The politics of poverty

Henley Morgan

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

THERE are some statements that should not be allowed to go unchallenged, even if expressing a contrary view pits one against a personality for whom one has great respect and admiration. Such is the statement attributed to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Minister AJ Nicholson and carried in a front-page story by this newspaper in its February 1, 2012 edition. In a speech to members of the diplomatic corps, the loquacious comrade was reported to have said something to the effect that his government would seek a downward reclassification of Jamaica's status as a middle-income country by the World Bank in order to facilitate access to concessionary financial resources available only to countries judged to be among the poorest of the poor.

The practice by some of our political leaders who take on the spectre of poverty and wear it as if it were a badge of honour in order to win gratuitous favours from rich nations is deeply offensive to self-respecting Jamaicans. This practice of manipulating our way into getting more foreign aid is reminiscent of the 1970s when left-leaning political leaders used the Third-World label to express a radical ideology of how to bring about change in the world. Done in excess, the socialist posturing served as a self-inflicted wound, which put Jamaica in the league of leper nations from which we are yet to emerge.

In the ongoing saga between Republican hopefuls to determine who will go up against President Barack Obama in general elections later this year, front-runner Mitt Romney has apologised for saying,

"I am not concerned about the poor. There is a safety net. If it's not working, I'll fix it." This statement by a man, who is himself a millionaire several times over, is not brilliant! He has been raked over the coals by the press for publicly admitting to a lack of concern for poverty-stricken people. But Governor Romney's faux pas is even more revealing for what it says about his apparent inability to see within the poor the seeds of their own redemption. In addressing the issue of what to do about the poor, some politicians easily see the need for assistance that amounts to a handout, but are blind to the ladder with which the affected people and groups are to climb out of poverty. This must change.

In the book, Doing Well and Doing Good - The Challenges to the Christian Capitalist, author Richard John Neuhaus writes insightfully about the potential of the poor. I quote in part: "Poverty is exclusion from the sources of wealth produced by the free economy. Another word for exclusion is marginalisation. The fact is that many people, perhaps the majority today, do not have the means that would enable them to take their place in an effective and humanly dignified way within a productive system in which work is truly central. They have no possibility of acquiring the basic knowledge that would enable them to express their creativity and develop their potential. They have no way of entering the network of knowledge and intercommunication that would enable them to see their qualities appreciated and utilised. Thus, if not actually exploited, they are to a great extent marginalised. Economic development takes place above their head, so to speak. The task of those on both sides of the chasm is to move billions of people into the circle of exchange and productivity that is the modern economy."

And it can be achieved. One only needs to look at China, a country which in less than two decades created the condition that has allowed 440 million people to lift themselves out of poverty, the biggest reduction in poverty by any country in history. In a world always seeking a label to pin on its politics, the January 21 to 27 edition of the highly authoritative Economist newspaper, in describing communist China's experimentation with market reform, used for its cover story the following: "The Rise of State Capitalism; The Emerging World's New Model". Those who have a healthy respect for capitalism are likely to shun such labels and see poverty instead as a consequence of exclusion from the market, rather than exploitation by the workings thereof. But even they would have to admit that the answer is not to be found in the neo-liberal economic theory of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which promotes wealth creation at the top of the economic pyramid while leaving the base unattended.

Walking through Trench Town and other similar man-made zones of exclusion, it takes an abundance of faith to think of many of the people living there; people who must scratch the earth like chickens for their daily morsel, in terms of potential and opportunity. It's far easier to see them as a societal burden; as people who have no productive potential above being wards of the state. When one gets to that point of cynicism, one of two things happens. At worst, the war against poverty is replaced by the war against the poor. Bullets and not jobs become the chief armaments with which the war is waged. At best, it produces the kind of benign paternalism one detects in AJ Nicholson's plea for more foreign aid to a government that thinks the best it can do for the poor is take care of them.

The time has come for us to think outside the box and beyond the JEEP (Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme) to treat with endemic poverty, which increased by over 10 percentage points in four years of the last administration. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Report, which compares countries on the basis of the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity among the masses, ranks Jamaica in the top tier. Most of this entrepreneurial energy is wasted; stuck in survival mode which hardly ever gets beyond subsistence existence, otherwise productive and wealth-creating citizens are made into hustlers by a system that caters more for people who are rich in pocket but may be poor in ideas, than it does for people who are poor in pocket but may be rich in ideas. How to release the potential that's locked up at the base of the social and economic pyramid is a thought that should preoccupy us all.

