BLANTYRE — The UN's World Food Programme launched an international appeal for 5.2 million US dollars (3.5 million euros) Thursday to help feed more than half a million Malawians until the end of next year.
"We are seeking donor support to meet the 5.2 million US dollars shortfall to enable WFP provide the food needs of the targeted beneficiaries up to December 2010," Anne Callanan, the WFP's country director, told AFP.
Callanan said despite a bumper maize yield of 3.3 million tonnes, "this national surplus does not automatically and directly trickle down to vulnerable groups such the chronically-ill and orphans."
The vulnerable beneficiaries -- numbering some 535,000 -- include AIDS sufferers, patients receiving treatment for tuberculosis (TB) and malnourished children.
"We desperately need the donors continued support to meet the needs of the beneficiary categories who may not have opportunities to benefit from the surplus except through direct food transfers," she added.
Malawi this year produced a record maize harvest, credited to heavy investment in subsidised fertiliser and other farm inputs.
However food security is still a pressing issue to poverty-stricken Malawians, who account for around 45 percent of the 13 million citizens.
A government-funded subsidy programme, which cost 183 million dollars in 2008-9 growing season, is hugely popular here and was credited with helping President Bingu wa Mutharika win a sweeping victory in the May elections.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Malawi has 1st swine flu case
Malawi has confirmed its first case of swine flu.
Christopher Kang'ombe, secretary for health, said Wednesday said the disease was confirmed in an unnamed male from the southern resort district of Mangochi. He had been among five suspected cases samples from which were sent to laboratories in South Africa.
Kang'ombe says the patient is responding well to treatment.
The World Health Organization says swine flu has been recorded in 23 African countries. Most of the confirmed cases are in South Africa, which, unlike most other countries on the continent, has a health system sophisticated enough to track the global pandemic.
Christopher Kang'ombe, secretary for health, said Wednesday said the disease was confirmed in an unnamed male from the southern resort district of Mangochi. He had been among five suspected cases samples from which were sent to laboratories in South Africa.
Kang'ombe says the patient is responding well to treatment.
The World Health Organization says swine flu has been recorded in 23 African countries. Most of the confirmed cases are in South Africa, which, unlike most other countries on the continent, has a health system sophisticated enough to track the global pandemic.
Malawi Conference on Micro Health Insurance in Africa
Microfinance Focus, Sept. 10, 2009: The Pro MHI Africa team will organise a two-day conference on micro health insurance and health care financing from Dec. 2 to 3, 2009 in Lilongwe, in partnership with the EU-African University Network.
The conference is being organised as part of the international project “Pro MHI Africa – EU-African University Network to strengthen community-based micro health insurance”.
The project is a joint effort by the University of Cologne, University of Botswana, University of Ghana and University of Malawi, and constitutes a platform for various microinsurance stakeholders in Africa and worldwide.
Apart from the stakeholders in microfinance and micro health insurance in Sub-Saharan Africa, the conference is aimed at NGOs, researchers and health care professionals who work on the topic of health care financing in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Malawi. The last date for registration is November 10, 2009. The venue is Malawi Institute of Management Campus, Lilongwe, Malawi.
The main objectives of the conference are:
I Presentation of common Project outcomes
Common research results and general outcomes of the two year project will be presented at the conference and hence new information on the potential, efficiency and sustainability of Micro Health Insurance in Botswana, Ghana and Malawi will be disseminated. This presentation will form the basis for an open discussion on these topics. New evidence was gathered mainly within qualitative research as well as in the context of an extensive comparative household survey conducted in Botswana, Ghana and Malawi in 2008 and 2009.
II Insurance Education in Malawi and Best Paper Award
Aother aim of the conference is to raise awareness on Micro Health Insurance in Malawi as the common spread of micro health insurance units has not entered Malawi yet. Besides a presentation of the main research results of the project Pro MHI Africa in Malawi the winner of the Malawian Best Paper Award will be proclaimed. Furthermore, a round table with important stakeholders in the field of Micro Health Insurance in Malawi is intended to discuss further steps as well as initiate the establishment of a national network of potential micro health insurance practitioners, researchers and supporters in Malawi.
