A Nigerian poverty female minister ‘had 19million British pounds in several of her bank accounts:

18 April, 2024

 

By World Media

 

A corruption investigation into a suspended Nigerian minister whose job is to help poverty-stricken people has recovered £19 million from more than 50 bank accounts, a financial watchdog has alleged.

Betta Edu, the humanitarian affairs and poverty alleviation minister, has been suspended since January over the alleged diversion of £505,000 of public money into a personal bank account.

Nigeria’s economic and financial crimes commission has now said that after six weeks investigating the ministry, it had found “many angles” to examine, the BBC reported.

Ola Olukoyede, the commission chairman, told the latest edition of the agency’s newsletter: “As it is now, we are investigating over 50 bank accounts that we have traced money into.

“That is no child’s play. That’s a big deal.”

President Bola Tinubu in early January ordered “a thorough investigation into all aspects of the financial transaction”, and officials suspended several government aid programmes.

At the time Dr Edu, 37, denied any wrongdoing. Her office said she had approved the transfer into a personal account, which was not in her name, but said it was for the “implementation of grants to vulnerable groups”.

The recovered money had already been transferred to government coffers, Mr Olukoyede said, but warned that the investigation could be lengthy.

He said: “We are exploring so many discoveries that we have stumbled upon in our investigation. 

“If it is about seeing people in jail, well let them wait, everything has a process to follow.”

Nigerians complain that Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country remains plagued by corruption, despite regular government vows to clean it up.

The country in 2023 scored 25 on Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index, where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.

 

 

Omuddukirize wo bubudamo wano Mubwakabaka bwa Buganda(African refugee) nga ava Congo, ow'emyaka 93 abadde asula n'emisota, ne mubwavu obuyitirivu anunuddwa:

Mulindwa nga atawaana ne refugee we Congo atafuna nga ko buyambi bwonna wano Mubwakabaka bwa Buganda!
 
 
6 November, 2023

 

Bya Tonny Kayemba

 

MZEE Sylvano Ssengendo 93, Omutuuze w'e Kalagala mu ggombolola y'e Nakifuma mu Mukono ng’ ono abadde asula mu nnyumba eri mu mbeera embi era ng’ejudde emisota anunuddwa.

Ssengendo  ennyumba mw'abade asula ebadde yaggwaako oludda era nga yasibako bisanja nga enkuba bw’etonya emugwerako kw’ossa okulwanagana n'emisota egibadde gimuyingirira buli kiseera okuva mu kisiko ekimwetoolodde.

Ono olumu abadde asula njala oluvannyuma lw'okubulwa eky'okulya n’akimutusaako ate nga ataawanyizibwa ekirwadde kya aniya ekyetaaga okulongoosebwa.

Ono nga teyazaala mwana  nga ne baganda be agamba bafiira mu lutalo e Congo gye baali basibuka ye kwe kuwangangukira mu Uganda.

Ekifulukwa kyabadde asulamu kyamuweebwa eyali mukama we wabula eyafa n’amulekawo ng'ono ennaku wabadde agiyonkera yonkera obutaaba okutuusa bwe yadduukiriddwa abazirakisa .

Rashid Mulindwa Omutandisi w'ekitongole ekirabirira abataliiko mwasirizi ekya Ekirooto Mission Charity Organization ekisangibwa e Kireka mu Munisipaali y'e Kira yadduukiridde omukadde ono n’ebikozesebwa mu bulamu obwabulijjo era  nga yamupangisiriza ennyumba mwe yamusengukidde wamu n'okumugulira ebikozesebwa okuli: Omufaliso, bulangiti, amasuuka, ebbaafu, wamu n'ebyokulya ebitandikibwako wamu n'engoye.

