Susie Wiles, the newly announced Chief of Staff to United States’ President-elect, Donald Trump, was co-chair of a lobbying firm hired by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2019 and the two parties extensively worked together, records have shown.
Days ago, Trump who defeated Vice-President, Kamala Harris in the tight presidential contest, had selected his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, to serve as his chief of staff.
Wiles will be the first woman to serve as chief of staff.
“Susie Wiles just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history, and was an integral part of both my 2016 and 2020 successful campaigns,” Trump said in the statement announcing his selection.
“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected. Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America Great Again,” he added.
The profile of Wiles revealed that until earlier this year, she was a lobbyist for tobacco company Swisher International, for which she worked to influence Congress on “FDA regulations,” according to disclosures filed with the Senate.
She is co-chair of Mercury Public Affairs since February 2022, and she was a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, the firm founded by Trump ally and campaign bundler, Brian Ballard.
There she worked as a lobbyist for coal company, Alliance Resource Partners, insurance company, Bankers Financial Corporation, General Motors, marketing company Zeta Global, transportation company Origin Logistics, and more companies.
A further probe into her records revealed that IPOB hired the Wiles’ firm to lobby the Congress and the State Department on the “promotion of human rights and democracy” in Nigeria.
According to a report by Foreignlobby.com in 2021, IPOB has a lobbying contract with Mercury Public Affairs.
The engagement, which started in October 2019, is for $85,000 per month but the firm only disclosed $254,000 in payments with the US Department of Justice for all of last year.
According to media reports, the emergence of Donald Trump as the winner of the US presidential election intensified hope of an independent nation known as Biafra.
As Trump’s victory was sealed, messages started to circulate in a WhatsApp group created for the Biafra agitation: President Donald Trump’s victory is an inspiration to Biafrans all over the world.
Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 6 November election to emerge as the 47th president of the United States.
While his win has been viewed with a level of misgiving by his critics in Africa, there was jubilation in the Biafran agitation community.
As world leaders sent out their congratulatory messages to Trump, self-proclaimed Biafra prime minister Simon Ekpa quickly joined the fray.
“As a reemerging nation, the United States of Biafra looks forward to the USA’s commitment to the principles of self determination and the freedom of people to choose their own form of government,” Ekpa, who lives in Finland, said on X.
Another separatist said on X: “Biafrans is [sic] set for exit. We have suffered in the hands of Nigeria terrorist government. Freedom is now.”
The Republic of Biafra, in Nigeria’s eastern region, is dominated by the Igbo ethnic group.
In 2020, the group claimed that the leadership of the US Republican Party in Iowa invited Kanu as a special guest at a Trump campaign rally.
Four years earlier, Kanu had written to Trump, then president-elect, and urged him to support Biafra’s push for independence in the same way that he had amplified the message of Brexiters in the United Kingdom.