III Exchange and Dissemination of latest research results on Micro Health insurance in Africa
The Pro MHI Africa team would like to bring together national and international microfinance, microinsurance and micro health insurance experts in the context of the final conference to initiate a common discussion about the status quo of Micro Health Insurance in Africa. Therefore, several co-authors of the official Pro MHI Africa Handbook of Micro Health Insurance in Africa will join the conference and present their papers as well as conduct interactive workshops on specific topics.
The conference is being organised as part of the international project “Pro MHI Africa – EU-African University Network to strengthen community-based micro health insurance”.
The project is a joint effort by the University of Cologne, University of Botswana, University of Ghana and University of Malawi, and constitutes a platform for various microinsurance stakeholders in Africa and worldwide.
Apart from the stakeholders in microfinance and micro health insurance in Sub-Saharan Africa, the conference is aimed at NGOs, researchers and health care professionals who work on the topic of health care financing in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Malawi. The last date for registration is November 10, 2009. The venue is Malawi Institute of Management Campus, Lilongwe, Malawi.
The main objectives of the conference are:
I Presentation of common Project outcomes
Common research results and general outcomes of the two year project will be presented at the conference and hence new information on the potential, efficiency and sustainability of Micro Health Insurance in Botswana, Ghana and Malawi will be disseminated. This presentation will form the basis for an open discussion on these topics. New evidence was gathered mainly within qualitative research as well as in the context of an extensive comparative household survey conducted in Botswana, Ghana and Malawi in 2008 and 2009.
II Insurance Education in Malawi and Best Paper Award
Aother aim of the conference is to raise awareness on Micro Health Insurance in Malawi as the common spread of micro health insurance units has not entered Malawi yet. Besides a presentation of the main research results of the project Pro MHI Africa in Malawi the winner of the Malawian Best Paper Award will be proclaimed. Furthermore, a round table with important stakeholders in the field of Micro Health Insurance in Malawi is intended to discuss further steps as well as initiate the establishment of a national network of potential micro health insurance practitioners, researchers and supporters in Malawi.
III Exchange and Dissemination of latest research results on Micro Health insurance in Africa
The Pro MHI Africa team would like to bring together national and international microfinance, microinsurance and micro health insurance experts in the context of the final conference to initiate a common discussion about the status quo of Micro Health Insurance in Africa. Therefore, several co-authors of the official Pro MHI Africa Handbook of Micro Health Insurance in Africa will join the conference and present their papers as well as conduct interactive workshops on specific topics.
Child Mortality Rate Declines Globally
MPATA, Malawi — The number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has fallen below nine million for the first time on record, a significant milestone in the global effort to improve children’s chances of survival, particularly in the developing world, according to data that Unicef will release on Thursday.
Rosaria Chimwaza, a health worker, weighed Fanny Kasipati's newborn in Tetheleya, Malawi. Such outreach efforts have cut child mortality rates.
The child mortality rate has declined by more than a quarter in the last two decades — to 65 per 1,000 live births last year from 90 in 1990 — in large part because of the widening distribution of relatively inexpensive technologies, like measles vaccines and anti-malaria mosquito nets.
Other simple practices have helped, public health experts say, including a rise in breast-feeding alone for the first six months of life, which protects children from diarrhea caused by dirty water.
Wealthy nations, international agencies and philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates have committed billions of dollars to the effort. Schoolchildren and church groups have also pitched in, paying for mosquito nets and feeding programs.
Taken together, they have helped cut the number of children under 5 who died last year to 8.8 million — the lowest since records were first kept in 1960, Unicef said — from 12.5 million in 1990.
“That’s 10,000 less children dying per day,” said Unicef’s executive director, Ann M. Veneman.
Even so, there is still a long way to go before achieving the goal set by leaders of 189 nations in 2000: to cut the child mortality rate by two-thirds by 2015. Pneumonia and diarrhea, the two leading causes of child deaths, are still relatively neglected, especially compared with malaria and measles, experts say.
“If we say as a world we care about saving children, and tackle the problem systematically, piece by piece, we can make progress, and it’s really important for people to know that,” Mrs. Gates said in an interview.
One of the most vertiginous drops in child mortality has occurred here, in a country so poor that half the children are stunted by malnutrition, so bereft of doctors and nurses that workers with 10th-grade educations dispense antibiotics. Yet for every 1,000 babies born here, 125 more children survived to their fifth birthdays in 2008 than did in 1990, the new figures show.
