Week 32: Poverty is taught!

Poverty is this “thing” “Elephant in the room” prevalent in developing Nations – with Sub Saharan Africa its poster child. It is dominantly caricatured with messianic act of the prosperous developed west (that were prior to the colonial extractive masters) to free its captives (often prior colonized subjects) by piercing through a barricading veil to open the opportunities for everlasting prosperity.

The discussion on poverty really refers to material poverty which inevitably is subjective – for instance it could sound perfectly rational for a child in Estonia (where virtually all services run on e-platforms) to see the lack of a smart phone by a child in Malawi as a sign of poverty). It follows this prevalent thing “poverty” has drastic contrasts, changing from place to place and across time. Moreover, it cannot be consistently experienced (sometimes it can be presence of or lack of the very same thing – it is a tree today a duck tomorrow?). This lends to a rational question: Does poverty really exist?

I argue poverty does not really exist. I present three propositions that may at first glance appear preposterous but once engaged, calm to the argument: “Poverty does not really exist! It is taught!”

First: “Poverty does not really exist – it is invented”

This “thing” called poverty cannot be touched and felt. It cannot be held to a consistent manifestation, definition, or measure. Applying Occam’s Razor - the simplest, most parsimonious conclusion is that it is not really there!

Before dismissing the foregoing as an insular preposterous “burying the head in the sand” pronouncement consider this: In no way is there a denial of the tangible and visual manifestation of a dearth of basic capabilities and opportunities to live a dignified life in Sub Saharan Africa - Children in filth with distended stomachs, fly infested dirty faces, no shoes with no prospects of securing formal education; Villages where safe drinking water is a distant dream; The undying image of a Starving Sudanese girl with a vulture pacing in close heel waiting on her inevitable last breath – Surely, are these not the wicked faces of poverty?

If we adopt the simple Merriam Webster definition of Poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions” then absolutely YES – this is poverty. But the question of real existence is: Does Poverty exist independent of any knowledge, perception or conception we may have about what exists? Simply put a tree exists because it is a tree – we can call it different names but voila it is a tree. For Poverty, that is not the case. Devoid of “othering” or “comparing” one human to another it may just as well not be there! This context leads to the second preposition:

Second: “Poverty is taught”

From prior thoughts, Poverty as a “thing” cannot stand on its own but rather gains its being in the shadows of comparison from one person to another. Teaching is the art of organized indoctrination – passing on dominant accepted norms, behaviors and identifications. I argue the only way poverty perpetuates its manifestation is through its teaching – applying Nazi Joseph Goebbels’s Law of Propaganda “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”. The drum beats of the ideology of poverty have belted long and hard to concretize the idea “you are poor”. At some time – ‘t’, you will look in the mirror and think “Yeah, perhaps it is true I am poor”. Now, I make my third and final “preposterous” argument in the form of a question:

Third: “Is it possible to be indoctrinated to poverty and wrongly identify as poor?”

I ask this not as “up in the clouds” intellectual hubris but rather a thirsting curious eye picking up the crumbs to trace the origins of the word Poverty.

The English meaning of Poverty first traces through the French materialistic view “pauvreté” referring to outcome of a wretched condition or destitution (this logically ties to the individualistic culture dominant in the west).

However, tracking back to the Latin root “pau-perum” reveals a different perspective of understanding poverty. “pau-perum” refers to an identification of “producing little”. This illuminates a context of motion in doing something so that when the effort falls short – then you are poor. Another way to sharpen the focus on the rooted understanding of poverty is arguing the flip term for “pau-perum” to be the Latin word “potentia” that denotes the motion of doing or becoming something. 

Antonio Negri valorizes poverty as the embodiment of weakness and lacking in potential.

Logically as the term travelled from the root “up the tree” its meaning is embellished and curves to the culture it manifests. The western culture is dominated by existential individualism and self-determination. Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo viewed poverty as an outcome of a dearth of rational choices to enable individual preference that ultimately links to individual deficiencies like laziness or lack of skills and education. For that reason, when the lens is cast to Sub Saharan Africa – the informal female street vendor with low education must be [very] poor.

But this lens falters on two counts.

First, the engagement in informal vending does not automatically signify poverty – actually in increasing cases in Sub Saharan Africa this is “choice” driven and financially rewarding.

Secondly, this forgets the fault in how productive potential was identified in Sub Saharan Nation making. In the delimitation and building of nation from a colonial nascence, the identification of what constituted a productive potential was inevitably constructed to the bias of the colonial want.

Therefore, an imported railway worker in the formation of the Nation of Kenya was designated as more productive and therefore not poor contrasted to a traditional cassava farmer and trader who was cast as informal and illegal as his product did not suit the colonial palate. 

This invocation of informality and illegality that then lends to identification of low productivity is a pervasive and persistent feature of Sub Saharan Africa with over 75% of its people tagged “informal” “illegal” and subsequently structures and systems designed away from this wrongly tagged producers that further aggravates the manifestation to “low productivity” and becomes the unending cycle of invented poverty!