This is another entry in the "Just when you thought it was safe to leave the house" file. The next time you find yourself shopping for food or other necessities in Chow Kit, you should be on the lookout not only for demonstrators on the run from FRU gas but a group of tall African men.

No one knows for sure where they are from. Are they students or tourists? A cautionary Star news report a few weeks ago helpfully printed a picture of a strolling African man, presumably for the benefit of readers who have never seen one. You can almost hear the collective murmur among the paper's paler-skinned readers: "Eee, so black one. Must be a criminal!" The same report quoted Chow Kit traders as saying that Africans are tall and scary-looking, and their presence could thus scare customers away.

There is a follow-up Star report today: "The police, Immigration and City Hall have come together to counter the 'African threat' in Chow Kit." These Africans, said to number in the thousands, are making life difficult by "not paying for meals and indulging in vice activities" (I can only assume that the transgressions are not committed simultaneously).

An unintentionally hilarious sentence comes when an official at the International Islamic University is interviewed. The sentence: "We need to know where they are from," says Dr. Moustapha, who is from Guinea." This guy was so obviously interviewed just to make the report seem less racist than it actually is, but it just looks like in the paper's zeal to expose nefarious black men, it even had to check on the citizenship credentials of its sources.

We've heard this Dark Threat tune before. The "Bangla menace" reached a frenzied height a couple of years ago with rumours of libidinous Bangladeshi petrol station attendants. People were locking up their daughters. Even the cartoonist Lat was freaked out enough to depict a swarm of these dark foreigners cluttering up our previously safe, familiar landscape.

The Bangla threat is not so alarming now, as many a popular fried-chicken joint cannot do without their labour. A bigger menace needed to be found - and the blacker the better. The Africans came in the nick of time.

The farcical aspect of this whole thing need not be pointed out, but I will do so all the same. Our leaders harp on South-South cooperation. Our youngsters get a kick out of hip-hop culture that is, through its roots in blues and funk, an extremely diluted derivation of African rhythms. There are a number of affluent Malaysian Malays and Indians who think it the height of street sophistication to act like badass niggers in the hood. They look stupid, of course, but this is just the way we jam, we jam. Most of all, Malaysians would howl in indignation if a British paper were to say something like: "Malaysians in London are a menace because they have no fashion sense and spend too much time posing for pictures in Trafalgar Square." People who break the law should be dealt with in the appropriate manner.(Aren't you glad I'm around to tell you these things?) Targeting a group of people based on their appearance or nationality is not a very New Millennial thing to do.

There are no coincidences. We should connect the report in today's Star with the heading of today's NST : "US help for k-economy." K-economy is the latest, shiniest concept being promoted by our government. The first sentence: "American companies, responding to Malaysia's needs, will help train locals to propel the country towards a knowledge economy."

Now I am as fond of Americans as the next Sarong Party Girl, but I know enough about the way things work here and now to envision a vast potential for abuse and sheer waste. It's a familiar scenario: we in Malaysia come up with some fancy concept, structure or company; we fly in a horde of overpaid, under-qualified mat salleh types just to show how prestigious the idea is; we lose money; we end up none the wiser; repeat.

This has been going on unabated in many of our crony corporations; the way these places are funded, it might just be our tax dollars that are being thrown away. In terms of lost money, it certainly sounds more serious that a few Nigerians gigolos who don't pay for their cendol. So why don't we ever hear of a White Threat?