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Mulindwa(kkono) nga ali nomukadde munyumba gyamufunidde okupangisa 

 

 

The Judiciary worker, Mr Kisambira doesn't regret murder-suicide threats as junior workers in Uganda receive petty wages compared to their senior workers:

 

By World Media

Stanley Kisambira (R) talking to the media

Judiciary driver Stanley Kisambira whose audio clips in which he threatened to commit murder-suicide so as to kill a judge and his bodyguard has responded to the permanent secretary who gave him only five days to defend himself.

In a defense written by his lawyers from the Centre for Legal Aid, Kisambira says he doesn't regret his statements and has asked the judiciary PS Dr Pius Bigirimana to cease from further absurdity.

 

Kisambira, a driver of Mbale High court judge Godfrey Namundi can be heard in the audio clips complaining about salary disparities in the judiciary for drivers and expressing his dissatisfaction with earning Shs 200,000 since joining the justice system in 2008.

 

In the same clip, Kisambira is heard saying he is very annoyed, disgusted and can even ram into a stationary vehicle and kill a principal, bodyguard, and himself - three people at once which is more painful compared to a bodyguard who only kills one principal. This was in reference to the recent murder of the state minister of Labour, Employment and Industrial Relations by his own bodyguard Wilson Sabiiti.

 

In a May 16 letter, Bigirimana accused Kisambira of misconduct, saying he would have used the right means as provided for under the public service standing orders as a public servant, other than running to social media to address his grievances.

 

"Inciting violence and threatening to intentionally cause an accident is unprofessional, criminal and punishable in the strongest terms. In addition, uttering false information that you are only paid Shs 200,000 contravenes section F-r of the public service standing orders."

 

As such, Bigirimana asked Kisambira in the letter to explain his act of gross misconduct within five days of receipt of this letter. Failure to do this, Bigirimana threatened to subject Kisambira to disciplinary measures including dismissal from the judiciary.

 

But in response, Kisambira's lawyers say that it was premature for Bigirimana who is also the judiciary's accounting officer to convict him of gross misconduct.

 

"Further to yours HC/P 10701 dated 16 May 2023, prematurely convicting our client of gross misconduct” and threatening to subject him to “further disciplinary measures including dismissal from the judiciary service,” we are instructed to reply as follows," reads the one-paged letter response.

 

The letter adds: "With great respect, your indecorously worded missive was not only premature and misconceived, but has also brought the judiciary service into disrepute."

 

According to Kisambira's lawyers, their client accepts no liability whatsoever for the contents or circulation of the audio clip at issue.

 

"A private communication, it contains protected political opinion and does not reasonably imply what you allege (incitement to violence, threatening accidents, uttering false information, etc).... as you rightly stated, our client did the right thing to express his dissatisfaction." reads the letter.

 

According to the Centre for Legal Aid, Bigirimana's reference to section p–b of the Uganda Public Service Standing Orders 2021 which talks about the procedure for conducting government, is plainly disingenuous and hereby "denounced, with contempt".

 

"You stretched the interpretation of that section by falsely implying that the alleged audio clip was an “official correspondence…which came into the possession of our client in the course of his official duties...Please cease and desist from further absurdity," advises the letter.

 

The lawyers further indicate that Kisambira enjoys what they have described as absolute immunity under the law to freely express his dissatisfaction in a peaceful manner, without fear of retaliation or victimization by his employer or the state.

 

"Take further notice that pursuant to sections 6(1) and 75(g) of the Employment Act 2006, you are barred from targeting an employee's political opinion as the reason for dismissal or imposition of a disciplinary penalty," adds the response.

 

To support their response, the lawyers have quoted several laws that they say Bigirimana as accounting officer of the judiciary should have looked upon before writing to Kisambira. They say the public service regulations on code of conduct further bars him from implementing any disciplinary procedure before the completion of proper investigations.

 

Accordingly, they have asked Bigirimana to terminate what they have described as a travesty of justice, and immediately provide Kisambira a decent package of appropriate interventions to address his dissatisfaction.

