This is always the ward I find the hardest to sort out, and it’s because there’s always a bunch of stuff happening in Somali, which I do not speak. I do my best, but even more than in other wards, there is stuff happening in the race that I just do not know about.

And even just on the English-language side, this is also an incredibly messy race. The tl;dr is that I think people should vote for Kayseh Magan.

Edited 2/2024: Hello, MN District 49A voters searching for information on Tiger Worku! Apparently he moved to Minnetonka and is s now running for legislature in your district. You can absolutely do better. I do not recommend supporting him for DFL endorsement, or in the primary. Details below!

On the ballot:

Jamal Osman (DFL, incumbent)
Tiger Worku (DFL)
Kayseh Magan (DFL)
Guy T. Gaskin (Republican)

Putting in a break because this post is long.

Guy T. Gaskin (Republican)

Starting with the shortest one: Guy doesn’t have a campaign website, and soft-pedaled his conservative views at the candidate forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters. He uses his LinkedIn page as a blog for rambling about the “woke mind virus” and “the cult of feminism,” and his Facebook page includes the claim that the Anti-Defamation League is a hate group, refers to Canada as “commies we should probably invade,” and has a bunch of miscellaneous MRA (men’s rights activism) stuff. He’s also not going to win (the Republicans who want a shot at winning in Minneapolis pretend to be Democrats) but I wanted to deal with him quickly before digging into the actual three-way race. Don’t rank Guy.

Jamal Osman (DFL, incumbent)

My issues with Osman start with some of his choices in 2021, the last time he was up for election. Late in October of 2021, someone (Osman said not anyone from his campaign) sent out an e-mail with a bunch of allegations about his opponent in that year’s race, Abidrizak Bihi. Osman’s campaign then sent out a blast condemning the e-mail in such a way as to ensure that anyone who’d missed it knew exactly what the allegations were. This was followed up by a campaign volunteer who picked a fight with someone he was texting with, then sent her a dick pic (!!!) and Osman’s response to this was to point out that the woman in question had been critical of him on social media. (There’s a Sahan Journal article that ran at the time that gives a more detailed roundup.) I’m not blaming Osman for the dick pic — it might not even have been an actual campaign volunteer, and in any case sometimes people’s campaign volunteers behave inappropriately. I’m blaming Osman for his own response, which was terrible.

In December of 2022, someone turned up a whole slew of atrocious Facebook posts Osman made between 2011 and 2013 — there was a bunch of homophobia and antisemitism and I’d say probably the worst of it was “Where’s Hitler when you need him?” (posted in Somali). He apologized profusely — in addition to his general apology he specifically apologized to all his Jewish and/or gay City Council colleagues. He says that none of this reflects his current views.

And like … okay, maybe, but he’s apparently accused Tiger Worku of being Christian at some campaign events. Here’s a link to Tiger talking about it in the debate. A transcript of what Tiger says there: “On September 3rd, there was a video released to social media of the council member standing on a stage and saying that Ethiopians will not conquer Somalis. And he called me Christian. Now, I want to set the record straight: I am a practicing Muslim, I’m proud of it, but that’s not the point. The point is, so what if I’m Christian?” If Jamal Osman is using an opponent’s ethnicity against him while campaigning, that does not suggest to me that his change of heart is sincere. Maybe on a personal level, Jamal Osman used to loathe Jews and gay people, and over time he’s shifted and now he has no personal problem with either Jewish people or gay people, but if he’s willing to weaponize religion and ethnicity for electoral advantage, the changes were not meaningful. Your personal views, as a politician, matter centrally because of how you will treat people politically. Your actual feelings in your heart matter a lot less to me than whether you’re willing to mistreat people when it benefits you.

Finally, there are his connections to the Feeding Our Future scandal. There are two that I know of.

The Stigma-Free International thing: In 2019, Osman incorporated a nonprofit called Stigma-Free International. In June of 2020, he says cut ties with the group. In October of 2020, the group filed new papers with the state saying it was now run by a guy named Ahmed Artan, who has been charged with fraud. Apparently Artan was working with Amy Bock (the Feeding Our Future fraud lady) within two days of taking over Stigma-Free International. Osman says (in that Sahan Journal article) that Stigma-Free International was the business he used to deliver corporate trainings about crisis mental health response. I don’t think he’s ever explained why, when he stopped doing this, he did not simply close the nonprofit. I have so many questions that to my knowledge haven’t been addressed: Why didn’t he close the nonprofit? How involved was he in turning the nonprofit over to Artan? Who was on the board when Osman was running it, and who was on the board when Artan took it over, and how exactly did the transition between these groups take place? Did Artan pay Osman anything? If Artan took over on the grounds that he was going to continue to run these trainings, what qualifications did he have? The key thing, IMO, is this: I am pretty sure that you can’t lose control of a nonprofit accidentally the way you can forget to register an Internet domain name and have it snatched up by someone else.

