POVERTY
By: Lengdung Tungchamma
Tags: Poverty Alleviation, Poverty, Sustainable Development

It was in a conversation with Tiko that I began to see overpopulation in a different light. I always thought that the problem was straight; parents gave birth to plenty of children because they were uneducated, they don’t understand how things work and hence make mistakes.

Tiko explained another new side of the issue that I had never considered before. Most of our population still lives in rural areas, which means their livelihood is almost completely dependent on agriculture. For a farmer, the more children they have the more hands-on the farm. If you have 3 children, the size of land you can plow will not be the same for someone with 5 children (all other factors being equal). The more children, the more hands-on the farm and more yields at the end of the year. So, while we in the city consider the cost of taking care of more children, the farmer in the village thinks differently.

Take for instance another example. For most of Northern Nigeria, the more children the more votes. I’ve heard the arguments again and again that Christians in Plateau need to give birth to more children to balance the ratio of Muslims giving birth. So, the population is also a political issue.

To solve overpopulation, one must fix these problems.

But that’s not the topic today. It’s poverty. Poor people. And the way we talk about it.

Photo by Jordan Opel on Unsplash

Recently, we’ve been flying these words around; poverty, poor people, vulnerable people, less privileged, orphans, widows, etc. These words describe a realistic condition however, they are mostly demeaning. How do these words influence “poor people” in how they think of themselves? We’ve never thought about that.

The tag with which we brand “these people” is not the only crime we are committing in the fight against poverty, our approach (which stems from how we view “poor people”) is disastrously faulty. Our approach does not seek to lift people out of poverty. It seems we are more interested in continuously having poor people that we can always say we are helping.

The repetitive generational circle of poverty is reinforced by a public that always stigmatizes “poor people” even when helping them. It is not difficult to imagine the mindset that a boy will grow up with when all his life he has been told he is different, not in a good special way, but in a disadvantageous way. Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Once you label me, you negate me”. Our statements on poor people are more often than not an indictment of their lives. Words that define their present predicament and concludes their destiny. The way we’ve designed our approach to helping “poor people” is often to help them stay poor without dying, rather than helping them rise and contributing meaningfully to society. It’s the reason we as a nation and a continent have not lifted a large number of people out of poverty. In fact, that’s the state of our national and state economies — we are basically surviving, not intending to rise to a point where we can live off on our own.

When my mum died, the church always had this offering they made for orphans and widows. Most times they say that the sons/daughters of widows should wait back to receive the offerings gathered. Their approach to the situation was well-intended but embarrassing. It was true that I had lost my mum, and it was true that we were struggling. But we were all struggling in Jenta. A place where everyone was struggling. Truth be told, we were better than off than many of the people who were advised to contribute to us. Moreso, the way I saw it then was that people were more interested in giving so they can say they’ve given to poor people who cannot afford rather than helping us become sustainable. This circle happened for 6 years until my dad married again. I hated every bit of it and never stayed for any of their meetings. I was not an orphan neither was I the son of a widower, as per their definition of it.

Over time I’ve become exposed to another set of “poor people”. Those who celebrate “poorness”. They are the ones who think they deserve every aid or support from anywhere that is coming. They display their poverty constantly by saying in various forms that they need this or they need that, they want whatever that is free. For these ones, being poor is an honorable badge they wear around in order to obtain benefits — a pass for free things.

I was the proud poor and these were the humble poor.

In my experience, I have seen that the humble poor have often remained poor for most of their lives. And then pass it on to their children. Poverty becomes a hereditary status. The mindset the humble poor promote and the cheerful donors accept is that poor people need help in everything, they are totally helpless and cannot do anything on their own. It’s the reason why we want to give them everything, including toothpaste. And this is the crux of why “poor people” mostly remain poverty throughout their lifetimes.

You cannot fight poverty without poor people. You cannot fight poverty by “helping poor people”. You can only help poor people when they are helping themselves. Poverty can only be solved when “poor people” decide to change their fortunes, not through the aids they receive. There’s a place for aid, but aid does not solve the problem of poverty.

Poor people need to become major stakeholders in discussions of how they should be helped. Rather than saying, I want to do this for you? It is time we begin asking, “What can you do? What are you doing that I can help you with? What do you want to do that will solve your lack of food, funds, or material wealth?”

The only justifiable time for aid is during times such as these. Times of crisis. Other than this, what we need to do is to work WITH (not for) poor people to improve their living conditions.

Many models already exist as to what nations, NGOs, Government bodies, and individuals can do to solve the problem of poverty. Germany after World War 2. Japan after World War 2. China after the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Scandinavian Countries. What’s holding us back is that we have been assuming many things that have proven to be failures, but we are unwilling to abandon them.

My hope is that covid19 revealed to us how much we have been providing aid to the poor and haven’t solved the problem of poverty around here.

PS: If you had asked me in those years that I was classified as an orphan what I wanted the most, it wasn’t necessarily food, I wanted a laptop. I was fascinated by computers. Today, computers contributed significantly to my income.