Malawi’s success and that of nations across the developing world was not inevitable. South Africa, the richest country in sub-Saharan Africa but afflicted with what its scientists and doctors describe as flawed political leadership on health policy over the past decade, is one of only four nations that experienced a rise in mortality rates for children under age 5 from 1990 to 2008. The others are Chad, Congo and Kenya, according to the new figures, which stem from an analysis of household surveys and other data by Unicef, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the United Nations population division.
Malawi illustrates the essence of the most successful efforts to reduce child mortality: it has found many creative ways to get the most cost-effective treatments and prevention methods to women and children, even in remote rural areas. Those interventions have included not just mosquito nets and vaccinations, but also deworming medicines and vitamin A supplements that boost children’s immunity.
Perhaps Malawi’s most powerful weapon is its ranks of more than 10,000 high school-educated village health workers. With a minimum 10 weeks of training, medical checklists to aid them in diagnosing childhood killers and hardy bicycles to get around, they dispense medicines and give injections, tasks only doctors and nurses do in many other countries.
“These days, when a child falls sick in the night, the mother can knock on the door of the health assistant,” said Teresa Frazier, 40. Her own 5-year-old daughter died after falling violently ill one night when Ms. Frazier was a young mother in a Malawian village of mud huts that, at the time, was many miles from the nearest medical help.
But as the sun went down on Monday, Ms. Frazier walked up to the tiny, two-room home of Blessings Mwaraya, 27, a health worker who lives amid banana, avocado and mango trees. Ms. Frazier, who gave birth to nine children, seven of whom survived, said she could not manage any more.
She had come for an injection of Depo Provera for birth control. Mr. Mwaraya, who earns $90 a month, painstakingly shook the little glass bottle containing the solution, drew it into the needle and stuck it in her arm. Health experts say family planning enables women to space births apart and have fewer children, aiding them in bearing healthier babies and better providing for them as they grow up.
“It’s still difficult to feed them all,” Ms. Frazier said of her surviving children, noting the paltry yield of corn on her small plot. Had Mr. Mwaraya been in the village in her younger days, she would have chosen to have had only four children, she said.
Mr. Mwaraya kept the Depo Provera in a plain wooden box, divided into compartments also stuffed with treatments for the main childhood killers: cotrimoxazole, a low-cost antibiotic, against pneumonia; oral rehydration salts for diarrhea; and Coartem, medicine for malaria.
“My interest was to assist my fellow Malawians who were falling sick but never had treatment at the village level,” said Mr. Mwaraya, dressed in a uniform of light blue pants and a short-sleeve jacket.
The pace of progress in Malawi and six other countries with some of the highest proportions of children dying — Nepal, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Laos, Mongolia and Bolivia — has been much steeper than the global average, the new data show. In each, child mortality rates have fallen at least 4.5 percent annually.
Here in Malawi, the mortality rate for children under 5 fell to 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 2008 from 225 in 1990 and 336 in 1970. Other poor nations, like Niger, Mozambique and Ethiopia, have also cut the number of deaths per 1,000 births by more than 100 since 1990, according to the new figures.
Doris Hebuye, a thin, sociable woman, listened from a distance one morning as her daughter Fanny, a new mother, cradled her 10-day-old baby. A health worker counseled Fanny Kasipati, 18, on the finer points of breast-feeding, the danger signs of sickness and choices for birth control.
As she sat outside their mud hut in the village of Tetheleya, Mrs. Hebuye’s eyes had a sad, faraway look as she described the deaths of two of her seven children — Gustus, at 3, and Margaret, at 1 —from causes she had never really understood.
“Malawi is changing for the better,” she said. “In those days, people gave birth without advice. These days, women are assisted in many ways.”
Rosaria Chimwaza, a health worker, weighed Fanny Kasipati's newborn in Tetheleya, Malawi. Such outreach efforts have cut child mortality rates.
The child mortality rate has declined by more than a quarter in the last two decades — to 65 per 1,000 live births last year from 90 in 1990 — in large part because of the widening distribution of relatively inexpensive technologies, like measles vaccines and anti-malaria mosquito nets.
Other simple practices have helped, public health experts say, including a rise in breast-feeding alone for the first six months of life, which protects children from diarrhea caused by dirty water.
Wealthy nations, international agencies and philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates have committed billions of dollars to the effort. Schoolchildren and church groups have also pitched in, paying for mosquito nets and feeding programs.
