Poverty is not a choice

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I found myself in a bit of a dilemma on Friday morning over a tweet I had sent on Thursday evening saying I had visited Glen View, the cholera hub, and witnessed poverty in its rawest forms.

I found myself in a bit of a dilemma on Friday morning over a tweet I had sent on Thursday evening saying I had visited Glen View, the cholera hub, and witnessed poverty in its rawest forms. I found myself having to go back and add this to the thread: “Must add when I say poverty I don’t mean squatter camps or rundown houses. No. There are proper houses there. Big houses. Presence of big businesses shows at some point people were thriving. The poverty there is state-induced. No access to water, no food, no jobs type of poverty.”

environment By Thandekile Moyo

One of the reasons I felt I had to retract that statement was I realised how insensitive it could have been because of the stigma attached to being poor. I imagined some poor boy (pun unintended) being looked down upon by some girl he likes in college because she read my tweet and now thinks the boy comes from some “squatter camp”. Isn’t it sad how we look down upon people because of situations already breaking them, situations that are not of their making? Is it not heartbreaking to think the people who need us the most are the ones we shun the most? We just do not want to be associated with society’s most afflicted, the poor, the HIV-positive and the “morally incorrect” (eg, prostitutes).

I was in rural Plumtree a few weeks ago and I remember marvelling at how beautiful one of the homes we visited was. This woman looked at me and said: “it wasn’t always like this you know. We were one of the poorest families in this community and nobody used to talk to us or want to be associated with us. Everyone looked down upon us and our relatives despised us. It’s only when fortunes turned that people started to recognise us and see us as worthy. I sometimes laugh when I see the church ladies coming to hold services here and I say to myself, oh! So now we are worthy? Hmm…”

Is there any animal viler than the human being? More hateful? More fickle? So we only recognise those who have made it in life? How many poor people have positions in your church committees? And in your families, how many of your poor relatives’ ideas do you ever listen to? If it wasn’t for the cheap labour they provide you with, would you ever think of that aunt who is so poor she only comes to town when you need her to do your laundry or when you need a babysitter? Poor people do not matter. They annoy us. They disgust us with their stink and their tattered clothes and mucous-eating babies. They embarrass us.

Unfortunately this treatment of the poor by us in our little circles mirrors treatment of the poor by most governments. When alienation of a certain group is institutionalised (established as a norm), the effects are devastating, disastrous and inhuman. Zimbabwe’s poor people embarrass the government, so the government shuts them up completely. Their plight is never heard because state media is controlled so they will broadcast only what they want you to see. They paint the poor as villains and they make them seem like a threat to the people. Who are “the people”?

Are the poor not part of the people? Well, no. they are not. Because our societies do not recognise poor people. The same way you feel your poor relatives have nothing worthy to say or feel beyond any manual labour they can offer you is the way the government feels about the poor. Beyond their vote they are nothing but a nuisance.

Let’s take the example of vendors in Harare. We are in an economic situation where unemployment levels are at the highest we have ever reached. We are all out of ideas. So some people have decided to sell vegetables, clothes and all sorts of things to make a living. They realise nobody is coming to the designated areas because they are far from everything. Their clientele is other poor Zimbabweans who cannot drive out of town after work to buy vegetables. They use public transport. So these people then decide okay, let us go to the people. Then you wake up one day and the city is flooded with vendors.

The vendors become a menace to you. Now you rich people cannot walk around town in peace because they have crowded the pavements. You cannot drive your fancy cars in peace because the city is congested with poor people, and their mode of transport (kombis), their source of income (vending) and their source of cheap food (vendors). You rich people then pile pressure on the government to remove the menace. The government doesn’t like them either, probably because you rich people are their children, their wives, relatives etc. so yes, the government hates the discomfort these poor people are causing you and the embarrassment they are causing them. But it is before elections, you see, so they cannot really do anything about them as they cannot afford to upset anyone.

Environmentalists also want them gone because there aren’t enough toilets in the CBD, they say. There’s no running water. The situation is catastrophic. It’s a ticking health time bomb. They want them to get out of the city centre and go home. But what the city’s environmentalists are not telling you is the fact that there is no running water in Glen View, Budiriro and all the other places these vendors call home. There aren’t enough toilets because one house can hold 10 families in each of its 10 rooms, kitchens and lounges included. Those residential areas are also a ticking health time bomb, but the powers-that-be do not care, they just want them away from the public eye. They know if they confine them to their locations, nobody will know the situation because hey, who listens to poor people?

Just as expected, the health time bomb explodes and we find ourselves with a typhoid and cholera outbreak, among other things. It’s after elections and the government doesn’t need the poor people anymore so they lay the cholera blame squarely on them. They embark on a “clean-up”, beat them up, and confiscate their wares and all you rich people celebrate because you finally have your pavements back. “Vendors must go!” you say, from your airconditioned homes with flush toilets.

Where must they go? Where did they come from? Who are they? All those questions do not matter to you because alienation of the poor has become institutionalised. Like institutionalised racism and institutionalised tribalism, those affected are a menace to both the government and to those benefiting from the status quo. Those benefiting from this marginalisation of poor people have become the government’s weapon as they bash vendors for breaking laws, for making their city dirty, for provoking the police and for being violent.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission has this to say about poverty:

“…Indeed, no social phenomenon is as comprehensive in its assault on human rights as poverty. Poverty erodes or nullifies economic and social rights such as the right to health, to adequate housing, food and safe water, and the right to education. The same is true of civil and political rights, such as the right to a fair trial, political participation and security of the person…”

There are different types of poverty. What Zimbabwe is facing is what is known as relative poverty, which is defined as “the condition in which people lack the amount of income needed in order to maintain the average standard of living in the society in which they live”. Our vendors are both an effect and a symptom of relative poverty. Relative poverty is caused by mainly three things:

Unemployment Education (lack of) Poor health

Next time, before you bash poor people (eg, vendors), I need you to ask yourself this: In any country in the world, whose responsibility are these three things?