RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/25/trumps-nigerian-moment-defeating-boko-haram-religious-persecution-and-corruption/

The opportunity exists for the Trump administration to do something now about Nigeria that would lead to real progress in the fight against religious persecution and repeated violations of the rule of law, would help to root out corruption, and deal a significant blow to the Boko Haram terror group. 

The lever available to the U.S. government to do this is $300 million in stolen monies soon to come under U.S. control currently frozen in British and Crown of Jersey accounts at America’s request. Nigeria wants it back and, before America acts, the pressure it’s applying to President Muhammadu Buhari for reforms needs to be stepped up. 

If successful, it would be a big win. U.S. authorities should be dubious about transferring monies back to Nigeria’s control considering there’s a good chance it would be passed back to back to ruling-party officials who were complicit in the original theft. More than that, considering the longstanding corruption in the government of Africa’s most populous nation and the disturbing pattern of human rights abuses committed by Buhari’s regime, it’s not clear the U.S. should turn the money over at all unless and until real reforms are adopted. 

Look at the record. According to the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, over the past two years, thousands of Nigerian Christians have been murdered. The European Parliament recently blasted the government over ongoing human rights violations. Amnesty International issued a condemnation over the use of “security agents and (the) judiciary as a tool for persecuting people who voice dissenting opinions.” Innocent reform advocates like Grace Taiga, a retired civil servant and practicing Christian, and opposition Senator Shehu Sani have been targeted by the regime and journalists critical of it like Omoyele Sowore has been jailed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_events_of_the_last_few_months_demand_we_revisit_our_relationship_with_china.html

I was young in 1972 when Nixon went to China, but I still remember the excitement attendant on that visit. For most of us, it was our first look into a formerly hermetically sealed country. Seeing China on the television was almost as exotic as seeing the surface of the moon in 1969 after the Apollo landing. For the Chinese, Westerners were equally exotic. Even as late as 1982, outside of Shanghai or Beijing, Chinese people had often never seen a blonde woman, something a British friend regularly experienced.

While the countryside may have been insular, by the late 1970s, China was opening up to the West and beginning to see opportunities to use its vast human and natural resources to bring money into a country that (like all communist countries) was cash poor. For the West, China’s availability as a manufacturer looked like a boon. Products could be made cheaply there and sold at a good profit in America.

For American consumers, having China make products cheaply also looked like a good deal. Although a lot of factory workers found themselves unemployed as more manufacturing shifted to China, for most people, cheap Chinese production meant that consumer goods that had once been out of their reach were now affordable. It’s thanks to China undercutting American prices that most of us have houses filled with merchandise, from furniture to electronics to cookware to foodstuff.

Many people assumed that, with money flooding in, China would eventually become a free-market economy, but that’s not what happened. Instead, China, while still calling itself communist, actually become a totalitarian mercantilist nation. And if you’ve forgotten your high school economics class, mercantilism is an economic policy that maximizes exports and minimizes imports.