Taken together, they have helped cut the number of children under 5 who died last year to 8.8 million — the lowest since records were first kept in 1960, Unicef said — from 12.5 million in 1990.
“That’s 10,000 less children dying per day,” said Unicef’s executive director, Ann M. Veneman.
Even so, there is still a long way to go before achieving the goal set by leaders of 189 nations in 2000: to cut the child mortality rate by two-thirds by 2015. Pneumonia and diarrhea, the two leading causes of child deaths, are still relatively neglected, especially compared with malaria and measles, experts say.
“If we say as a world we care about saving children, and tackle the problem systematically, piece by piece, we can make progress, and it’s really important for people to know that,” Mrs. Gates said in an interview.
One of the most vertiginous drops in child mortality has occurred here, in a country so poor that half the children are stunted by malnutrition, so bereft of doctors and nurses that workers with 10th-grade educations dispense antibiotics. Yet for every 1,000 babies born here, 125 more children survived to their fifth birthdays in 2008 than did in 1990, the new figures show.
Malawi’s success and that of nations across the developing world was not inevitable. South Africa, the richest country in sub-Saharan Africa but afflicted with what its scientists and doctors describe as flawed political leadership on health policy over the past decade, is one of only four nations that experienced a rise in mortality rates for children under age 5 from 1990 to 2008. The others are Chad, Congo and Kenya, according to the new figures, which stem from an analysis of household surveys and other data by Unicef, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the United Nations population division.
Malawi illustrates the essence of the most successful efforts to reduce child mortality: it has found many creative ways to get the most cost-effective treatments and prevention methods to women and children, even in remote rural areas. Those interventions have included not just mosquito nets and vaccinations, but also deworming medicines and vitamin A supplements that boost children’s immunity.
Perhaps Malawi’s most powerful weapon is its ranks of more than 10,000 high school-educated village health workers. With a minimum 10 weeks of training, medical checklists to aid them in diagnosing childhood killers and hardy bicycles to get around, they dispense medicines and give injections, tasks only doctors and nurses do in many other countries.
“These days, when a child falls sick in the night, the mother can knock on the door of the health assistant,” said Teresa Frazier, 40. Her own 5-year-old daughter died after falling violently ill one night when Ms. Frazier was a young mother in a Malawian village of mud huts that, at the time, was many miles from the nearest medical help.
But as the sun went down on Monday, Ms. Frazier walked up to the tiny, two-room home of Blessings Mwaraya, 27, a health worker who lives amid banana, avocado and mango trees. Ms. Frazier, who gave birth to nine children, seven of whom survived, said she could not manage any more.
She had come for an injection of Depo Provera for birth control. Mr. Mwaraya, who earns $90 a month, painstakingly shook the little glass bottle containing the solution, drew it into the needle and stuck it in her arm. Health experts say family planning enables women to space births apart and have fewer children, aiding them in bearing healthier babies and better providing for them as they grow up.
“It’s still difficult to feed them all,” Ms. Frazier said of her surviving children, noting the paltry yield of corn on her small plot. Had Mr. Mwaraya been in the village in her younger days, she would have chosen to have had only four children, she said.
Mr. Mwaraya kept the Depo Provera in a plain wooden box, divided into compartments also stuffed with treatments for the main childhood killers: cotrimoxazole, a low-cost antibiotic, against pneumonia; oral rehydration salts for diarrhea; and Coartem, medicine for malaria.
“My interest was to assist my fellow Malawians who were falling sick but never had treatment at the village level,” said Mr. Mwaraya, dressed in a uniform of light blue pants and a short-sleeve jacket.
The pace of progress in Malawi and six other countries with some of the highest proportions of children dying — Nepal, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Laos, Mongolia and Bolivia — has been much steeper than the global average, the new data show. In each, child mortality rates have fallen at least 4.5 percent annually.
Here in Malawi, the mortality rate for children under 5 fell to 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 2008 from 225 in 1990 and 336 in 1970. Other poor nations, like Niger, Mozambique and Ethiopia, have also cut the number of deaths per 1,000 births by more than 100 since 1990, according to the new figures.
Doris Hebuye, a thin, sociable woman, listened from a distance one morning as her daughter Fanny, a new mother, cradled her 10-day-old baby. A health worker counseled Fanny Kasipati, 18, on the finer points of breast-feeding, the danger signs of sickness and choices for birth control.
