Sweden’s Parliament voted yesterday to pay 21 million Swedish kronor (approximately 2 million euros) of the African nation of Somalia’s debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The vote was unanimously in favour of the proposition apart from the ten MPs from the Right-wing Sweden Democrats’ delegation, who all voted against it, according to a report by Samhällsnytt.
Prior to the vote, Dennis Dioukarev, a Sweden Democrat MP representing Gothenburg, gave an address in which he questioned why the Swedish taxpayers’ assets should be used to pay off Somalia’s debt.
The Parliament’s decision was especially strange considering that the world is currently entering the worst economic downturn that it has seen in the last century as a result of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
“Could have gone to pensions, but Somalia is more important than old people who have worked all their lives and paid huge sums in taxes,” one critic of the decision commented on Twitter.
The payment will be made by Sweden’s Riksbank, which is the country’s central bank. The proposal submitted to the Swedish Parliament, which was been made available on its official website, justifies the move by claiming that Somalia has been unable to take out new loans from the IMF “for a long time” because the African country hasn’t been making its debt or interest payments.
The proposal also says that Somalia’s inability to repay its IMF debt has also prevented it from having access to other forms of aid and loans, which in turn has negatively impacted the country’s economy.
Somalis are one of Sweden’s largest immigrant communities. It has been estimated that there are currently 60,000 Somalis living in Sweden, many of them in Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb which has been dubbed “little Mogadishu.” Last year Mona Walter, a Somali woman living in Sweden who was raised as a Muslim but then rebelled against her upbringing and converted to Christianity, predicted that in fifty years, if present trends continue, Sweden will become fully Islamicized, both demographically and culturally,
The argument(no subtitles):
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This is totally unnecessary and unfair to the Swedish taxpayer, Somalia has pretty high economic potential particularly with it's geographic location being so close to a huge percent of international shipping(30% of Europe's oil passes through the gulf of Aden). Although clearly it's always going to be a shithole, they can repay a 2.5 million dollar loan. Why isn't this put towards helping the already suffering Swedish people?
