ONE of the five Zimbabwean women who went on hunger strike at Britain’s Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre since Monday has been deported to Malawi.
Rose Phekani, who arrived in the UK in 2004 but only claimed asylum last month, was handcuffed and bundled onto a Kenyan Airways plane on Wednesday night by five guards, friends said.
Maud Kadangu Lennard, another detainee at the Bedford facility who has been told she will be deported on September 19, said Friday: “She called us from Kenya where the plane had a stop-over.
"She said she stood no chance against five guards assigned to her. They handcuffed her when she tried to resist, and two guards took her all the way to Malawi.”
The remaining hunger strikers are Lennard, Faina Manuel Pondesi, Zandile Sibanda and Pauline Chitekeshe.
Britain has refused the women’s plea for asylum, insisting that the women travelled on “genuine” Malawian passports and are therefore Malawian and not Zimbabwean as they claim.
The UK government is currently not deporting failed asylum seekers to Zimbabwe, awaiting the outcome of a country guidance case known as HS (Zimbabwe) which is currently before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT).
Rights groups say the UK government is showing breathtaking insensitivity to the asylum seekers’ plight.
Malawi Watch executive director Billy Banda said while the UK government had a right to protect its interests by sending the Zimbabweans to Malawi, most of the deportees ended up destitute.
He said: “It is wrong for the UK government to displace these Zimbabweans who escaped a repressive regime by obtaining a Malawian passport to seek protection in UK. What the UK is doing is not deportation but displacement. How can they deport someone to a country that one has no roots?”
Lennard said the four remaining hunger strikers, who are in a group of seven Zimbabweans, were determined to continue their action.
She said: “We are all very weak. I personally don’t have strength to walk around and I have a headache. But we are determined. I am not going to Zimbabwe, they would have to kill me first.”
Meanwhile, Malawi has warned that the deportees face up to three years in jail.
Malawian authorities also revealed there was little or no engagement at all between the UK Home Office and its embassy in London to verify the identities of asylum seekers travelling on Malawian passports.
The deportees are prosecuted for “false declaration of a Malawi passport form C/S 327 and uttering a false statement of citizenship C/S 33(1)” under the Citizens Act, reported the Nyasa Times newspaper on Friday.
If convicted, the Zimbabweans face up to three years imprisonment with hard labour “with an option of fast tracked deportation to the Zimbabwe/Mozambique boarder at Nyamapanda”, the paper added.
Friday, 14 September 2007
Jillian Wolstein raises money to build schools in Malawi
Clevelander Jillian Wolstein felt honored when Malawi villagers gave her a native name, but she was a bit perplexed. The name, "Chifundo," they said, means "messy" in the native language, Chichewa.
As she smiled her thanks, she thought, "Yeah, I'm sort of disheveled here. And I sit in the dirt when I play with the little kids, so I'm probably dirty."
Still, she wondered. "Tell me again what Chifundo means," Wolstein asked.
Only this time, she didn't hear "messy." Her name means "mercy," they said.
Wolstein laughed softly as she recalled the experience, delighting in the joke and touched by the gesture. She earned the honor through her dedication to help a village in the Machinga district near Liwonde National Park in the southern lakes region of the country. Malawi is wedged among Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia in eastern Africa.
She was inspired to work in Malawi in April 2006 while she was flying home from an African safari with her family. She'd been humbled by the deprivation she'd seen in rural African life and realized the blessings she and her family enjoyed. "I'm going back to do something," she told her husband, developer Scott Wolstein.
"We were building an enormous house in Hunting Valley," Jillian Wolstein said, "and I thought we should repay some karmic debt before moving in." Attending fund-raising parties and writing checks to charities suddenly weren't enough, she said.
With $100,000 from the couple's Wolstein Family Foundation, she partnered with Wilderness Safaris, a travel agency, to replace the village's open-air thatched-roof school and mud desks with two sturdy brick buildings with wood desks. The travel agency oversees the school.
Nanthomba School, expected to open by December, will accommodate 320 children, but it is likely to have 600 pupils, she said, because many families moved to the village when they heard a new school was opening. Four of seven teacher homes have been completed. It is customary to house teachers near the schools in Malawi.
The foundation pays the teachers and is financing their education for certification. Their classes are 15 miles away, so the foundation bought bicycles for them. When they pass their exams, the teachers will get to keep their bicycles.
As she smiled her thanks, she thought, "Yeah, I'm sort of disheveled here. And I sit in the dirt when I play with the little kids, so I'm probably dirty."