As she sat outside their mud hut in the village of Tetheleya, Mrs. Hebuye’s eyes had a sad, faraway look as she described the deaths of two of her seven children — Gustus, at 3, and Margaret, at 1 —from causes she had never really understood.
“Malawi is changing for the better,” she said. “In those days, people gave birth without advice. These days, women are assisted in many ways.”
Malawi, China sign pact for two major projects
PowerRating -- Malawi's dream of having ultra-modern international conference center and a five-star hotel in the coming three years have come closer to fruition following Tuesday's signing of a pact between China and the Southern African nation.
The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding in the Malawian capital of Lilongwe through which Malawi will borrow about 92.3 million U.S. dollars from the Export-Import Bank of China for the construction of the two major projects that would completely change the face of Malawi's capital.
The Malawi National Assembly approved the loan facility in June, authorizing the government to borrow the funds to finance the construction of the International Conference Center and a five- star hotel alongside it.
Malawian Finance Minister Ken Kandodo who signed the pact on behalf of the government, said the two projects were some of the activities to be carried out pursuant to the framework of cooperation between Lilongwe and Beijing in support of Malawi's economic and social development agenda.
"Once this project is completed, Malawi will now have the capacity to ably host huge international conferences and meetings and the projects will also boost the country's tourism sector," Kandodo said.
The minister commended China for taking a keen interest in supporting Malawi's efforts of developing the country through various multi-million U.S. dollar ventures.
On his part, Chinese Ambassador to Malawi Lin Songtian expressed his happiness that the projects had now taken off with the signing of the memorandum by the governments of the countries.
Lin, who signed the pact on behalf of the Chinese government, disclosed that contractors who would build the conference center and the hotel were already set to embark on the project.
"Construction equipment for the two projects has already been assembled and is awaiting shipment to Malawi. The equipment should be here in the coming three months," said the Chinese ambassador.
The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding in the Malawian capital of Lilongwe through which Malawi will borrow about 92.3 million U.S. dollars from the Export-Import Bank of China for the construction of the two major projects that would completely change the face of Malawi's capital.
The Malawi National Assembly approved the loan facility in June, authorizing the government to borrow the funds to finance the construction of the International Conference Center and a five- star hotel alongside it.
Malawian Finance Minister Ken Kandodo who signed the pact on behalf of the government, said the two projects were some of the activities to be carried out pursuant to the framework of cooperation between Lilongwe and Beijing in support of Malawi's economic and social development agenda.
"Once this project is completed, Malawi will now have the capacity to ably host huge international conferences and meetings and the projects will also boost the country's tourism sector," Kandodo said.
The minister commended China for taking a keen interest in supporting Malawi's efforts of developing the country through various multi-million U.S. dollar ventures.
On his part, Chinese Ambassador to Malawi Lin Songtian expressed his happiness that the projects had now taken off with the signing of the memorandum by the governments of the countries.
Lin, who signed the pact on behalf of the Chinese government, disclosed that contractors who would build the conference center and the hotel were already set to embark on the project.
"Construction equipment for the two projects has already been assembled and is awaiting shipment to Malawi. The equipment should be here in the coming three months," said the Chinese ambassador.
Malawi: Community based rural land development project
1. Key development issues and rationale for Bank involvement
Malawi's economy is agro-based. Agriculture contributes around 36 % of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), provides 85% of employment and contributes 90% of foreign exchange earnings. Over 90% of the total agricultural value-added comes from about 1.8 million smallholders who on average own 1.0ha of land. Land pressure is particularly high in the southern region of Malawi where per capita average landholding sizes are less than 0.2 ha. About 1.1 million hectares of land is held in some 30,000 estates, with an average landholding size ranging from 10 to 500 hectares.
One of the key constraints to smallholder productivity in Malawi is the small land holding size. The Poverty and Vulnerability Assessment (PVA) indicates that average cultivable land holding is less than 1 hectare (0.90 ha) and just about 0.2 ha per capita. About 58 percent of the farmers cultivate on less than 1 ha, of which about 11 percent are near landless. Only 13 percent cultivate on more than 2 ha and the majority of these are in the north where population density is still very low (about 50 people per km2).
