Category: Africa

Wall St. Journal: Aid to Africa an unmitigated disaster

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The weekend edition of the Wall St. Journal carried a lengthy article entitled, “Why Foreign Aid is Hurting Africa.”    I don’t know what the fallout has been for reporter Dambisa Mayo but if it was anything like Irish Times writer Kevin Myers last summer who said much the same thing, the poor reporter must be under heavy fire as I write.

Here are just a couple of paragraphs that will be sure to inspire you to read the rest:

Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time — millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.

Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.

I wonder how Kevin Myers finally made out after the attacks on him, our coverage of Myers was here and here.

Come to think of it, Myers was a wee bit more graphic then the Wall St. Journal.  Here is Myers:

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

Do-gooders beware, too much aid can be a bad thing for the human spirit.

Missing Somali “youth” seen shopping at the mall; maybe, maybe not

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Fox News has a new story yesterday that is pretty much the old story we reported here last week that said FBI sources say some of the missing Somali youths are back in town after ostensibly attending terrorist training in Africa.

Yesterday’s story adds this new bit of information:

One month later [January], a 22-year-old man who traveled to Somalia was spotted at a Minneapolis shopping mall, according to Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn. Jamal would not identify the man, but said family members had confirmed that the man had returned from Somalia.

But no one has seen or heard from the man or his family in recent weeks, according to Jamal, who said the man may have been arrested or may be hiding with his family.

This new news may or may not be true, consider the source—Omar Jamal.  Fox News and all these other mainstream news outlets need to find some fresh sources.   I want to remind readers that we have written extensively on Jamal, convicted of immigration fraud in 2005.    He was ordered deported but obviously that never happened.    One reader told me that we don’t deport people to countries undergoing massive civil war, as in Somalia, however, if true, we deported this poor woman to Somalia recently.

Using our search function for ‘Omar Jamal’  I found these posts (pages of them).  Note how often he turns up in all sorts of Somali-related stories from legalizing khat, to our lousy education system, to defending rapists and gang violence, to the Colman/Franken race and of course to terrorism.  Perhaps his most perplexing statements involved the Denver Cyanide death case in August.   That case, now completely hushed-up, involved the cyanide death of a Canadian Somali man in a hotel in Denver in advance of the Democratic National Convention.  He had enough cyanide to kill hundreds.  Omar Jamal jumped in to control the news!  Here is what I said in August:

Now, here is what jumped out at me from this “jumbled” story. Why the heck is the head of the Somali Justice Center of St. Paul, MN involved in all this? Note in these two stories here and here, that Omar Jamal is manipulating the news. He doesn’t know Diri, a Canadian, but is yakking it up with Diri’s family and being quoted authoritatively that Diri was not involved in terrorism, that he was just a schizo, and the lazy mainstream media reporters eat it up!

So, maybe or maybe not, a missing “youth” was spotted at the mall.

Drug-resistant TB on the rise in immigrant communities

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Although numbers of cases of active Tuberculosis ( TB) have declined, health officials are worried about the increasing number of cases of drug-resistant TB they are seeing.    Refugees are permitted to enter the US with latent TB. This is one of the problems we have mentioned involving refugees who are not tracked by the volags (government-contracted resettlement agencies) or federal or state government in as soon as 3 months after their arrival in the US.

From Newsmax (hat tip Blulitespecial):

SAN FRANCISCO — Even as tuberculosis rates decline in the United States, drug-resistant strains of the disease showing up in states with large immigrant populations and are becoming increasingly hard to treat.

Researchers are concerned about this trend while funding for labor-intensive disease control programs is being cut in cities such as San Francisco, which has the highest TB rates in the country.

Drug resistance develops when patients start feeling better and interrupt their treatment, giving bacteria an opportunity to develop a defense against the medication.

The picture is grim, and World TB Day on Tuesday is an attempt to raise awareness of a disease that infects about 9 million people, particularly in Asia and Africa. About five percent of those patients are immune to the best drugs. About 2 million die annually.

Immigrant communities in states such as California are particularly vulnerable because many people are foreign born or travel frequently to countries where TB is a greater risk, such as Mexico, India and China

California leads the nation with 2,696 TB recorded cases in 2008_ and with 451 cases of drug-resistant TB identified between 1993 and 2007. About 83 percent of these drug-resistant cases involve immigrants born abroad.

If you are thinking, oh well, that is California, think again.   We began our coverage of TB in immigrant communities when we first read about Ft. Wayne, IN and its financially strapped health department here.   Check out our health issues category for lots more on TB.

Now, I am not saying we are Africa yet, but go back and read this post I wrote last June about the South African “prison” for drug-resistant TB patients.   What else can be done with these people?