Still, she wondered. "Tell me again what Chifundo means," Wolstein asked.
Only this time, she didn't hear "messy." Her name means "mercy," they said.
Wolstein laughed softly as she recalled the experience, delighting in the joke and touched by the gesture. She earned the honor through her dedication to help a village in the Machinga district near Liwonde National Park in the southern lakes region of the country. Malawi is wedged among Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia in eastern Africa.
She was inspired to work in Malawi in April 2006 while she was flying home from an African safari with her family. She'd been humbled by the deprivation she'd seen in rural African life and realized the blessings she and her family enjoyed. "I'm going back to do something," she told her husband, developer Scott Wolstein.
"We were building an enormous house in Hunting Valley," Jillian Wolstein said, "and I thought we should repay some karmic debt before moving in." Attending fund-raising parties and writing checks to charities suddenly weren't enough, she said.
With $100,000 from the couple's Wolstein Family Foundation, she partnered with Wilderness Safaris, a travel agency, to replace the village's open-air thatched-roof school and mud desks with two sturdy brick buildings with wood desks. The travel agency oversees the school.
Nanthomba School, expected to open by December, will accommodate 320 children, but it is likely to have 600 pupils, she said, because many families moved to the village when they heard a new school was opening. Four of seven teacher homes have been completed. It is customary to house teachers near the schools in Malawi.
The foundation pays the teachers and is financing their education for certification. Their classes are 15 miles away, so the foundation bought bicycles for them. When they pass their exams, the teachers will get to keep their bicycles.
Will the Poor Always Be with Us?
In 1970, six years after its independence from Britain, Malawi had a per capita GDP of around $70. Today, despite nearly half a billion dollars a year in foreign aid, that figure stands at $600 — still among the lowest in the world. And Malawi isn't alone. While most of the developing world's economies have grown at around 4% per year since 1970, a significant number of countries, largely in Africa, are actually worse off now than they were a half-century ago. Even as globalization lifts much of Asia from poverty, these unlucky nations seem caught in a riptide of poverty.
In his new book, A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark notes that the yawning chasm between rich and poor has been widening since the late 18th century. "Hundreds of millions of Africans now live on less than 40% of the income of pre-industrial England," he writes. Clark proposes a wildly contentious explanation for this disparity. By studying wills from England circa 1800, he finds that rich families tended to reproduce far more abundantly than poor ones. As the affluent outbred the poor, bourgeois values like thrift and literacy apparently diffused through English society from the top down, eventually jump-starting the Industrial Revolution, and allowing, for the first time in history, economic growth to outpace population growth. England's exploding prosperity, then, depended on the cultural, and perhaps even biological, transmission of those values. "The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality," Clark concludes.
That's a bold statement. It's also utterly specious. As every high-school biology student knows, evolution is neither a tidy nor quick process. Even if Clark could somehow prove that prosperity is hereditary — survival of the richest, he terms it — it doesn't follow that genetics, rather than geography or blind luck, caused Europe to industrialize before the rest of the world. Isn't it just as likely that innovations such as the steam engine, and the exploitation of its colonies, made England wealthy? And Clark's social Darwinism doesn't explain why equally stable and sophisticated societies in China and India industrialized at different rates, or how they have managed to become capitalist powerhouses in only a generation. At best, A Farewell to Alms is woefully naive; at worst, willfully reductionist. But Clark is right on a least one point: the industrialized world's prescription for affluence — good government, efficient markets and generous transfusions of foreign aid — has done little to spread prosperity to countries like Malawi. As he writes, "There is no simple economic medicine that will guarantee growth."
In his terrifically readable — and far more convincing — The Bottom Billion, former World Bank research director Paul Collier offers another take on why aid is so ineffective. For one, it's often inefficiently distributed: according to one survey in Ghana, only about 1% of medical aid actually made it to hospitals. And foreign aid is sometimes channeled into military spending — about 11% of the total, according to Collier's best estimate — or squirreled away in Swiss banks by kleptocrats. But Collier primarily blames a phenomenon known in economics circles as "Dutch disease."
In the 1960s, the Netherlands discovered huge deposits of natural gas in the North Sea. A windfall, right? Wrong. The discovery effectively hobbled Dutch industry, since any surge in revenue from natural resources — or from foreign aid, for that matter — tends to drive up exchange rates, making exports less internationally competitive. But thriving export industries, Collier argues, are precisely the reason for Asia's dramatic economic rise. They are also what Africa will need to develop in order to follow the same trajectory. Collier's idea seems to be sinking in: last month, the large international aid organization CARE announced that it would no longer accept subsidized food aid from the U.S. because it was depressing local farm economies in poor countries.