However, such pressure exists in the face of underutilized land in both the estate and customary sector. Land distribution is sharply unequal and overcrowded arable land exists next to underutilized leasehold land. Based on estimates from land utilization studies undertaken in 1996, about 2.6 million hectares (about 28 percent) of suitable agricultural land under estate and customary tenure remain uncultivated or underutilized. Current Government estimates however indicate that approximately 600,000 hectares are currently idle, and it is this land that has been the target for redistribution under the project.
The major policy issues for the land sector in Malawi evolve around equity of access, security of tenure and sustainability of land use and use of land-based resources. The Government has been piloting the Community-based Rural land Development Project (CBRLDP) since 2004, in an attempt to introduce policies and strategies that will improve land use efficiency by bringing idle land into production using non-distortionary approaches. The CBRLDP is piloting a 'transparent, voluntary, legal and resource-supported approach to land redistribution. Its key principles include being market-assisted, community- driven and focusing on rural areas, where poverty is most pervasive.
Malawi's economy is agro-based. Agriculture contributes around 36 % of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), provides 85% of employment and contributes 90% of foreign exchange earnings. Over 90% of the total agricultural value-added comes from about 1.8 million smallholders who on average own 1.0ha of land. Land pressure is particularly high in the southern region of Malawi where per capita average landholding sizes are less than 0.2 ha. About 1.1 million hectares of land is held in some 30,000 estates, with an average landholding size ranging from 10 to 500 hectares.
One of the key constraints to smallholder productivity in Malawi is the small land holding size. The Poverty and Vulnerability Assessment (PVA) indicates that average cultivable land holding is less than 1 hectare (0.90 ha) and just about 0.2 ha per capita. About 58 percent of the farmers cultivate on less than 1 ha, of which about 11 percent are near landless. Only 13 percent cultivate on more than 2 ha and the majority of these are in the north where population density is still very low (about 50 people per km2).
However, such pressure exists in the face of underutilized land in both the estate and customary sector. Land distribution is sharply unequal and overcrowded arable land exists next to underutilized leasehold land. Based on estimates from land utilization studies undertaken in 1996, about 2.6 million hectares (about 28 percent) of suitable agricultural land under estate and customary tenure remain uncultivated or underutilized. Current Government estimates however indicate that approximately 600,000 hectares are currently idle, and it is this land that has been the target for redistribution under the project.
The major policy issues for the land sector in Malawi evolve around equity of access, security of tenure and sustainability of land use and use of land-based resources. The Government has been piloting the Community-based Rural land Development Project (CBRLDP) since 2004, in an attempt to introduce policies and strategies that will improve land use efficiency by bringing idle land into production using non-distortionary approaches. The CBRLDP is piloting a 'transparent, voluntary, legal and resource-supported approach to land redistribution. Its key principles include being market-assisted, community- driven and focusing on rural areas, where poverty is most pervasive.
HELP IN STOPING ILLEGAL DEPORTATION OF NELLY SAMU KUTAMA
A Mother of two’s last-ditch plea to Home Office against deportation
Zimbabwean Lady, Nelly Samu is due to be removed on Friday 11th September 2009, by flight KQ101 to Malawi at 20:00hrs
Nelly Samu and her Friends are being held at Yarl’s Wood detention centre
A Zimbabwean mother who has been refused asylum by Britain despite being a victim of Robert Mugabe yesterday revealed her terror at being sent back to the Malawi. History reveals that Malawi has never accommodated any Zimbabwean who seek refuge this was proven during the liberation struggle were Zimbabweans caught in Malawi were sent to Prison and handed to the Smith regime. The Lady has got two Children back in Zimbabwe who have been looking forward to join the mother if she had been granted stay in UK. Writing from her cell in Yarl’s Wood detention centre, Nelly Samu said she could not believe the UK Government was handing a “death sentence” to her and her friend Bridget Mhepo. The lady is booked on a flight from Heathrow to Malawi tomorrow, but the solicitors will lodge an application for judicial review hours earlier after their visit tomorrow, giving them a crucial delay in the proceedings. It is also a shame to note that some Zimbabwean Lawyer in Birmingham have refused to represent Nelly Samu after having failed to make payment for the pending case which has not been resolved. I would like the law society to act on such anomalies to end this kind of treatment to Asylum cases. I believe this is not just the case of Zimbabweans but