How the rich have impoverished the world

The outbreak of coronavirus seems to have levelled the social world.

Here is a disease that appears to respect no social class. All of humanity is affected, seemingly equally. But is that the case?

As the world enters what could be a global lockdown, with a slowdown in economic production, no or controlled interaction, little or no access to shops and markets, the socio-economic differences will become stark clear.

The rich will still fare better than the poor. They will stock up for the quarantine. They will have access to medical services and personal doctors.

They probably have bigger houses, thus more private spaces at home. They will have access to entertainment and other means to pass the time.

In many cases they will most likely work from home, earning income and saving. The poor may end up cramped in smaller houses, lose jobs and incomes, have little or no access to the basics of life — they will struggle to make it from day to day.

There are several studies, books and reports on how the world is splitting into two: the poor and the rich.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

All debates on this division agree on one point: that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

Yet there are hundreds of civil society groups, NGOs, institutes, charities and individuals, all dedicated to bridging that widening gap.

There are thousands of women and men who wake up every morning and work till late in the evening trying to address this social problem.

But it seems as if poverty is resolved to embrace even more people every day than decline.

How have these individuals failed to chip away at poverty? How have countries that have recently claimed to be experiencing economic growth in Asia, Latin America and Africa failed so miserably to get more people to lead better lives?

How have the intellectual elite failed to figure out how to resolve this problem? According to Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, (Alfred Knopf, 2018), the elite cannot change the world as it would upset the high table, at which they feed.

Anand’s book is a cold analysis of how the social structure is today designed to almost perpetuate inequality.

PUBLIC DISCOURSE

In this system, the poor are simply on their own, abandoned to fate and an economic system that has trapped them into endless toil without light at the end of the tunnel.

The elite, on the other hand, are busy developing policies and institutions that will guarantee them a stay up the social ladder.

Yet the system was not always this way. At least in the past there was serious public debate on inequality, poverty and common progress.

Such discussion was not just an occasional moralising on the pulpit or in the newspapers. It often was a debate involving public intellectuals.

Public intellectuals argued with each other, questioned received wisdom and often challenged government policies on issues of collective importance.

But this category of thinkers has been in decline. It has been replaced by ‘thought leaders’ — the men and women who globetrot, giving public talks in forums such as TED talks on all kinds of issues.

To illustrate the distinction between the two groups, Anand, citing Daniel Drezner in his book The Idea Industry, writes:

“The ascendant type is the thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend, Drezner says, to ‘know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world’; they are not sceptics but ‘true believers’; they are optimists, telling uplifting stories; they reason inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from authority. They go easy on the powerful.”

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

The point Anand is making here is that the ‘thought leader’, the ‘expert’, who is really just someone with an idea or two about an aspect of life, is today taken more seriously than someone who has spent or spends years studying the same subject.

This is how, for instance, there are so many experts on politics, economics, culture (in Kenya they sign off as commentators) but who really don’t know the basics of these subjects.

They really don’t need to know much on a topic beyond the sound bites and repetition of their conviction.

One sees tens of experts on Africa, who don’t live in Africa or occasionally come to Africa, on many global news channels every now and then.

But, beyond the thought leaders, there is a new breed of elite do-gooders. It has become common to find ‘social entrepreneurs’ in many slums and the countryside of poor countries in the world today.

These men and women seem to believe that by investing among the poor, they could help the needy gain some income, attain better living standards and move a rung up that social ladder.

But does it happen that way in the real world? Take the idea of ‘renting’ out that extra space in one’s house, as the Airbnb gospel goes.

Well, very few people ask how, in the first instance, hotel accommodation is expensive. Who owns these hotels?

Or, if one were to adopt the Airbnb model in Nairobi, who really will benefit? Probably the same elite that owns the hotels and owns most houses/apartments in Nairobi!

RISK OF BEING BLACKLISTED

In the recent past, universal banking and access to credit has been touted as a solution to poverty.

Thought leaders have argued that poor people need to be able to borrow money affordably so that they can either invest in their small businesses or pay for basic goods and services.

On the outside this sounds like a good idea. But a keener observer would know that many poor people in a country like Kenya belong to one or another saving group — the so-called chamas.

Also, many poor people have always had some line of credit or another. They could borrow from the local kiosk or grocer. They could borrow from a neighbour or relative.

But then one day some do-gooders introduced them to some financial app, headquartered somewhere beyond Kenya.

The poor Kenyan could borrow, but they also run the risk of being blacklisted in case they defaulted on the ‘easy money’.

Today media reports suggest that many Kenyans are trapped in a vicious cycle of borrowing from one loan app to repay another and borrow from a third to repay the second!

The point that Anand makes over and over again in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World is that the elite cannot, and will never, be the vanguards of the revolution — the king will not dethrone himself.

BREEDING DEPENDENCY

And the way to test this theory is to think through the seeming inability of the NGOs — and now the government experts — to resolve some basic problems like the provision of potable water, access to basic education, availability of toilets, eradication of waterborne diseases, et cetera.

Think about the billions of dollars that have been spent in Africa or in Kenya to enable access to free education.

How then is it that so many schools in Kenya lack classrooms, desks, offices for teachers, toilets and libraries?

About 25 years ago, Graham Hancock wrote The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business.

Hancock’s thesis was that international aid didn’t in fact address disease, poverty, illiteracy or suffering in the poor nations of the world.

It instead guaranteed the aid managers fat salaries, oiled the wheels or corruption in the poor nations and generally created dependency.

The aid business is another one of the elite ‘do-good’ industries. It also depends on an established network of donors, institutions and persons.

It thrives on endless meetings in high-end hotels at which copied and recopied PowerPoint slides, claiming to analyse some problem, are shared but little is done on the ground, where the problem exists.

COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

In fact, more money is spent by the donor community on per diem, travel, and hotel costs than on the projects themselves.

Anand’s book is not just another ‘blame’ book. It is an invitation to humanity to think through its problems collectively.

Anand’s message in the end is: “When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen; it is saying what it believes through what it does.”

In other words, let’s be cautious about those who claim to be speaking on behalf of others, and seek to resolve common problems — such as the Covid-19 — collectively.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]