Recipe to take over a small country

The Russians have done it in Crimea. Send in the troops and hold a referendum and you can have a country in your hand. But this recipe requires military might and a majority of the population consisting of people from your country or similar to your country. And one must be prepared to fight with the Americans and the European powers.

There is a simpler and more peaceful way of taking over a country without resorting to arms and with the leaders happily doing your bidding, and the people ignorant of what is happening to their country. Take for example a small island country like Mauritius or the Maldives, small islands with small populations and an innocent but eager govt to want to bring economic growth to their people. The leaders will think that they are progressive and doing everything for the good of the people. Just feed on their ambition and egos and they will behave like deaf frogs.

Step One, encourage their leaders to go all out for economic growth. Help them to sell the idea to their people. If it doesn’t work, use a bit of threat or reverse psychology on the people. You want growth or you don’t want growth. This type of statement sure works on their kiasu people. Once the people and leaders are hooked on this growth drug, everything will fall into place.

Step Two, send in the money. Offer them economic aid in terms of foreign investments to create jobs for the people. This is a formula they cannot refuse. Send in our talents to assist them. And convince them that they did not have enough talents.

Step Three, sign a free trade agreement with them to allow our talents and non talents freedom to migrate and work there. The first batch will be our companies and industries setting shops there. And don’t forget to set up our own schools too. And give the reason that the local talents are not suitable then start to export our people to fill up these companies as foreign talents. If needed to, just employ a few local clerical staff as show of providing jobs for their locals.

Step Four, cultivate the ‘gong gong’ leadership to use our talents in their private and public sectors. Better still, make sure our talents are employed in their stats boards and ministries. Once these people are in place, start to recruit our people to occupy key positions in these institutions and eventually filling them with our citizens. Once our citizens are in control, these institutions, including ministries will be as good as ours.

Step Five, advise the local govt to offer citizenships to our people. If no citizenship, PRs also can. The main goal is to fill the country with our citizens to be their new citizens or PRs. Of course this may lead to some problems with their citizens. Teach them how to disguise our presence by classifying PRs as locals and the daft locals would not have any clue what is going on to their country. For those who have become citizens, pretend to be good citizens and start to buy up their properties, estate by estate. With so much money at our disposal, we can eventually buy up the whole island or at least their prime estates.

Step Six, let time to take care of the rest. With our citizens controlling their industries and ministries, and continuing to employ our citizens, it is a matter of time when we will be the real majority there. And without knowing anything, without doing anything, that island will be ours in half a generation.

Step Seven, our citizens that have become their citizens can start to participate in local politics as rightful citizens. Join or form political parties to contest to be the elected govt. Oh, there is something I missed. Educate the locals there to believe in meritocracy so that our more meritocratic talents can rise to top positions without protest from their people. Because of our high education standard, we don’t need to use fake certificates and CVs. And if possible, convince their locals that they are daft and they need foreign talents like ours to help them and create jobs for them.

Not only will their ‘gong gong’ govt be helping us to take over their country, they will be very grateful that we are sharing with them our growth formula and our talents. They will have all the economic growth they desired. And make sure their local elites also benefited from our presence and investments. Make them very rich in the process so that they will support everything we do. For their average citizens, they may lose out, but never mind, they are too daft and inconsequential to do anything. There may be a few small protests, but no matter. Once they become an absolute minority, there is nothing they can do to overturn our takeover.

And in conclusion, we could own a few islands like the Mauritius and the Maldives to expand our territories and influence.

Not a bad recipe right? We have a growing population and we need to expand. We cannot do that to our big neighbours, but to smaller countries with goondu leaders, there are great opportunities to make such friendly and benign takeovers a success.

Kopi Level - Yellow