all the people in detention have got to be respected and the right for life has been taken from these individuals faced with such treatment I just wonder what happened to the Gardener act which states that no one if removed forcible from the UK. The Home Office has refused to grant her asylum because she entered Britain on Malawian passports. However she had used this as a means of escape from Zimbabwe four years ago, meaning it is almost certain they will end up being sent to their home country. Nelly Samu, whose husband was killed in a hit and run London on A13 in 24 December 2001, News paper cutting for the story covering her husband’s tragic death in the London Recorder 02/01/02. She arrived in Britain in 2005, to try and chase after the compensation of the loss of her Husband Andrew Kutama In her note, yesterday, Nelly Samu, 41, said she would be sent to jail in Malawi for her fraudulent documentation, before being deported to Zimbabwe, where they face torture and death. “I can’t believe that the Government can’t see how much this is torture I have already suffering while I am here. As soon as I get to Zimbabwe, no matter where I am going to be, my life is in danger. “I call this a death sentence. I know people might ask why I am so afraid, but I know what I have gone through. I have been trying to be strong for my two daughters and with the help from my friends in Loughborough, but now I can smell torture and death. “All these years I have been here I had started to feel comfortable and have a sense of belonging… I had started to rebuild my live and hoping to be given permission to stay. Everybody knows what is going to happen when I am to be returned to Malawi. It is facing death. Only God knows what I am going through.” The Lady’s MP, Andy Reed, has raised his concern for Nelly Samu by writing a letter ref: SAMU01004 dated 2 September 2009, Re: Immigration status of Nelly Samu, 5a Great Central Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 1RW I Write on behalf of my above named Constituent who is at present detained in your Detention Centre. I am most concerned that my constituent has not had an opportunity to have a fair assessment made of her immigration status. I am therefore requesting that my constituent is given an opportunity to have her immigration status looked into before any action is taken to remove her from the UK. My constituent requires legal assistance and this is being arranged for her. Would you kindly acknowledge safe receipt of this message. My fax number is 01509212159 Thank you very much for your assistance. Yours Faithfully ANDY REED MP Member of Parliament for Loughborough The Home Office insists it has followed proper procedures. Please read and share with FRIENDS AND FAMILY give your own opinion about this kind of behaviour for I am sick and tired of hearing such injustice humanitarian treatment to my fellow Zimbabweans and the other Nationalities. Send a copy to Home Office and share your concern. One would wish themselves dead if receiving such treatment and discrimination. She has got all to prove that she is Zimbabwean but the Home Office has turned a blind eye to such proof. A Zimbabweans Nelly Samu who has been refused Asylum by Britain despite being a victim of Robert Mugabe she has revealed her terror at being sent back to the country. The saddening story is that she suffers epilepsy while in detention and she has fallen victim to the culture of disbelief in the courts and have proven their being Zimbabweans by Zimbabwean National Registration Card, Kutama, Death Certificate of Andrew Kutama(late Husband run of by a car in London A13 in 24 December 2001) No compensation receive for the loss of a husband, Marriage Certificate, Original Zimbabwean Birth Certificate, UNHCR letter May 2004, and News paper cutting for the story covering her husband’s tragic death in the London Recorder 02/01/02. She has been held in detention as Jestina Mukoko was in the Hands of Zanu Pf Government which is preaching Unity Government, is the same thing which Jacqui Smith is preaching of Democracy & Human rights abuse by Mugabe yet she is holding the likes of Nelly Samu, Bridget Mhepo and many other Southern African Nationals. I would like to bring this out to the world that they may understand the ruthlessness of the British system when it comes to Black people. Zimbabwe my home and my frustration, I wish I was a dog here in UK for they are well protected than Asylum or Illegal migrants (Black African Zimbabweans) who can here using foreign passports which I find it conflicting with the 1951 Geneva Conference that a person could use any documentation when fleeing their own country. In our culture no one would use the door to exit when the enemy is standing by the door they would use any other means. I have got profound evidence that the Minister Dydimus Mutasa did not use a Rhodesian passport to come to the UK in the early 60s. I would want the world to judge such injustice faced with the Zimbabweans in the detention centers around United Kingdom. I wish to hear the response of the Secretary of state. Regards Preacher Prince Muguza Administration Public Relations Nottingham Zimbabwe Community Network
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