Scams are in the air this spring: Kenyan couple extorts hundreds of thousands from nuns

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I guess it’s just another sign of the times.  Congress and Obama are scamming the taxpayer, so what the heck, “refugees” can scam nuns.  It’s a slippery slope.    I told you this morning I had another hard-to-believe story today and this is it.  Hat tip:  Blulitespecial.

Actually this couple from Kenya weren’t really refugees, just pretending to be.  From the Chicago Tribune:

A married Near North Side couple claiming to be Kenyan refugees whose lives were in danger managed to scam more than $800,000 from an order of Carmelite sisters in Wisconsin, federal agents allege.

Angela Purity Martin-Mulu, 35, and Edward Bosire, 39, also took nearly $20,000 from a Carmelite monastery in Des Plaines, according to an FBI affidavit filed in Milwaukee.

The two are being held in the federal lockup in Chicago on a mail fraud charge and are due in court in Chicago on Friday. They are awaiting a hearing on facing the charges in Milwaukee.

The husband-and-wife team posed as brother and sister, accepting meals, gas for their car, cash and other aid even though one Illinois bank account held by Martin-Mulu registered $582,831 in deposits from 2003 to 2008, according to the affidavit. At least $24,000 was spent in casinos.

Read the whole story.

“You feel like you’ve been stepped on,” said Mother Marie Andre, superior at the Carmelite monastery in Des Plaines.

Sister, we know just how you feel.

Americanized Somali woman deported to Somalia, could this be true?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have a pair of stories this morning that are ‘stranger than fiction,’ and this is the first.

According to a publication, Medeshi,  an English-language publication for news about the Horn of Africa, a Somali-born, but America-raised, 23 year old refugee woman has been deported to Somalia, and her family contends right into the hands of Al-Shabaab.

After living in the U.S. for 16 years and migrating from a country that was recently categorized to top the most dangerous countries in the world – even more dangerous than Iraq and Afghanistan – Muna Absiya would still have to be deported to Somalia despite evidences showing apparent prosecutions.

They don’t say what exactly she was doing to warrant this drastic measure—one I would normally agree with—but, if true,  this case seems over the top.  Where were the immigration lawyers?   Whatever she did, you can bet she wasn’t wearing a hijab (check out her photo).

The painful trauma of war in Somalia as a backdrop, her older sister’s death, Safiya; and that of her father passing away in 2002 implicated Ms. Absiye’s mental equilibrium, clearing the way for minor infractions that would play out into the grounds for a deportation after losing her immigration status in April 2007.

In March, she went to what she thought was a routine meeting with a “deportation officer.”   Instead,  Bam!  Just like that!  She was on a plane to Africa.

Ms. Absiya has been out for Supervised Release Program that required her to report to a deportation officer, as a routine monitoring for twice a month. On Thursday February 26, as part of undergoing her scheduled interviews with SRP, the deportation officer requested her to come back in five days, for another appointment before the regular dates, which precisely was the Monday of March 2nd, and surely incognizant of what awaits her in there.

“She called me (her sister Farhia) at 6pm in that Monday evening; crying and told me she is being deported to Somalia right now.”

Presumably taking one look at her, the flight crew and airport personel realized they could not just drop her off in Mogadishu.

However, her saga did not end with the deportation. Ms. Absiya was initially landed in Kenya to transfer her onto flights bound to Mogadishu, according to her attorney. “The airline staff at the airport were so concerned about this young woman’s life that they decided not to let her off in Mogadishu,” attorney details her ordeal, as she spent a whole week with swirling flights between four Airports everyday, from Nairobi to Mogadishu and to Hargeysa and Djibouti and back to Nairobi where each airport had to detain her temporarily until next flights –presumably to nowhere- without granting her an official entry to the country.

Hopefully before they ultimately dropped her off they at least got her covered from head to toe.  The article doesn’t say what happened or where she is now, but ends with her sister’s appeal.

“Why would the United States of America, the so called Human Rights leader, put a young westernized woman’s life at risk and try to deliver her to Al-Shabaab, wearing prohibited attire like pants and shirt with no headscarf? Why?” asks Farhia (her sister), whose fury was perplexed by the lack of response from authority to address the safety concerns they harbor in which her sister was consequently exposed to by deportation.

“My sister is endangered when they throw her away like that. She speaks no Somali, and knows nothing about the culture there.”

Whatever this woman (acculturated in America for 16 years) did, dropping her off in Mogadishu where Sharia law prevails is a death sentence.

Remember the story of poor, Asho, stoned to death last fall.