His wife’s involvement with a questionable food nonprofit: Ilo Amba registered a nonprofit in November of 2020 called Urban Advantage Services, which allegedly fed 2,500 children per day out of a small office near the convention center. It was sponsored not by Feeding Our Future but by Partners In Nutrition. (Partners in Nutrition was started by Amy Bock and her then-friend Christine Twait; Amy Bock left and started Feeding Our Future. My understanding is they parted on bad terms, but there were a number of fraudulent organizations that were getting money from Partners in Nutrition.) The Reformer asked neighbors of Urban Advantage Services if they ever saw any evidence that the group was delivering meals: “The office manager for a law firm one floor up, Yang Moua, said she never saw children come to the building for food, although she sometimes saw people packaging and loading trucks with food.”

When Worku brought this up in the debate, Osman said his wife had not been criminally charged. That’s true. Neither of them has been criminally charged. I think it’s totally valid to look at what’s been reported and make our own assessment of Osman’s culpability, though, and he’s been awfully close to some stuff that is shady as hell and super uninterested in answering questions that were not carefully vetted by a lawyer.

ETA: The Attorney General’s office has now announced it is shutting down “sham organizations,” including Urban Advantage Services, that defrauded the government by collecting money and using it to enrich themselves. From the Star Tribune article: “In court documents, state attorneys said Amba established the ‘sham corporation’ to direct money to herself and family, and her organization, which has no apparent legitimate activities or assets, refused to respond to the civil investigation. According to the state Education Department, which oversees the federal funding distributed to the state for these meal programs, her nonprofit received $461,533 in federal reimbursements in 2020 and 2021.” Osman’s website still lists an endorsement from Keith Ellison. (Also, to be clear, the action taken by the AG’s office involved shutting down the organization, but did not charge Amba criminally for her actions.)

Tiger Worku (DFL)

Tiger Worku got fifteen minutes of fame back in 2021 thanks to a legitimately hilarious CNN interview featuring a can of soup. I regret to tell you that the milkshake-drinking duck has a multitude of problems.

First, this isn’t necessarily a problem, just relevant to his candidacy: he is incredibly young. I think he’s 21. He went to South High in Minneapolis and I don’t know whether he’s now a student somewhere or if he got a job or what, because his website has no biographical information. Like it has an “About Tiger” thing that looks like a link but isn’t. I looked for a LinkedIn for him and didn’t find one. He didn’t send in a response to the Star Tribune voter’s guide or the Neighbors for More Neighbors voter’s guide. I sent in a question from his “contact me” page to ask if there was any biographical information that might be relevant to his candidacy (a total softball question!) and got no response.

Hilariously, you can buy his biographical information because he literally wrote and self-published a memoir. Mosaic Republic is available exclusively in hardcover and came out from something I would describe as an old-style vanity press. (I have lots of friends who do self-publishing. The serious self-publishers focus on ebooks and POD paperbacks. If you bought boxes of hardcovers from your publishing house, you used a vanity press.) Anyway, I am not going to pay $30 for his memoir but someone at the Center for the American Experiment did (their take, not surprisingly, isn’t positive.)

At the Ward 6 forum, he touted his experience as the President of the Seward Neighborhood group (he was elected at age 17) as something that qualified him for the City Council seat. He also took credit for the Seward Vaccine Equity Project. His time leading the SNG was a complete and utter disaster, and according to one of the SVEP organizers, he had absolutely nothing to do with the project — in fact, they split SVEP from the SNG because of Tiger, because they wanted to avoid the drama and dysfunction he was bringing to the SNG.

While Tiger was president of SNG, the Executive Director quit. According to an August 2021 letter sent by three of the former board members to the new SNG board (this was after half the board had quit, but before Tiger finally resigned), “Tiger and [a close ally] engaged in repeated overstepping of board roles, extreme micromanaging, and bullying of SNG’s new Executive Director (ED) Sam Taitel, a non-binary POC, which led to Taitel filing a grievance for harassment and resigning.” The letter goes on to say that Tiger repeatedly “failed to complete essential duties as president: Not signing checks or signing them weeks late, not paying bills, falsely claiming that certain authorized expenses were not authorized, refusing group input on meeting agendas, posting agendas late or not at all, and not responding to repeated requests from both SNG’s accountant, and our auditor.” Tiger also deleted meeting minutes, muted a dissenting board member during a board meeting that was happening over Zoom, deleted a Zoom recording of a neighborhood resident he disagreed with, and used Google Workspace access to read private e-mails. Also, confidential HR documents about Taitel were leaked to community members.

