POVERTY
My
friend Ojotre and his fiancée have travelled through many countries in Africa.
They have marveled at the sight of expensive government guzzlers – four-wheel
drives - emblazoned with big inscriptions such as “Poverty ‘Eradication’ or ‘Alleviation’
Programs”, and yet everywhere they have visited, unusual forms of poverty confronted
them. This couple has wondered as to why African governments extol publicly an
onerous task upon which they have no control.
Poverty
alleviation is a hoax. Poverty eradication is a myth. One obsession of governments
and international donors is this patronage and ruse that they intend to
eradicate or alleviate absolute poverty. Many of these people use that phrase to mean many
different things at different levels depending on their role and the powers
they hold. Poverty alleviation/eradication could mean exploitation, underdevelopment,
political capital, power over (patronage), and imperialism (neoliberal -
emerging markets). There is a whole industry and market out there where poverty
is a commodity.
What
constitute poverty is highly perceptional, relative, and political. As a political
object, poverty is framed to justify a mobilizing ideology; as an international
development issue, it is framed to conjure a sense of benevolence and sympathy.
Incidentally, every effort at eradicating poverty only exacerbates it. Every
poverty alleviation/eradication attempt has provided temporary fix and perpetuated
worse outcomes for the long term, including producing disease and further helplessness/dependency.
To
understand poverty, we have to understand what it is not – wealth, abundance,
access, equitable society, power, social class privileges, and the manner in
which societies and economies are organized and operationalized. Once we
appreciate fully the structural systems that produce, reproduce, and transmit
power globally and locally, we then can courageously grapple with poverty as
the function of societal inequality resulting from that power relations and its
controls production.
Thence,
to alleviate poverty one has to focus on the pervasive inequalities in society
that deprive people of resources and opportunities. The antithesis of poverty
therefore is providing equal opportunity for production and distribution of
resources. People can get out of poverty if they have ownership over their
means of production and the products of their labor. When people have control
over their environment and control over the requisite tools to harness and take
sway over their environment, then they can emerge out of poverty. However, in
all these poor countries, the glaring lack of infrastructure to support wealth
creation and distribution, as well as the unequal rules of global trades and
transnational movements, inextricably bind disadvantaged people to absolute
loss of control over production, labor, capital, and environment. Poverty
therefore is systemic and structural such that “alleviation” or “eradication”
are obscurantist strategies.
There
is a common observation that if 10 of the world’s richest were to share half of
their wealth with the rest of the world, nearly 3.5 billion people, or half the
world’s population would emerge out of absolute poverty. This formula applies
in every society where enormous amount of wealth is concentrated in the hands
of a small percentage of individuals.
For
a meaningful progress in improving life conditions, social and historically
entrenched inequalities in this world should be the target of discussion. It is
not coincidental that the countries usually designated as endemically poor also
share a history of profound repeat abuse – slavery, colonialism, and now
corporate imperialism. For societies where poverty is endemic, you find a
history of colonialism, disease, corporate exploitation, ethnic clashes,
dictatorships, and environmental degradation. Poverty therefore is the product
of all these entrenched inequalities that we never debate. Poverty has nothing to
do with what we invest our time, money, and resources on such as MDGs or SDGs.
We
must often revise the nearly prophetic works by Nina Munk, Dambisa Moyo and many
other thinkers before and after them who have countered dominant discourses about
global anti-poverty strategies. They called upon the world to recognize the inherent
historical factors that subverts real development, address structural bottlenecks
- unfair global trading rules, and the destructive economic policies such as
structural adjustment that have further underdeveloped states in the southern
hemisphere. Structural adjustment policies are never going to eliminate
poverty, but produce it!
End.
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