Making a difference for the poor?
By Dr. Winford James
October 24, 2004
Posted: October 30, 2004
The budget for fiscal 2005 - which, by the way, partially takes effect from 2004 - has, with some justification, been hailed by some as a poor man's budget. After all, it offers relief to low-income persons in the form of, among other things, an increased old age pension, an increase in the public assistance grant, an increased disability grant, a 46 percent reduction in the surcharge on the importation of chicken and turkey parts, plans to have the Caricom Secretariat approve the removal of the Common External Tariff on four commodities, zero-rating of five commodities, more and bigger monthly hampers in the SHARE programme, a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage, and an increase in the personal allowance for persons earning below $30,000 per annum.
Furthermore, the budget promises an alleviation of poverty through 'life skills development, literacy, training and skills upgrade, and access to credit and other opportunities for the generation of sustainable incomes.' And, of course, make-work schemes like URP and CEPEP will continue.
Now the poor - indeed, everybody - must take any relief that comes their way. If I could save a dollar here and a dollar there, I would take it; and I would hope to be able to spend or invest the savings responsibly.
But the question we must ask is, Will the poor cease being poor as a result of the various types of budget relief? I think the answer must be no. Not a quiet, dispassionate no, but a resounding one.
The most convincing proof is one that stares us in the face every year. Every year, the budget recognizes the high numbers of poor people and comes up with predictable strategies to alleviate their poverty. Every year. And the strategies essentially take the form of meagre increases of meagre allowances and grants, on the one hand, and provision of conditions for greater affordability of services like lower-level housing, education, and medicine, on the other. This, against the backdrop of bigger and bigger budgets every succeeding year.
This year, the budget was $28B, and it comes as expected and as desired with relief measures for the poor. Next year, we can be sure that we will have an even bigger budget, with its own relief measures for the poor. We have not been given the number of poor people in the land, but we can safely assume that the number, always too high, is not coming down. It is as if budgets can make no real difference in the quality of life of the poor.
This year's budget admits that the poor will always be around - in the words of the minister of finance, 'in perpetual need of assistance'. But it also recognises the importance of education and training to leading people out of poverty - something we have known all along. The education and training will be delivered through an integration of effort from various ministries and government departments and programmes, which the minister calls an 'added focus in our approach to poverty eradication'.
Isn't this an admission that the integration was not there before? If it wasn't there before, doesn't it mean that perhaps thousands of people had no way of their poverty before the new initiative? Doesn't it mean that all this time people were locked into poverty by dependence on handouts and various kinds of miniscule ameliorations?
It must be clear that people everywhere improve their standard of living by making good incomes. And three of the best ways in which they can make good incomes are acquisition of different levels of good education and training, creating and selling goods and services through formal and informal education and training, and buying and selling such goods and services.
Of course, social and political conditions have to be propitious. Governments have to put in place enabling laws and policies. Socially and economically hostile hegemonies have to be broken. The patterns of wealth distribution have to be democratised. People created and socialised as labour have to be transformed and resocialised as entrepreneurs, producers, owners, and employers.
This programme calls for new foci in the education, training and innovation systems, especially the curriculum in these systems. There is an urgent need for the commercialisation of self-knowledge, and by self-knowledge I mean informal and formal knowledge of our physical environment and our cultures in all their manifestations and forms. I mean our tacit as well as our codified and codifiable knowledge.
We have got to become as a matter of course producers, innovators, and exporters of the products of our self-knowledge even as we continue to adapt the technologies we routinely import. We have got to maximise our human performance by changing the way we help the poor and the way we educate ourselves. The poor must be made to see the goose-pimply possibilities of an education for entrepreneurship and innovation.
However, the success of the programme depends on the quality of public policy. Without public sector leadership, it will fail. It should be clear by now that the high numbers of poor people among us are the consequence of a failure of public sector leadership.
Who have been our pubic sector leaders for most of our independent history?
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