 

Following the audios by Kisambira, he was arrested and detained at Kampala Central police station for two days but he was later released on police bond.

 

Sources in police said that he had to be released because it was not right in their view to take him to court simply because he had talked about his grievances and that the best solution is for the judiciary to review his salary.

 

On social media platforms, Kisambira has been hailed as brave for exposing the low salaries of judiciary rank-and-file members. A fundraising campaign has been initiated to support Kisambira in obtaining legal representation and welfare.

 

The campaign encourages donations, emphasizing Kisambira's role as a whistleblower who spoke out about the exploitation of the judiciary. The flyer states, "Kisambira is ready to be punished or sacked but won't be silenced."

Nb

It is a very good debate that is going on especially for the workers' pay in this country just after the recent celebration of the International Workers' Day on 1st May, 2023.

Apart from that African politics of Uganda National Resistance Movement, the workers day celebrations were about a living wage.

 

The Union members and their struggles all over the world have their International Workers Movement. Eight-hour day movement that advocated 8 hours work for any worker. 8 hours recreation. And 8 hours rest.

One cannot see any wrong with this worker discussing about his small wages as compared to the wages of some of the African workers who are very rich multi-millionaires in this country!

 

 

IN UGANDA, THERE SHOULD BE EFFORTS TO ESTABLISH AN AFRICAN SOCIAL WELFARE:

The Inspector General of Government, Ms. Kamya has decided to audit the lifestyle lives of government officials so that she can be able to arrest corrupt officials:

 24 October, 2021

The new Inspector General of Government, Ms Beti Kamya. PHOTO/DAVID LUBOWA

The office of Inspector General of Government (IGG) plans to adopt lifestyle audit to catch corrupt public officials in the next five years. 

IGG Beti Kamya said her vision is to quickly reverse the massive theft in public offices by making citizens know that the cost of corruption is why they cannot have the services they pay for.

“We want to exhibit the faces of corruption in every classroom, living room place of worship, entertainment and every bedroom so that everybody can recognise it,” she said.

Ms Kamya, who was meeting the European Union (EU) delegation led by Ambassador Attilio Pacifici in Kampala on Thursday, cited the case of multi-billion property confiscated by the court from Geoffrey Kazinda and forfeited to government.

Ms Kamya said in the lifestyle audit, the IGG would push for even primary school children to recognise illicit wealth at home and ask their parents whether their salary can afford the new expensive car, luxurious houses, overseas schools and holidays they enjoy abroad.

 

The poor African man with a walking stick

 

“We want teachers in posh schools to give home work to their 10-year-olds in 5th Grade to write down their fathers name, place of work, job title, and car they drive and its cost, a picture of their houses and discuss it openly in class,” she said.

Ms Kamya said she also wants adults and children to start being embarrassed and ashamed of their unexplainable wealth.

“We value our engagement with the Speaker of Parliament Jacob Oulanyah and ask for support to rally MPs in the fight and we intend to engage the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice and the Leader of Opposition in Parliament,” she added.

Findings

Ms Kamya said preliminary findings show that Uganda is losing Shs20 trillion annually to corruption, which totals our entire annual revenue collection from taxes.

“It is criminal that poor Ugandan break their backs to work and pay taxes, but very few people take it all for themselves to live luxurious lifestyle and have massive wealth that they cannot consume in their lifetime,” she said.

Ms Patricia Achan, the deputy IGG, said through the Leadership Code Act, they will raise the verification activity, beginning with the staff of the IGG, then verify wealth declaration of all accounting officers.

“The intention is to rescue at least 20 percent of the Shs20 trillion lost per year,” she said.

 “We need to give corruption a face, unmask and expose its face so that everybody can recognise it. It will incite Ugandan to despise it, hate and avoid it,” she said.

Ms Cissy Kagaba, the executive director of Anti-Corruption Coalition Uganda, said adopting the lifestyle audit was a good measure, but the IGG should capture every one and not pick on only a few individuals.

