Nubians in Kenya Appeal for their "Right to Existence"

So, at the very least, birth in a country to should gain on citizenship. What about those Somalis who have been there for decades. I guess there should be some sort of process to becoming a citizen, yes? But, worse, the conditions of their habitation seems akin to internment camps.

What to do?

I started trying to fill out this "Africa" section of A2K a while back and got almost no response from the members here and little if any interest from people outside A2K. The subject of Africa, for whatever reason, seems to not even invoke outrage and action from the most liberal members of this liberal website.

bump

I think Africa is beleagured by tribalism - and many African countries find it very hard to see beyond it, I think.

An old friend of ours - who was a political refugee in Oz during the Ian Smith regime in the then Rhodesia - and who flew back to take his place in the new Zimbabwean government when that regime toppled, used to talk a lot about that and had a very pessimistic view medium term view about his own country, and Africa generally - partly due to that.

God - I wonder if Mugabe has killed him and his family? Sigh - anyhoo....




It is interesting, we come from countries who accept immigration and the presence of ethnic minorities as a matter of course (your country, 'k, having a longer history of this, and hence a more accepting attitude - I THINK). I think this is VERY unusual, really. Certainly most Asian countries do not look fondly on immigration - and I think Europe is grappling with it recently- and has had similar fracture lines where dumb treaties and political carvings up placed disparate folk in the same country.

I do wonder if countries not practiced at assimilation/multi-culturalism - and where large numbers of people struggle to meet basic needs - have less of an investment in solving these problems?

Good point about familiarity with immigration. Funny to think that America is good about immigrants. Even with our long history of accepting people from all over, we don't always do it very well.

I thought Kenya was one of the wealthier African countries.

The problem is not uniquely African though. After declaring their independence, Estonia and Latvia adopted citizenship laws that, although arguably defensible from a perspective of historical justice, left hundreds of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians etc without citizenship. Having moved to the Baltics sometime during the near-five decades of Soviet occupation, they did not qualify for citizenship, and were left with only their old, no longer valid Soviet passports. For something like a decade (the problem is now gradually being solved, I believe) they were thus left without the possibility of international travel, without the right to vote and without access to many state facilities.

mmm, but were the non citizens shunted to the wastelands?

Prolly is by African standards:

"A situational analysis of poverty in Kenya
Estimating poverty profiles in Kenya: methodologies for monitoring the impact of PRSPs
Kimalu, P. Nafula, N. Manda, D. K. Mwabu, G. Kimenyi, M. / Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) , 2002

According to the 1997 welfare monitoring survey, more than half of Kenya’s population was poor. Growth-led poverty-reduction approaches in Kenya have been criticised on the grounds that they ignore the non-income aspects of poverty. The authors also note how recent development experiences indicate that rapid and politically sustainable progress on poverty reduction has been achieved by pursuing a strategy that has the two key elements of promoting broad-based economic growth and providing basic social services to the poor.

The Kenyan government, together with donors, the private sector, the civil society and other stakeholders, therefore prepared a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) to fight poverty. However, to ascertain and monitor the impact of such programmes and projects from time to time, estimates of poverty indices and profiles at different points in time are necessary. This paper therefore attempts to estimate poverty indices and profiles for the year 2000 using poverty estimates based on 1994 and 1997 welfare monitoring surveys.

The paper therefore claims to establish a methodology for updating existing poverty rates. In particular, it establishes baseline poverty rates for 2000, which can be used to assess progress in reducing poverty over the period 2001–2003. The authors note however, that to make such an assessment, information is needed on the change in growth and income distribution that can be attributable to antipoverty measures. It is assumed that certain changes in economic conditions and distribution over the period 2001–2003 would be identified with investments to reduce poverty."

http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC11216.htm




See here also:

http://www.worldbank.org/afr/findings/english/find55.htm



http://www.uneca.org/era2002/kit/era_theeastAfrica.htm


http://www.povertymap.net/casestudy/kenya.cfm


http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC9379.htm

The Balkans seems a very fair comparison, doesn't it?

I wonder if that is just incomprehensible to non-Europeans?

I like this website.....

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ke.html

Yeah - I just don't like to encourage the CIA!

I don't really either, and I don't assume they divulge all info on that website, but they have good basic facts, I think.

Kenya has 50% of it's population below poverty and a 40% unemployment rate.

Liberia has 80% below poverty and 85% unemployed.

Sudan - 40% and 18.7%

S Africa - 50% and 26.2%

There's a page on the world as a whole: "30% combined unemployment and underemployment in many non-industrialized countries; developed countries typically 4%-12% unemployment."

No, I don't think the Balkans have had the non-citizens problem, the taking away or leaving people void of citizenship and rendering them stateless that way. Not since communism, anyway (Zhivkov's Bulgaria comes to mind). Well, perhaps some Roma.

(And Little K, you're right of course; the Baltics comparison did not extend to the same lengths. But the bit about people forcibly losing their citizenship and all accompanying rights is not all that 'exotic', is what I'd wanted to point out.)

The CIA World Factbook is always a good resource to get the basics from.