On January 5th a mother and her daughter died tragically at Bonasika Creek when their house collapsed on them. Thirty-five-year-old farmer, Seematie Chandra and her 6-year-old daughter Christine Sookdeo were crushed to death under their abode as they were feeding their puppies. Seematie’s husband, farmer Tulsieram Sookdeo now has to look after his two surviving children while continuing to make a living.
The photograph of the collapsed home provided by the police depicted the difficult circumstances being experienced by the family. The wooden structure was visibly aged and the pillars that it had stood on before the collapse were probably well rotted. The roofing sheets were haphazardly placed as if trying to cover leaks.
The tribulations of this family underline starkly the gross disconnect between the impoverished and their governors and with the oil revenues that have begun to flow into the country. The late Mrs Chandra and her husband had probably never even heard of the debate around oil revenues or if they had perhaps they were too busy with farming to even contemplate whether it would improve their lives and those of their children.
Were they beneficiaries of any of the handouts from this and the previous government? If they did receive, then the agents of the government in this remote area failed to note and act upon the fact that the children of this couple were never registered for school. Three children in this one family not registered for school? What sort of services are being provided by local, regional and central governments in these areas?
Undoubtedly an assortment of officials and others will now descend on this family. An urgent need will be mental health counselling for the father and the children in addition to the material support they will now require to remain a family.
For years in these columns, we have urged that poverty mapping be done to identify families like those of Seematie Chandra and Tulsieram Sookdeo whose hard-scrabble lives expose them and their children to daily and deadly risks. If this family had been identified as being in very difficult circumstances perhaps even just an upgrade of their living conditions and the fast-tracking of the registration of their children could have improved their lives immeasurably and prevented the tragedy that occurred.
There is no sign that this government or any of its predecessors have taken poverty mapping in this country seriously. Those living in extreme poverty must be identified and they must be provided the means with which to begin pulling themselves back from the brink. It would be obscene if in this year when the PPP/C government intends to drain every single dollar from the Natural Resource Fund – around US$564m – that those living in difficult circumstances aren’t prioritised for assistance.
As the government is in the midst of preparing its 2022 budget, it would be well advised to present an initiative to immediately and frontally address extreme poverty. This is, of course, far different and separate from the cash transfer proposals that have been under discussion for several years.
As exemplified by its injudicious hustling through Parliament of the flawed Natural Resource Fund Bill, this government is completely preoccupied with controlling the oil revenues that are flowing into the country to the exclusion of rationality, prudence and independent oversight. Hopefully its openly-expressed admiration of the Kazakhstani model of the Sovereign Wealth Fund will be tempered by the recent unrest in that former Soviet Republic which saw a shoot-to-kill order from its President and an invitation for Russian troops to help quell the disturbances.
It is also worth noting in that context that, according to Reuters, while the country’s vast natural resources have made a small elite incredibly wealthy, many ordinary Kazakhs feel left behind. About a million people out of a total population of 19 million are estimated to live below the poverty line.
On April 9, 2012, the newspaper’s leader asked questions about poverty here.
“How many families for instance are living in extreme poverty – not able to send children to school because they can’t afford clothes or two meals a day? How severe is this problem and in which parts? Governments have to be acutely aware of and sensitive to the most vulnerable families and to chart how they can be helped in a comprehensive way. For many years the government has been urged to do detailed poverty mapping. Send out social workers to find the most vulnerable families and track how they fare through various interventions. Quite often these families are under severe stress as a result of substance abuse, sexual abuse, mental health breakdown, other chronic illnesses or ostracism. The pat solutions don’t work in these cases. Each week the toll of such families become evident but only when the circumstances rise to the level of tragedy like that of the killing of a baby amid the drunken row of its parents. Otherwise, these families live wretched lives daily and endure cycles of great need and disaster until the inevitable occurs.
“This government and the one that preceded it have cumulatively had around 25 years trying to assess how well poverty alleviation programmes have worked, going all the way back to the PNC’s Econo-mic Recovery Programme and its IDB-funded safety net, the Social Impact Amelioration Programme. Yet, there appears to be no compendium of distilled wisdom from these costly programmes accompanied by generalized prescriptions for dealing with entrenched and cross-generation poverty. Money has been spent and that’s it. The poor, it seems, only exist to be statistics to be opportunistically plucked or to rise to the surface in the sharp relief of pain, tragedy and humiliation”.
The editorial in this newspaper of October 21, 2019 stated as follows: “Whatever decisions are finally made on the cash transfer – it is one of the areas where there should be political consensus – it would seem just and sensible that monies be directed to those in extreme poverty for whom day-to-day living is a hard scrap – families living on the edge. On a regular basis as is evidenced in the media there are families without food for the day, without access to clean water, without the ability to send their children to school, without the means to secure basic health care and residing in conditions that lead to violence and abuse in all of its forms. These are the families that need urgent help and should have the first call on any revenues that might be set aside for cash transfers”.
The disaster that engulfed the family of Seematie Chandra and Tulsieram Sookdeo on January 5th should impel this government to pay serious attention to extreme poverty and to begin logging its incidence in all parts of country and developing an action plan to address it. There is much work to do.