A letter sent to the whole neighborhood in September 2021 (and still available on the SNG website) tells this story again but largely in passive voice: “Normal, routine administrative tasks had been neglected. Bills were not paid. Urgent correspondence was not read and was not responded to. SNG committees had largely ceased to function or report their activities. There was virtually no communication from the board’s leadership with the community-at-large explaining the situation or evidence of any plan to correct it.”

I’m not sure that actually covers the SNG history but it at least hits the highlights. On its own, this is disqualifying! This is THE EXPERIENCE that he cites, and he was a disaster in this role. But wait, there’s more!

During endorsing convention season, Tiger signed up a bunch of delegates who don’t remember who he is, don’t recall signing up to be delegates, and in several cases are active Republicans who are extremely sure that they NEVER signed up to be delegates for Tiger.

And finally, there’s the campaign finance stuff. At the LWV forum Tiger talked about the importance of knowing who’s contributing to people’s campaigns. Tiger turned in a campaign finance report acknowledging $47,000 in donations but listing zero individual donors — which is legal only if none of those people donated $100 or more. His expense reports all had weirdly suspicious round numbers and also said he’d spent $3000 on his website (this is not a $3000 website.) The rosiest possible explanation for all of this: he learned nothing from his time at SNG, no one tracked anything, and when reports were due they guesstimated.

On paper, he looks like the most left-wing person in the race. However, he’s demonstrated himself to be both untrustworthy and uninterested in doing the work of the positions he seeks. I would not rank him!

Kayseh Magan (DFL)

I first encountered Kayseh last year because he was one of the people with concerns about Omar Fateh. When I called him, he basically started the call by telling me that everything he wanted to say was on the record and I could quote him.

I know people who hold this strongly against Kayseh. (Omar Fateh, for example, who endorsed Jamal Osman.) But you know — you have no idea how many people want to talk to me, do not even say they want it to be off the record, and then get mad if I quote them. Like. Seriously. If you talk to the citizen journalist and start off by making it clear that you are willing to stand by what you’re telling her, that’s actually a demonstration of forthrightness, earnestness, and sincerity that I think you ought to get credit for.

Kayseh works (well, worked, I think he left his job to run for office) as a fraud investigator. He’s also in the past worked in law enforcement (in college, he worked as a juvenile detention officer; after returning to Minnesota, he worked for the Washington County Sheriff’s office). I asked him about this and he said that it was a job he was able to get as a student that offered health benefits and paid a decent wage, and then when he moved back it was a job he could get with the experience he had. He didn’t do the job for very long and he emphasized that police accountability was one of his top priorities. His website talks about this: he wants a Brady list (a public database of information about officer misconduct), and end to hiding discipline as “coaching,” and says he wants a police contract that works for the residents of Minneapolis, which is open-ended but acknowledges how important that aspect of police accountability is.

I did a fair amount of digging on Kayseh. He changed his name a few years back and I asked him about this; he said that a lot of Somalis do name changes because the paperwork when they entered the US assigned them a name or a spelling they don’t use. I looked him up in both Minnesota and Ohio, under both names, looking up both court records and newspaper articles, and the most scandalous stuff I found was a minor traffic ticket.

He served on the on the Minneapolis redistricting commission and according to David Brauer (who paid much closer attention to that process than I did) was a “solid voice.” He served on the Minneapolis Civil Rights commission for (I think) a year and I browsed through meeting minutes to see if anything interesting had come up there. In June 2020 he brought up training 911 dispatchers to prevent white people from weaponizing police against Black people (the example he gave at the time was Amy Cooper in NYC calling the cops on the Black birdwatcher). He also advocated for physically passing out information to tenants on their rights.

He has some endorsements I don’t love, but just this once I think I can make common cause with the Senior DFL Caucus. My guess is that if elected, he will cast some votes I don’t like, but that’s true of all three candidates. Kayseh is clearly the candidate with the most integrity; his past service to the community has involved showing up and doing the work. If I lived in Ward 6, I would vote for Kayseh Magan.

(I don’t know if I’d list a second choice. I guess with Jamal Osman you at least know what to expect. Someone who uses their Google Workspace access to leak privileged information, as Tiger Worku reportedly did, could do a lot of unpredictable damage as a City Council rep. But I very strongly prefer Kayseh Magan to either of his opponents.)

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