You should not be blamed for being poor

Traders eke out a living at OTC bus stop in Nairobi on December 31, 2019. Many poor people are hard-working. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Poverty is a rooted structural strategy that has existed for years to keep the benefits of labour reserved for a few individuals.
  • The people who’ve managed to move up the ranks of the poverty structure aren’t simply working hard. There’s more to it.

The easiest route to take when trying to explain poverty is using blunt arguments like poor people are poor because they’re lazy and sleep too much.

In Kenya, for example, it’s accompanied by false examples that if you wake up at 4am and get on the road you’ll see alleged hard-working wealthy people who drive big cars heading to work while the lazy poor people are nowhere to be seen.

And that when lazy poor people wake up, it’s after sunrise when the rest are already at work.

This is not only an ageing thought that should be forcefully killed, but it is an insult to every hard-working Kenyan. This is because poor people are the hardest workers.

There are the people who have no choice because poverty doesn’t grant them the luxury of choosing what they must do to get by.

They are the people who'll do jobs that make us gag, like washing public toilets that many swear they’d rather die than use.

These are the women, men and sometimes even children who are up by 3am to go to the market to get us groceries that are transported overnight to the city.

STRUCTURAL STRATEGY

They are the chapati and mandazi sellers, boiled eggs with kachumbari and smokies’ hawkers, matatu and bus operators.

They are the fruits and water hawkers who are always in traffic no matter the weather.

They are the many people forced to oil the capitalism machine without getting equity.

These people and many unmentioned others keep the economy moving, yet somehow in discussions about wealth and the unjust way in which capitalism unequally distributes it, they are mocked as being lazy.

This kind of thinking must henceforth stop. It’s demeaning, harmful and diverts attention from the fact that poverty is a structure.

It blurs the endless ways in which structural poverty is a leadership failure and not an individual’s flaw.

Poverty is a rooted structural strategy that has existed for years to keep the benefits of labour reserved for a few individuals.

UNSCRUPULOUS METHODS

It qualifies some people to acquire prosperity while others do not. It classifies people into informal and formal work by certifying one form of work as professional and hence payable in dignity.

The other, which is often the informal work, is rendered menial and hence payable in the indignity of horrible work environments, policies, remuneration and disrespectful references like poor people are poor because they’re lazy.

The people who’ve managed to move up the ranks of the poverty structure aren’t simply working hard.

There’s more to it - like who is in their network, their parents, where they started from, who gave them an opportunity, who invested in them, and so on.

Blaming people who are doing their best to survive structural monsters is thus not the way.

Scheaffer Okore is a policy analyst; [email protected]