Bridge the gap between rich and poor

Editor | Thursday October 28, 2010 00:00

Right from the red carpeted offices of the Office of the President to the ward AIDS committees.  Yes, even school committees!  We all acknowledged the problem and were thus able to deal with it.  Today delegates from across the country are converging in Mahalapye to lay a roadmap for poverty eradication in Botswana.

We are told that the delegates will include people from across all sectors of the society; the poor, the rich, the clergy, members of the legislature etc.  There is definitely a common understanding about the enemy that we face as a country.  Nearly a million of our people are living in poverty, most of them in abject poverty.  It is a laudable effort for government to have raised the battle cry from 'poverty reduction' to 'poverty eradication'.

There is no doubt that the delegates who are meeting this morning will come up with sound resolutions that will see poverty, especially the abject type that we see in many homes, becoming a thing of the past.  Well-meaning as the government is, there is a danger though that all these efforts may be hopelessly off the mark, unless certain 'must-be-done issues are acknowledged and taken care of.

If we take seriously what Vice President Mompati Merafhe said when he talked about the economic disparity between the rich and the poor - especially the working class - as the position of government, then all these well-intended efforts will become useless.  Calling for the bridging of the gap between the rich and poor should not be seen as stigmatising' the rich, as Rre Merafhe is reported to have said, nor is it borne of a grudge by anybody against rich people.

Prosperity, we are told, is a result of productivity.  Let those people who have worked hard to be where they are be appreciated.  However, we believe that it is wrong for anybody to be receiving most of the fruit of the land alone. It is our most ardent belief that the land's natural resources should be equitably shared.  We are not calling for equal salaries for all people.  Rather we are saying, it is wrong to have one person receiving an obnoxiously high salary while those working with him or her receive peanuts.  It is wrong.  We contend that for only the rich to be getting business opportunities and funding from government programmes such as CEDA, while the poor struggle, is not just.

We believe that government as well as the civil society should appreciate the centrality of education in poverty eradication.  It is only the exception from among children who come from poor families who make it to tertiary education.  Many factors, such as distance to school and lack of food, all converge to cause their failure.  And so the cycle will continue.

It can be broken, we believe, by increasing the minimum living standard for the poor, the minimum wage standards for the lowly paid workers, retirees, and raising the income level of low-income people by strengthening the training and improving the basic education level, employment promotion measures and continuously improving the employability of low-income people.

These are all ways of ensuring that the poor do get out of the dungeon.  But first government needs to acknowledge that there is a gap between the rich and the poor, and that it contributes to the state of poverty in our nation.

                                                                Today's thought'Wars against nations are fought to change maps; wars against poverty are fought to map change.'                                                                   - Muhammad Ali