.
“Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races, as well as congressional and senatorial elections,” CA says.
If CA does the same work in Kenya for this election, it can be expected to pay Facebook and other third-party data companies for information about Kenya’s undecided voters whom it will then bombard with social media posts and adverts.
A small CA team arrived in Kenya at the weekend to find out what voters believe the Jubilee administration should have done and what it should do, according to well-placed sources in the Office of the President.
The CA team will work closely with BTP Advisers, which has already started campaign planning. Its staff have been coming in and out of Kenya for some time…
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