Breaking The Poverty Cycle

By Baboki Kayawe
Staff Writer | Monday February 8, 2010 00:00

It can be quiet perplexing though how some people become accommodative of poverty and become captives of hunger without actively doing something to change their circumstances.

Maybe poet William Carlos William summed it up when he said empty pockets make empty minds. He might have been telling the truth, as it appears most empty pockets manifest into minds that do not function well.

Have you not come across people who are reluctant to do even the simplest of tasks such as building a traditional hut, even when they have an abundance of raw materials at their disposable? 

Take for instnce my neighbours at the village back home. These are able-bodied people who go to bed huddled in a very shoddy hut-like structure. I have tried to understand why these people live under those conditions, because there is an abundance of natural resources like soil and grass which unlike the mophane worm do not require a license for one to harvest.

However intergenerational poverty constitutes the worst of all disasters. In an interview with Mpho Sedimo, a 20-year-old girl from Mokobaxane; a very small village in Boteti sub district, poverty for her has become bloodline centred. It has been passed on from her great-grand father, to the grandfather and then to her father, right down to her.

Mpho Sedimo is not only a hungry girl, she does not see any point in living.

'It is always said that like dirt poverty can't be wiped out, but ours is more of a birthmark,' she says.

Sedimo who left school at tea break, not because she was not interested in acquiring education but because her parents saw no value in the institution, regrets  being born to a family like hers as she believes they contributed to what she has become. While it is not a choice who ones' parents should be, to Sedimo having the genes that she has inherited has made her stuck to poverty. She says she makes ends meet by being a regular at the Ipelegeng programme but it is far from enough as the money she gets cannot support a family of fifteen. She attributes the state of affairs in her family to being a descent of the Basarwa tribe, as the family spends their lives working for people in cattle posts but never use the income, sometimes in the form of small stock, wisely.

'The problem with my tribesman is that life for us means alcohol,' she says. She does not consume the toxic substance as she believes it was not meant for them (tribe). Mpho admits that intergenerational poverty has had an irreparable cognitive impact to the family. Her two brothers and sisters are reluctant to do anything to bring food to the table; they would rather do small jobs in lieu of alcohol.

'If I could only have been educated beyond standard one, I think my family would be having a better future,' she says.  She envisages a different life for her son Kgotso. The boy is doing standard two at a local primary school and her dream is to give him the necessary support that would see him a different and proud product, weaned of poverty one day. Gloria Jacques, a lecturer in the Department Of Social Work at the Univeristy of Botswana says in an interview with Monitor, that intergenerational poverty is the hardest challenge, as it tends to produce an integral personality type that is difficult to change.

 Its major effect is often de-motivation where people cease to care and 'that is perhaps the worst scenario.'  She says constant struggling to make ends meet may lead to that condition and it is up to social workers and policy makers to find ways of inspiring people to help themselves. She further alludes that sometimes it only takes the interest of a concerned person to make them think and act in a more positive way.

'That is one of the greatest challenges for social work in Botswana, not to do for people but to help them to help themselves,' Jacques says.

As to the relationship between material poverty and cognition, she says there is definitely a great link between the two. She further says there is also a link to emotional factors as the way a person thinks about or perceives the world influences their feelings and their behaviour.

'Therefore if one's life is defined by a lack of necessary resources and constitutes an ongoing struggle for survival then emotionally that person will feel drained and behaviourally they may tend to give up the unequal struggle,' she says.

Jacques also admits that this is not always the case as others may be motivated by factors such as love and caring for their children or may develop anger against what they perceive to be fate. She says that anger may motivate them to take a stand and make every effort to change their situation by good means or bad. In the latter case, she says they might turn to crime to obtain what they need and want.

She sites the situation in Haiti at the moment in which some parents are actually handing over their children to American missionaries in the hope that they will start a new life in America. 'Sometimes our judgement of people in that situation is coloured by our own perceptions (cognition) and emotions which are not necessarily applicable to others,' she says.

Eradication of poverty by 2016 and of course meeting the millennium development goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger need more than social transfer measures such as food baskets to the poorest of the poor, who are probably victims of intergenerational poverty.

As Jacques put it, intergenerational poverty is the hardest challenge, as it tends to produce an integral personality type that is difficult to change, the time is now for social workers and policy makers to find ways of making victims of intergenerational poverty find interest in helping themselves. However, it is a mammoth task as in most cases these people are often de-motivated and they do not care.

'This is perhaps the worst scenario'