Of course, Collier isn't philosophically opposed to the idea of foreign aid. But his proposed solution to its inefficacy doesn't include celebrity rock concerts or NGO sloganeering — an approach he broadly derides as "the headless heart." Perhaps most controversially, he argues for military intervention in civil conflicts, citing as an example the British army's decisive 2001 rout of Sierra Leone's vicious Revolutionary United Front, which was infamous for recruiting child soldiers and wantonly butchering civilians. These aggressive steps aren't just a moral imperative; they also make economic sense, since, Collier estimates, a failed state costs its neighbors an average of $64 billion in military spending and lost trade, and can spread dysfunction far beyond its borders (for a prime example of the latter, see Afghanistan). These arguments impel Collier to a sobering conclusion: without radical international intervention, the world's poorest states are likely to remain trapped in a cycle of civil war and near-zero economic growth for decades.
In his new book, A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark notes that the yawning chasm between rich and poor has been widening since the late 18th century. "Hundreds of millions of Africans now live on less than 40% of the income of pre-industrial England," he writes. Clark proposes a wildly contentious explanation for this disparity. By studying wills from England circa 1800, he finds that rich families tended to reproduce far more abundantly than poor ones. As the affluent outbred the poor, bourgeois values like thrift and literacy apparently diffused through English society from the top down, eventually jump-starting the Industrial Revolution, and allowing, for the first time in history, economic growth to outpace population growth. England's exploding prosperity, then, depended on the cultural, and perhaps even biological, transmission of those values. "The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality," Clark concludes.
That's a bold statement. It's also utterly specious. As every high-school biology student knows, evolution is neither a tidy nor quick process. Even if Clark could somehow prove that prosperity is hereditary — survival of the richest, he terms it — it doesn't follow that genetics, rather than geography or blind luck, caused Europe to industrialize before the rest of the world. Isn't it just as likely that innovations such as the steam engine, and the exploitation of its colonies, made England wealthy? And Clark's social Darwinism doesn't explain why equally stable and sophisticated societies in China and India industrialized at different rates, or how they have managed to become capitalist powerhouses in only a generation. At best, A Farewell to Alms is woefully naive; at worst, willfully reductionist. But Clark is right on a least one point: the industrialized world's prescription for affluence — good government, efficient markets and generous transfusions of foreign aid — has done little to spread prosperity to countries like Malawi. As he writes, "There is no simple economic medicine that will guarantee growth."
In his terrifically readable — and far more convincing — The Bottom Billion, former World Bank research director Paul Collier offers another take on why aid is so ineffective. For one, it's often inefficiently distributed: according to one survey in Ghana, only about 1% of medical aid actually made it to hospitals. And foreign aid is sometimes channeled into military spending — about 11% of the total, according to Collier's best estimate — or squirreled away in Swiss banks by kleptocrats. But Collier primarily blames a phenomenon known in economics circles as "Dutch disease."
In the 1960s, the Netherlands discovered huge deposits of natural gas in the North Sea. A windfall, right? Wrong. The discovery effectively hobbled Dutch industry, since any surge in revenue from natural resources — or from foreign aid, for that matter — tends to drive up exchange rates, making exports less internationally competitive. But thriving export industries, Collier argues, are precisely the reason for Asia's dramatic economic rise. They are also what Africa will need to develop in order to follow the same trajectory. Collier's idea seems to be sinking in: last month, the large international aid organization CARE announced that it would no longer accept subsidized food aid from the U.S. because it was depressing local farm economies in poor countries.
Of course, Collier isn't philosophically opposed to the idea of foreign aid. But his proposed solution to its inefficacy doesn't include celebrity rock concerts or NGO sloganeering — an approach he broadly derides as "the headless heart." Perhaps most controversially, he argues for military intervention in civil conflicts, citing as an example the British army's decisive 2001 rout of Sierra Leone's vicious Revolutionary United Front, which was infamous for recruiting child soldiers and wantonly butchering civilians. These aggressive steps aren't just a moral imperative; they also make economic sense, since, Collier estimates, a failed state costs its neighbors an average of $64 billion in military spending and lost trade, and can spread dysfunction far beyond its borders (for a prime example of the latter, see Afghanistan). These arguments impel Collier to a sobering conclusion: without radical international intervention, the world's poorest states are likely to remain trapped in a cycle of civil war and near-zero economic growth for decades.
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