Look at the Cape Flats, a landscape filled with religious structures, human potential and aid organisations. Yet any predictive data will tell you that its status as a landscape defined by poverty will be here for another 300 years. File picture: Independent Newspapers
I have worked in spaces of poverty for over forty years now.
From seeing people trapped in poverty’s grip and living in its dehumanising shacks in the late 60’s and early 70’s, to travelling through the country in the 80’s to see sites like the apartheid homelands as far as Giyani in 1983 and Mozambique and Zimbabwe during the same periods, it clear that “addressing poverty” is a slogan for massive backslapping, but clearly never an intention.
I recently wrote that those who say they are involved in ‘poverty alleviation’ should probably stop using the phrase. The data and the visuals tell a different story.
At best, they are either satisfied that minimalist aid will fix everything associated with generational poverty or at worst, involved in conscience-massaging altruism.
It is becoming clearer that the aid ecosystem has made poor people addicted to aid’s handouts. The minimalist amounts of food and aid given to suffering poor people have erased their ability to discover their dignity and self-worth because they have become addicted to meagre handouts.
Why are we, government, and civil society, not discussing and designing economic and education systems that will stop these minimalist interventions that destroy human motivation and dignity? When will we be brave enough to say “stop sending us your old shoes and food parcels that create addictions to aid.” When will we be brave enough to say “we want an economy that will end our poverty in one generation.” Other societies have done it.
The answers are because those who send the aid don’t want to end poverty, for it’s not in the interest of power to allow poor people to create their own sustainable and competitive economies.
Look at the Cape Flats, a landscape filled with religious structures, human potential and aid organisations. Yet any predictive data will tell you that its status as a landscape defined by poverty will be here for another 300 years.
There is no intention to end its poverty. Because there is no plan to liberate it economically. The plan is to increase its addiction to mind-numbing aid, while the altruists feel damn good about it.
Take the learning problems. Several studies have shown that children in Grade 4 struggle to read for meaning. This came up in the 2001 and subsequent PIRLS studies and the GADRA study in 2023. Academics, activists, and education agencies have flocked to solve the problem.
The data has shown that after all these years, the needle has hardly moved. Why? Because everyone is trying to make the child who grew up in poverty and with extreme trauma the problem.
Ten-year-old Thabo and Jasmina are defined as the problem. It’s not Thabo and Jasmina that can’t read. They are doing exactly what the system is designed to produce.
The system is intentionally designed to create this problem. Few are saying “the system is broken.”
Schools with the power of privileged resources are able to overcome this system problem, thus they do not have the same devastating data sets.
Therefore, instead of saying “Grade 4s can’t read for meaning” as if children from poor communities are literary dunces, say “the system is broken and it’s incapable of educating traumatised children living with extreme poverty to read for meaning.”
The children are acting consistent with what the system has taught them. Or rather, did not teach them.
Our problem is how we define what we confront and how we speak about it. We can no longer blame South Africa’s high crime rate on the Manenbergs of the world; it’s a response to dehumanising poverty. We can’t talk about how great minimalist aid is, as it can never replace the government’s duty to build an economy that ends traumatising poverty.
And we can no longer blame Grade 4s for their reading abilities when it's the system that fails them over and over.
* Lorenzo is a leader and veteran in the social development space who has worked for decades to address SA’s stark inequities.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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