“After the lifestyle auditing, we want to know what next because people often make declarations, but the issue of verification has been a challenge,” she said.

 

About lifestyle audit

Lifestyle audits, also known as lifestyle checks or lifestyle monitoring, are an accountability tool that can be used to detect and prevent corruption. Such audits are conducted when the visible lifestyle or standard of living of an individual appears to exceed their known income level. The detection of such discrepancies can raise the red flag, warranting closer inspection.

In such instances, an assessment of the individual’s income, assets and investments can be undertaken to determine if such seemingly extravagant expenditures could have come from illicit gains. If the audit shows a mismatch between a person’s known income and assets compared to their lifestyle and spending patterns, then there is an increased risk that the person is deriving alternative income from sources that constitute a conflict of interest or illegal activity, including embezzlement and bribery.

As verification often includes assessments of an official’s household, the approach is particularly helpful in detecting whether corrupt proceeds could have been under the names of family members or associates.

Lifestyle audits are best used in conjunction with other anti-corruption measures, including the criminalisation of illicit enrichment, establishing obligations for regular declarations of assets, incomes and interests, as well as unexplained wealth orders.

However, the viability of this approach is contingent on public access to the content of asset and income declarations, and the interest and ability of civil society to engage in lifestyle audits concealed.

Source: Transparency International

THERE IS POVERTY IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY OF THE WORLD THAT IS AMERICA

Posted on 17th December, 2017

A journey through a land of extreme poverty: Welcome to North American States:

17 December, 2017
By Guardian paper
M/s Ressy Finley, lives in a tent on the 6th Street in downtown LA

LOS ANGELES – “You got a choice to make, man. You could go straight on to heaven. Or you could turn right, into that.”

We are in Los Angeles, in the heart of one of America’s wealthiest cities, and General Dogon, dressed in black, is our tour guide. Alongside him strolls another tall man, grey-haired and sprucely decked out in jeans and suit jacket. Professor Philip Alston is an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

General Dogon, himself a veteran of these Skid Row streets, strides along, stepping over a dead rat without comment and skirting round a body wrapped in a worn orange blanket lying on the sidewalk.

The two men carry on for block after block after block of tatty tents and improvised tarpaulin shelters. Men and women are gathered outside the structures, squatting or sleeping, some in groups, most alone like extras in a low-budget dystopian movie.

We come to an intersection, which is when General Dogon stops and presents his guest with the choice. He points straight ahead to the end of the street, where the glistening skyscrapers of downtown LA rise up in a promise of divine riches.

Heaven.

Then he turns to the right, revealing the “black power” tattoo on his neck, and leads our gaze back into Skid Row bang in the center of LA’s downtown. That way lies 50 blocks of concentrated human humiliation. A nightmare in plain view, in the city of dreams.

 

The tour comes at a critical moment for America and the world. It began on the day that Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted for sweeping tax cuts that will deliver a bonanza for the super wealthy while in time raising taxes on many lower-income families. The changes will exacerbate wealth inequality that is already the most extreme in any industrialized nation, with three men – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet – owning as much as half of the entire American people.

A few days into the UN visit, Republican leaders took a giant leap further. They announced plans to slash key social programs in what amounts to an assault on the already threadbare welfare state.

“Look up! Look at those banks, the cranes, the luxury condos going up,” exclaimed General Dogon, who used to be homeless on Skid Row and now works as a local activist with Lacan. “Down here, there’s nothing. You see the tents back to back, there’s no place for folks to go.”

California made a suitable starting point for the UN visit. It epitomizes both the vast wealth generated in the tech boom for the 0.001%, and the resulting surge in housing costs that has sent homelessness soaring. Los Angeles, the city with by far the largest population of street dwellers in the country, is grappling with crisis numbers that increased 25% this past year to 55,000.

The richest 1% now own a staggering portion of the world's wealth 

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path toward drugs and homelessness.

