The Claim To Know Poverty And The Chase After The Wind

I remember the young and hard-hearted Fofo in Ama Darko’s novel - Faceless - who kept telling people that she knows poverty, she has seen it and she negotiates with it every day. Fofo’s life is a description of the many people in this world who have to wake up at the sound of the cock’s crow or the beeping alarm or the chirping birds to renegotiate and rearrange the previous day’s terms and arrangement of life with POVERTY. Their nightmares begin when the bright morning star begins to show its beautiful face to them either in their dreams or at dawn when they are lying down with their eyes gazing the skies; their fears heighten at the sight of any sign marking the beginning of a new day because to them, another day is another moment for the continuation of the usual routine of working hard but earning nothing. To them, sleep is more of a departure from life’s realities and the ugly life of dependence, sickness, hunger, worthlessness, nothingness etc than relaxing to keep the body relaxed on that hard mat covered with thin and dirty bed sheet. How can anyone reduce the life of this person to $1.25 a day? How can someone explain to such a person he/she is poor because she lives on $1.25 when this amount is not enough to meet the basic needs? Can anyone claim to know poverty better than these people who have seen touched, negotiated and dealt with poverty not only once but almost every day of their lives?

The goal of development has been changing for the last five decades with poverty reduction and empowerment taking centre stage of the current motives of development. To the many people who sit in their swivel chair and rotate 360 degrees to generate a solution to poverty, the reduction of poverty to numerical values means a technical know-how of poverty and a great achievement. This in reality is a simplification of the complex and probably the incomprehensive living conditions of the millions of people who live in poverty to figures and pictorial diagrams which can be contained in books and policy documents. I wonder if words and numerical values have been enough to express, explain and interpret what it means to live in and with poverty. I have always wondered how many of those who work to generate the solutions to poverty have seen and experienced it rather than seeing it through the eyes of others. In reality, one does not have to be poor to be able to know the solutions to poverty; after all you don’t need to be a driver to know how to ignite a car, but the experts of poverty reduction strategies (as given as titles and advertised in job vacancies) can never claim to be more expert than the daily negotiators of that life.

Poverty reduction policies have taken different forms, from agricultural development, to promotion of education, trade liberalisation, microfinancing and etc. Undoubtedly, these contribute in different ways to deepen or alleviate poverty, thus, the provision or the elimination of one barrier does not necessarily means the alleviation of poverty. The provision of education does not automatically reduce poverty; neither does the provision of credit schemes to empower people economically automatically translate into the alleviation of poverty. I remember being involved in an impact assessment a poverty alleviation programme – a microfinance programme; the programme was well-intentioned and well-organised and was meant to provide small credit to women and men, traders and farmers so as to be able to expand their economic activities to be able to generate enough income to create better living conditions for themselves, wow! What a brilliant idea. Indeed, a brilliant idea it was, but whether it did have this linear effect is another question altogether. Whilst the farmers do very well in producing relatively larger quantity of food, they have to compete very hard with the cheap food products which have been dumped into the country by international competitors under the guise of international trade. Their lives are condemned to a cycle of ‘poverty→hope of better life→hardwork→poverty’. Can anyone blame them for not making effort?

Sometimes, the international politics and policies that war against the poor are not even mentioned let alone considered in poverty alleviation measures. The imperialism at the international level that are sometimes packaged as technical knowledge and are swallowed by the leaders of these struggling people under the take-it-and-gain or take-it-and-suffer-from-us principle but sometimes also under the freewill of some toady leaders continue to impede the development process. The problem of poverty can never be eradicated at the bottom when the strings at the top sustaining it are not dealt with. Lack of well-structured and well-tailored domestic policies in most developing countries cannot be exempted from the sustaining factors of poverty. The poor owe it a duty to themselves, the rich have a moral obligation and the political and national leaders have a non-negotiable responsibility to work to support the poor to come out of poverty and this can be done when all parties play their role. Blueprint and piecemeal approaches cannot work but policies and programmes tailored to meet local needs should be welcomed and in all these, the negotiators of poverty should never be left out, otherwise, attempts to deal with what we claim to know but don't know better can only produce numerous definitions and solutions the effect of which will be a wild chase after the wind.