Transforming the zones of exclusion where the poor exist in their largest numbers to zones of investment and opportunity is an alluring idea. One hopes that at the first retreat of the new government, discussion of the impending restructuring of an agreement with the IMF was not pursued to the exclusion of ideas for genuine empowerment and engagement of the base. Winning a general election on the basis of which party loves the poor more should make a government want to end their suffering, not increase their number.

hmorgan@cwjamaica.com

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COMMENTS (7)

Tom Stroke
2/16/2012

@howie J, what Lee Kuan Yew borrowed from Jamaica after his visit in 1975 was not to do the foolishness he saw taking place in Jamaica at the time. When he came, he saw Michael Manley talking nonsense about “redistribution of world wealth”. The PNP is still stuck in that ruinous mode even now, as we are about to witness with JEEP. You know something, rather than get bugged down in discussion on this issue please read this article which will direct you to the memoirs of Lew Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story 1965 – 2000 by Wilberne Persaud in the Gleaner on January 8, 2010:
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100108/business/business7.html

howie J
2/15/2012

@Tom Stroke, Lee Kuan Yew said, “… we borrowed in an eclectic fashion, elements of what Hong Kong was doing, what Switzerland was doing, what Israel was doing, and we improvised. I also went down to Malta to see how they ran the dry docks.”
I have heard people talking about Singapore’s success is due to borrowings from Jamaica, but this is not true. Singapore’s economic success is due to great support from men like Goh Keng Swee, Goh Chok Tong and Albert Winsemius, a Dutch economist, who was Singapore’s Economic Advisor from 1961 to 1984.
What Jamaica and Singapore have in common is that we are British colonies, but as Lee Kuan Yew observed, we differ in that, ‘Singapore has no xenophobic hangover from colonization.’

Meat Head
2/15/2012

One of the great contributors to the economic malaise is the political strategy of using handouts to build the base (JEEP?). This strategy, while successful electorally, has devastated our economy, draining funds that could be used for more productive development and driven our debt and loan servicing costs to unsustainable levels. We are now at crisis levels so there may be reason for hope - I'm not holding my breadth, though.

Noel Richards
2/15/2012

Nixon's rapprochement with China (1969) and the Nixon Shock of 1971 (abandoning Gold Standard), set in motion the problems we are experiencing today. Those acts trumpeted the emergence of Neoliberalism, with the IMF, World Bank, IDB etc, becoming the tools of exploitation. Later deregulation of the US financial system, the killing of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 by Bill Clinton, accelerated everything exponentially. J'cans cannot thrive without understanding this financial world.

Noel Richards
2/15/2012

"Neoliberalism" was the backlash to the policy of "Embedded Liberalism", which underpinned the Bretton Woods System of 1944. The "Glorious Thirty" (Les Trente Glorieuses) 1945-1975, that followed the end of WWII, was inevitably challenged as the US dug a hole for itself in Vietnam. That period was based on the relative stability that was presented by a bipolar world (US v Soviets) and the inevitable growth associated with Europe's regeneration from wholesale destruction. Then came Nixon.

Noel Richards
2/15/2012

AJ's statement is wrong, it falls in line with PJ's encouragement of migration for the benefit of remittances, both are recipes for failure. What must be altered is the wholesale lack of understanding of the world's economic system, how it works, what it intends to achieve and who controls it. Without being able to give details, there are no existing economic models that JA should follow. The US cannot be copied, the BRIC's are being exploited. JA can and must tread a unique path.

Tom Stroke
2/15/2012

I am still trying to lift my lower lip off the ground at how well written the argument was made by this writer in this article. To add to the writer’s argument, the pronouncement by AJ Nicholson can be viewed as a message to Haiti that it should move over, for Jamaica is moving at full speed to unseat it for the bottom spot. I believe Mr Perkins is still bewildered in death, why Singapore, whose former leader came and learned from Jamaica, is today so prosperous, while Jamaica remained backward with its hands outstretched and palms held upward for available handout. After his party presided over Jamaica for more than 18 unbroken years, AJ felt no remorse to look those members of the diplomatic corps and make the argument that we need to be downgraded. What a shame? Yet, AJ claim he is on a mission to restore Jamaica’s image, to what I am asking. Simply amazing.

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The politics of poverty