Given all that, it’s remarkable how positive Finley remains. What does she think of the American Dream, the idea that everyone can make it if they try hard enough? She replies instantly: “I know I’m going to make it.”

A 41-year-old woman living on the sidewalk in Skid Row going to make it?

“Sure I will, so long as I keep the faith.”

What does “making it” mean to her?

“I want to be a writer, a poet, an entrepreneur, a therapist.”

 

Robert Chambers occupies the next patch of sidewalk along from Finley’s. He’s created an area around his tent out of wooden pallets, what passes in Skid Row for a cottage garden.

He has a sign up saying "Homeless Writers Coalition," the name of a group he runs to give homeless people dignity against what he calls the “animalistic” aspects of their lives. He’s referring not least to the lack of public bathrooms that forces people to relieve themselves on the streets.

LA authorities have promised to provide more access to toilets, a critical issue given the deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A that began in San Diego and is spreading on the West Coast claiming 21 lives mainly through lack of sanitation in homeless encampments. At night local parks and amenities are closed specifically to keep homeless people out.

Skid Row has had the use of nine toilets at night for 1,800 street-faring people. That’s a ratio well below that mandated by the UN in its camps for Syrian refugees.

“It’s inhuman actually, and eventually in the end you will acquire animalistic psychology,” Chambers said.

He has been living on the streets for almost a year, having violated his parole terms for drug possession and in turn being turfed out of his low-cost apartment. There’s no help for him now, he said, no question of “making it”.

“The safety net? It has too many holes in it for me.”

Of all the people who crossed paths with the UN monitor, Chambers was the most dismissive of the American Dream. “People don’t realize – it’s never getting better, there’s no recovery for people like us. I’m 67, I have a heart condition, I shouldn’t be out here. I might not be too much longer."

That was a lot of bad karma to absorb on day one, and it rattled even as seasoned a student of hardship as Alston. As UN special rapporteur, he’s reported on dire poverty and its impact on human rights in Saudi Arabia and China among other places. But Skid Row?

“I was feeling pretty depressed,” he told the Guardian later. “The endless drumbeat of horror stories. At a certain point you do wonder what can anyone do about this, let alone me.”

And then he took a flight up to San Francisco, to the Tenderloin district where homeless people congregate, and walked into St Boniface church.

What he saw there was an analgesic for his soul.

San Francisco, California

About 70 homeless people were quietly sleeping in pews at the back of the church, as they are allowed to do every weekday morning, with worshippers praying harmoniously in front of them. The church welcomes them in as part of the Catholic concept of extending the helping hand.

“I found the church surprisingly uplifting,” Alston said. “It was such a simple scene and such an obvious idea. It struck me – Christianity, what the hell is it about if it’s not this?”

It was a rare drop of altruism on the West Coast, competing against a sea of hostility. More than 500 anti-homeless laws have been passed in Californian cities in recent years. At a federal level, Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who Donald Trump appointed U.S. housing secretary, is decimating government spending on affordable housing.

Perhaps the most telling detail: apart from St Boniface and its sister church, no other place of worship in San Francisco welcomes homeless people. In fact, many have begun, even at this season of goodwill, to lock their doors to all comers simply so as to exclude homeless people.

As Tiny Gray-Garcia, herself on the streets, described it to Alston, there is a prevailing attitude that she and her peers have to contend with every day. She called it the "violence of looking away."

 

That cruel streak – the violence of looking away – has been a feature of American life since the nation’s founding. The casting off the yoke of overweening government (the British monarchy) came to be equated in the minds of many Americans with states’ rights and the individualistic idea of making it on your own – a view that is fine for those fortunate enough to do so, less happy if you’re born on the wrong side of the tracks.

