The burden of the poor

A distinguished visitor from the United Kingdom asked why so many people carry guns. I replied: The rich fear the poor. As the prosperity gap becomes wider, those who have prized possessions feel the need to protect themselves from the prying eyes of those who have less. We need not be antirich, but the rich need to be propoor.

My own life went from riches to rags and then back to one of very real privilege. Up to my midteens, I lacked nothing. I lived among the elite, went to top private schools and traveled the world. Then, overnight, a civil war and the loss of my father’s income for three years forced me to return to the land of my birth, the United Kingdom, as a refugee. I overheard my mother saying she was down to one week’s worth of spending money. I got a job the next day and never again relied on parental financial support. I went to university on a full state grant reserved for the poor. My work as a student, in factories, hotels, restaurants and as a door-to-door salesman, brought me into direct contact with the desperately rich and poor.

My salvation was education. My final year at university was focused not just on studies. I had to find work for survival. After 30 interviews and five job offers I chose a career in banking, and the rest is history. But my real education came through other life experiences. When I was a child, my mother told me to never force a person to bend to serve unnecessarily but if they had to, then I had to appreciate the dignity of labor. So, no unmade beds or clothes strewn across the floor. Instead, my parents funded the education of the children of our household staff. Under my grandfather’s tutelage, I learned how to resolve disputes and offer fairness among the farmers who tended to the family land. To this day, I am at ease with rural people and I can eat with my hands even though the silver spoon that was taken away from me as a teenager has now been restored.

The poor do not need sympathy, patronage, or the largesse of politicians who distribute taxpayer money as though it were their own. Well-meaning charity, except for emergencies, needs to focus on livelihoods, not short-term gestures. Elimination of absolute poverty can only happen if government and the well-off make it their priority. People thrive on opportunity. Education and health enable the poor to climb out of adversity. Schools, teachers and books are vital, but the lack of shoes, clothes or food can stop children from learning. Government programs and spending can succeed if there is real accountability for outcomes where success is rewarded and failure does not go unpunished.

Urban development that does not cater to accessible and affordable social housing means that the poor will be unable to service the needs of the rich in their gated communities and condos. Developers should not be allowed to build unless they are also prepared to provide sustaining infrastructure close to the community and not in some far-flung place. Instead of focusing on eyesore vistas of squatters and the inconvenience of tricycles and PUVs that get in the way of dark-tinted SUVs, the aim should be to invest in employment in the source communities of migrants and in public transport that reduces the commute to work for all. The poor cannot be made invisible. People live in squalor in cities, not by choice but because they are not valued as a community asset. Slum dwellers are frightening, but their impoverished relatives in the provinces are romanticized as indigenous people.

Not everyone who has made their fortune is lost in a dizzy pursuit of consumption and affected gaiety. First-generation wealth generators, in particular, have better grounding and understanding of turning adversity into opportunity. They tend to have a closer bond with the people who help make their enterprise a success. Instead of using corporate social responsibility as an adjunct of the PR department, their values and actions in sustaining communities are an integral part of the business model.

Pay living wages, not the minimum. Create opportunity through social enterprise. Take the lack of toilets and bathing facilities, for example. Small amounts of capital, low-cost design and municipal support can not only entice people into starting such businesses but also solve a dire community need. Microfinance, especially in the hands of women, can turn a squatter into an entrepreneur.

Agriculture can move from being a backbreaking source of bare subsistence to a mode where more of the value added is at source and the stranglehold of middlemen and lack of paths to markets are overcome. What is lacking is not the will of the poor to work, it is the absence of modern farming methods, poor knowledge of higher-yield crops, and ineffective husbandry of natural resources. As consumers, we have to learn to value, afford dignity and provide deserving returns to those who bend their backs so that we can stand straight.

I have learned a few salutary lessons from the poor. In an impending natural disaster, I saw well-to-do people clear the supermarkets of goods as soon as the shelves were stocked. In wet markets in the same city, the poor bought only what they needed. They never ran out of stock. In another scene, we carefully distributed aid based on our perception of who needed what. We returned only to find that the recipients redistributed what we gave them. And then there was the case of a lady squatter who lost everything in a typhoon. She used a third of our donation to house her family; the rest went into a roadside stall. She now earns seven times what we gave her per month!

Unleashing the potential of the poor is a far better safeguard than living with armed security guards.

Asif Ahmad is the ambassador of the United Kingdom, which is committed to spending 0.7 percent of GNI as development assistance.