It was Aristotle who called poverty “the parent of revolution and crime”; and he was not wrong. Statistically, a high number of people committing crimes such as theft are those who are in dire straits. When such crimes are committed by those considered better off in society, that is just plain old greed. Similarly, the premise of the majority of revolutions has been and continues to be the poor masses rising up against the privileged few who most often have treated them unjustly.
But there are some people who have made Aristotle’s statement less than absolute. Two examples have been featured in this newspaper’s Sunday edition. On September 30, we let the world have a glimpse at the life of mother extraordinaire, Mrs Vanessa Simon of Hopetown, West Coast Berbice.
A 39-year-old single parent with five sons, Mrs Simon holds down three menial jobs. She works as a security guard, a sweeper and cleans drains. In addition, she strips branches to make brooms, which she sells along with plants. She also finds time to be part of an organisation that sells agro-processed products, which sees her assisting with grinding of peppers and bottling of products. She still manages to keep her five boys clothed, fed, on the straight and narrow and in school.
Mrs Simon could easily have succumbed to dipping her hand in someone else’s pot, but she chooses to work in order to provide for her family. She could have taken one or more of the boys out of school to help, but that thought has never crossed her mind. She believes that education is the way out of poverty and she is determined to give her sons the best education she can afford.
On October 14, it was the inspiring story of Ms Wanda Fortune, now an attorney-at-law and her mother Ms Dorothy Blackman, neither of whom is familiar with the words ‘give up’. Ms Blackman, also a mother of five, is a newspaper vendor, who scrimped, scraped and saved to send her third child to university and law school.
Ms Wanda Fortune grew up in the newspaper vending ‘family’ business. She told this newspaper how throughout her school life she would wake up early and sell newspapers before going to school. But here again, school was always a priority because although Wanda sold newspapers unashamedly to help her mother put food on the table, she knew that she wanted something more for herself and that education was the way to get that ‘more’. Her mother tried fundraising but eventually mortgaged her still unfinished home, to find the money for law school tuition and her daughter’s living expenses in Trinidad and Tobago. They have reaped the sweet reward of having Wanda admitted to the bar earlier this month.
Mrs Simon and Ms Fortune and Ms Blackman have in fact started a revolution against poverty. They have refused to be stereotyped, or to be pitied for their circumstances. Their revolt entails rising above their condition and changing the way the world sees people who don’t have, and the clear intention is to do it through education. If any young woman or man needs a role model any of these three women would fit the bill.
Their stories became even more important as the world marked ‘International Day for the Eradication of Poverty’ yesterday. All too often, the tendency is to provide the poor with handouts. If they are hungry, give them food. If they are naked, give them clothes and shoes to wear. But if we are to seriously give poverty a shove away, we need to provide poor people with more than their very basic needs. They need decent work with adequate salaries, access to proper education and low cost transportation, access to capital (low-interest loans) where possible so they can start their own businesses, as well as adequate health and social services.
According to the World Bank’s Guyana poverty assessment, in 1994, an estimated 43 per cent of the population fell below the poverty line. Roughly two thirds of the poor, or 29 per cent of the total population were further classified as being extremely poor, with an expenditure level below that required to purchase a minimum low-cost diet. The people living below the poverty line were mostly women, children and the elderly and were found in rural and hinterland areas and to a lesser extent in towns. The rural poor, the assessment found, were mostly self-employed in agriculture or as agricultural labourers. In urban areas, the poor included those employed as labourers in a variety of occupations, in small informal businesses, as public servants at the bottom end of the salary scale, and pensioners.
In 2006, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty had declined from 29 per cent to 18.6 per cent, which meant that Guyana scored high on its target of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty – one of the eight Millennium Development Goals. But rural and hinterland residents, women, children and the elderly remained among the poorest of the poor.
The results of the ongoing census will reveal what the true position is to date. However, stories like those cited above bring awareness of the level of poverty in the country. The fact is that for every two successes there are scores of others who don’t see a way out of abject poverty. The way forward must therefore include real economic growth, not that which is buoyed by an informal economy, and public spending on health, water and education, including scholarships to poor, but deserving children.