Countering that has been the conviction that society must protect its own against the vagaries of hunger or unemployment that informed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. But in recent times the prevailing winds have blown strongly in the “you’re on your own, buddy” direction. Ronald Reagan set the trend with his 1980s tax cuts, followed by Bill Clinton, whose 1996 decision to scrap welfare payments for low-income families is still punishing millions of Americans.

The cumulative attack has left struggling families, including the 15 million children who are officially in poverty, with dramatically less support than in any other industrialized economy. Now they face perhaps the greatest threat of all.

As Alston himself has written in an essay on Trump’s populism and the aggressive challenge it poses to human rights: “These are extraordinarily dangerous times. Almost anything seems possible.”

Lowndes County, Alabama

Trump’s undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.

Black people are 13% of the U.S. population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

The racial element of America’s poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed. The UN special rapporteur chose as his next stop the “Black Belt,” the term that originally referred to the rich dark soil that exists in a band across Alabama but over time came to describe its majority African American population.

The link between soil type and demographics was not coincidental. Cotton was found to thrive in this fertile land, and that in turn spawned a trade in slaves to pick the crop. Their descendants still live in the Black Belt, still mired in poverty among the worst in the union.

You can trace the history of America’s shame, from slave times to the present day, in a set of simple graphs. The first shows the cotton-friendly soil of the Black Belt, then the slave population, followed by modern black residence and today’s extreme poverty – they all occupy the exact same half-moon across Alabama.

There are numerous ways you could parse the present parlous state of Alabama’s black community. Perhaps the starkest is the fact that in the Black Belt so many families still have no access to sanitation. Thousands of people continue to live among open sewers of the sort normally associated with the developing world.

The crisis was revealed by the Guardian earlier this year to have led to an ongoing endemic of hookworm, an intestinal parasite that is transmitted through human waste. It is found in Africa and South Asia, but had been assumed eradicated in the U.S. years ago.

Yet here the worm still is, sucking the blood of poor people, in the home state of Trump’s U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions.

A disease of the developing world thriving in the world’s richest country.

The open sewerage problem is especially acute in Lowndes County, a majority black community that was an epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965.

Despite its proud history, Catherine Flowers estimates that 70% of households in the area either “straight pipe” their waste directly onto open ground, or have defective septic tanks incapable of dealing with heavy rains.

When her group, Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (Acre), pressed local authorities to do something about it, officials invested $6 million in extending waste treatment systems to primarily white-owned businesses while bypassing overwhelmingly black households.

“That’s a glaring example of injustice,” Flowers said. “People who cannot afford their own systems are left to their own devices while businesses who do have the money are given public services.”

Walter, a Lowndes County resident who asked not to give his last name for fear that his water supply would be cut off as a reprisal for speaking out, lives with the daily consequences of such public neglect. “You get a good hard rain and it backs up into the house.”

That’s a polite way of saying that sewerage gurgles up into his kitchen sink, hand basin and bath, filling the house with a sickly-sweet stench.

Given these circumstances, what does he think of the ideology that anyone can make it if they try?

“I suppose they could if they had the chance,” Walter said. He paused, then added: “Folks aren’t given the chance.”

Had he been born white, would his sewerage problems have been fixed by now?

After another pause, he said: “Not being racist, but yeah, they would.”

Round the back of Walter’s house the true iniquity of the situation reveals itself. The yard is laced with small channels running from neighboring houses along which dark liquid flows. It congregates in viscous pools directly underneath the mobile home in which Walter’s son, daughter-in-law and 16-year-old granddaughter live.

It is the ultimate image of the lot of Alabama’s impoverished rural black community. As American citizens they are as fully entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s just that they are surrounded by pools of excrement.

This week, the Black Belt bit back. On Tuesday a new line was added to that simple graphic, showing exactly the same half-moon across Alabama except this time it was not black but blue.

 

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Alabama secretary of state

 

It depicted the army of African American voters who turned out against the odds to send Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate, the first Democrat from Alabama to do so in a generation. It delivered a bloody nose to his opponent, the alleged child molester Roy Moore, and his puppetmasters Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

It was arguably the most important expression of black political muscle in the region since King’s 1965 march. If the previous entries in the graphic could be labeled “soil”, “slavery” and “poverty”, this one should be captioned “empowerment."

Guayama, Puerto Rico

So how does Alston view the role of UN rapporteur and his visit? His full report on the U.S. will be released next May before being presented to the UN human rights council in Geneva.

Nobody expects much to come of that: the world body has no teeth with which to enforce good behavior on recalcitrant governments. But Alston hopes that his visit will have an impact by shaming the U.S. into reflecting on its values.

“My role is to hold governments to account,” he said. “If the U.S. administration doesn’t want to talk about the right to housing, health care or food, then there are still basic human rights standards that have to be met. It’s my job to point that out.”

Alston’s previous investigations into extreme poverty in places like Mauritania pulled no punches. We can expect the same tough love when it comes to his analysis of Puerto Rico, the next stop on his journey into America’s dark side.

Three months after Maria, the devastation wrought by the hurricane has been well documented. It tore 70,000 homes to shreds, brought industry to a standstill and caused a total blackout of the island that continues to cause havoc.

  The Black American citizen suffering it out on an outdoor bench

 

But Puerto Rico’s plight long predates Maria, rooted in the indifference with which it has been regarded since being acquired as a spoil of war in 1898. Almost half of Americans have no idea that the 3.5 million Puerto Ricans on the island are U.S. citizens, which adds insult to the injury of the territory having no representation in Congress while its fiscal policies are dictated by an oversight board imposed by Washington. What was that about casting off the yoke of overweening government?

Nor do most people appreciate that the island has twice the proportion of people in poverty (44%) than the lowliest U.S. state, including Alabama (19%). And that was before the hurricane, which some estimates suggest has pushed the poverty rate up to 60%.

“Puerto Rico is a sacrifice zone,” said Ruth Santiago, a community rights lawyer. “We are ruled by the United States but we are never consulted – we have no influence, we’re just their plaything.”

The UN monitor was given a sense of what being a plaything of the U.S. means in practice when he travelled south to Guayama, a town of 42,000 close to where Maria made landfall. Devastation was everywhere – houses mangled, roofs missing, power lines drooping alarmingly overhead.

Looming over the community is a coal-fired power plant built by the Puerto Rican branch of AES Corp., a Virginia-headquartered multinational. The plant’s smoke stack dominates the horizon, as does a huge mound of residue from the combusted coal that rises to at least 70 feet like a giant sandcastle.

The mound is exposed to the elements and local people complain that toxins from it leach into the sea, destroying the livelihoods of fishermen through mercury poisoning. They also fear that dust coming off the pile causes health problems, a concern shared by local doctors who told the UN monitor that they see a high incidence of respiratory disease and cancer.

“It kills the leaves of my mango tree,” said Flora Picar Cruz, 82. She was lying in bed at midday, breathing with difficulty through an oxygen mask.

Studies of the pile have found perilous levels of toxic substances including arsenic, boron, chloride and chromium. Even so, the Trump administration is in the process of easing the relatively lax regulations on monitoring dangerous effluents from it.

AES Puerto Rico told the Guardian that there was nothing to worry about, as the plant was one of the cleanest in the US having been purpose built to avoid any run-off into air or sea. That’s not what the people of Guayama think. They fear that the age-old pattern of being taken for granted by the US colonizer is about to rise to the next level.

When such attitudes are replicated across the island it helps explain why so many Puerto Ricans are voting with their feet: almost 200,000 have packed their bags and quit for Florida, New York and Pennsylvania since the hurricane, adding to the more than 5 million who were already on the U.S. mainland. Which gives a whole new meaning to the American Dream – anyone can make it, so long as they abandon their families, their homes, and their culture and head off into a strange and forbidding land.

Charleston, West Virginia

“You’re an amazing people! We’re going to take care of a lot of years of horrible abuse, OK? You can count on it 100%.”

Donald Trump’s promise to the white voters of West Virginia was made just as he was securing the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016. Six months later, his audience handsomely repaid him with a landslide victory.

It is not surprising that white families in West Virginia should have responded positively to Trump’s charm offensive, given that he offered them the world – “We’re going to put the miners back to work!” After all, numerically a majority of all those living in poverty nationwide – 27 million people – are white.

In West Virginia in particular, white families have a lot to feel sore about. Mechanization and the decline of coal mining have decimated the state, leading to high unemployment and stagnant wages. The transfer of jobs from the mines and steel mills to Walmart has led to male workers earning on average $3.50 an hour less today than they did in 1979.

What is surprising is that so many proud working folk should have entrusted their dreams to a (supposed) billionaire who built his real estate empire on the back of handouts from his father.

Before he ran for the presidency, Trump showed scant interest in the struggles of low-income families, white or otherwise. After almost a year in the Oval Office, there is similarly little sign of those campaign promises being kept.

Quite the contrary. When the UN rapporteur decamped in Charleston, West Virginiam on Wednesday as the final stop in his tour, he was inundated with evidence that the president is turning the screws on the very people who elected him.

That same day, Republicans in the Senate and House were fusing their plans for tax cuts ahead of a final vote next week. Many West Virginians will be lulled into believing that the changes are designed to help them, as initially everybody in the state will pay less tax.

But come 2027 when deficit-saving changes kick in, the bottom 80% of the population will pay more, while the top 1% will continue to enjoy a $21,000 bonanza.

“Trump’s policies will exacerbate inequality, suppress wages and make it harder for low-income families to seek assistance,” said Ted Boettner, executive director of the non-partisan West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.

 

If sewerage is the abiding image of the burden of the Black Belt, then a mouthful of rotting teeth is West Virginia’s.

Doctors at Health Right, a volunteer-based medical center in Charleston that treats 21,000 low-income working people free of charge, presented the UN monitor with a photograph of one of its dentistry clients.

The man is only 32, but when he opened his mouth he turned into one of Macbeth’s witches. His few remaining rotting teeth and greenish-blue gums looked like the festering broth in their burning cauldrons.

Adult dentistry is uncovered by Medicaid unless it is an emergency, and so people do the logical thing – they do nothing until their abscesses erupt and they have to go to ER. One woman seen by the center’s mobile dentistry clinic was found to have nothing but 30 roots in her mouth, all of which needed surgery.

In other briefings, Alston was given a picture of life under siege for West Virginia’s low-income families. If Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, then Trump is waging a war on the poor.

People are jailed for years because they cannot afford bail awaiting trial; private detectives are used to snoop on disability benefit claimants; mandatory minimum drug sentences are back in fashion; Jeff Sessions is scrapping federal rehabilitation schemes for those released from prison; tenants in subsidized housing are living in fear that they will be evicted for the slightest infraction – the list goes on and on.

And the result of this relentless drubbing? “People end up fighting each other,” said Eli Baumwell, policy director of the ACLU in West Virginia. “You become so obsessed with what you’ve got and what your neighbor has got that you become resentful. That’s what Trump is doing – turning one against the other.”

 

And so it was that Philip Alston boarded one last plane and headed for Washington, carrying with him the distilled torment of the American people.

At one point in the trip Alston revealed that he had had a sleepless night, reflecting on the lost souls we had met in Skid Row.

He wondered about how a person in his position – “I’m old, male, white, rich and I live very well” – would react to one of those homeless people. “He would look at him and see someone who is dirty, who doesn’t wash, who he doesn’t want to be around.”

Then Alston had an epiphany.

“I realized that’s how government sees them. But what I see is the failure of society. I see a society that let that happen, that is not doing what it should. And it’s very sad.”

 

 

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