Mistreating poverty alleviation
Eight months after seizing power, General Pervez Musharraf's credibility as a reformer is sagging badly as he backs down from confronting one traditional interest group after another. He has scaled back a few sweeping crusades and accepted donors dictates to the extent that his conciliatory position on such issues smacks of the same weakness that we have been witnessing in the politicians stand for the last fifty years. One of such issues is the struggle against ever increasing poverty and we know that its root causes are exploitation, domination and oppression from the top and alienation of the masses from the elites at the bottom; and inadequate structures and values leading to social, political and economic inequalities.
To address these causes, we need structural change, demanding strong discipline and leadership shared by delegation of authority from base up. The irony is that with the new propaganda of poverty alleviation, social development has once more been reduced to concepts of social assistance or social safety nets. Such a conception might be workable in the developed world, where poverty is limited to isolated pockets. It cannot, however, serve as a basis to define social development in most less developed countries, like Pakistan, where poverty is a structural feature affecting the majority of the population that is steadily spreading with "structural adjustment" policies. In such countries, social development should aim at the eradication of poverty in a broadest sense.
Poverty should be defined in terms of a low level of human welfare, or as a "failure of human capability". In this perspective, poverty is almost synonymous to powerlessness. Powerlessness surely manifests itself in a lower level of satisfaction of basic needs, and, more importantly, in lack of access to, and control over, capital: physical, financial, human and societal. This characterisation of poverty helps reveal processes of poverty generation and reproduction and, hence, informs policy formulation.
Unfortunately, most treatments of poverty, and to a larger extent, measurement of poverty, have over-emphasised the economic welfare criterion, income-expenditure deficiency, anchored in the "poverty line" approach. In addition to the methodological shortcomings of the poverty-line of measures, it does not provide a full characterisation of poverty. More importantly, this method does not even approach the question of dynamics of poverty generation. Hence, it provides no clue to the eradication question. Instead, it tends to end with concern for alleviation through income transfers.
A social development strategy, aiming at the eradication of poverty, should, however, start from a deep understanding of the dynamics of poverty generation. In fact, limited and inequitable access to various forms of resources is the most immediate cause of poverty.
Significant levels of exclusion from education and basic health care represent powerful forces of marginalisation. Low educational attainment is closely linked with poverty. Infirmity itself is one sense of poverty. In addition, to be in good health is tantamount to being able to work. This is especially so in the case of the poor who often engage in physically demanding activities. Since earnings, i.e. income from work, represent the mainstay of livelihood of the vast majority of the poor, sickness can compound poverty through deprivation from income. Indications are that poor households are increasingly unable to afford the cost of basic education and health care. With stronger privatisation of services, and increasing poverty, the affordability of education and health care by the poor is expected to diminish. All this takes place in a context of ineffective social safety nets.
The poor are by definition asset-deprived and hence with little or no collateral. As a result their access to credit, and to formal credit in particular, tends to be seriously compromised. Structural adjustment militates to accentuate the bias in favour of big capital, the assumption being that only big capital can afford to innovate and thus raise productivity. Thus, large investors have access to all perks: tax holidays, land and infrastructure at concessional prices, free repatriation of profits, etc. Their political connections sweeten their deal even more through privileged access to information and markets. By comparison, the would-be entrepreneurs of small and micro enterprises normally have to negotiate a thicket of red tape and barriers to credit. In particular, the insurmountable constraint of the collateral for credit has never been adequately relaxed.
The vast majority of our population resides in rural areas and agriculture employs more than half the labour force. Clearly, access to land and water is crucial to sustainable livelihoods in rural communities. The poor are deprived from effective participation and influence in social and political institutions, ironically including even those that are meant to help them overcome poverty. Marginalisation of the poor in political institutions is the ultimate deprivation because it reinforces a major cause of poverty: the powerlessness of the poor that renders them a silent majority in national and local affairs. As such, the poor are denied important citizenship rights - and therefore key capabilities to pull themselves out of poverty.
A consensus has developed that the most effective way to eradicate poverty is empowering the poor to bail themselves out of poverty. But the poor generally have no capital and their labour power and creative capabilities are suppressed by impoverishment. Empowering the poor is a task for the state, being the guardian of the interests of all citizens. To emphasise, the state does not mean only government. It is incumbent on the state to equip the poor with all types of capital: societal, human, financial and physical. Most important of these types of capital is the human- built through education, training and health care. However, since poverty is synonymous with powerlessness, societal capital is indispensable to provide the poor with access to social and political organisations that ensure that their voices are heard and their interests safeguarded. Financial capital is essential to enable the poor to set-up small and medium enterprises that represent one of the most effective means for job creation and income generation. In predominantly rural societies, access to land and irrigation water are basic requirements for sustainable livelihood that need to be safeguarded at all times.
That the state has the responsibility for empowering the poor through provision of capital does not mean, however, that the state itself assumes the role of direct provision of goods and services. This has failed. The requirement rather is that the state guarantees the provision of different forms of capital to the poor through distributive measures. For supremacy of private enterprise is also doomed to fail in combating poverty, even if it succeeds in generating economic growth in the narrow sense.
Indeed, success in poverty eradication is conditional on the evolution of a new social order in which a synergy, not just complementarity, obtains between a revitalised and efficient state, a dynamic and socially responsible private sector, and a powerful and truly grassroots civil society.
The profit motive is clearly ineffective in equipping the poor with the capital necessary to combat poverty (for example, providing basic education, or health care, to the poor does not carry a profit margin to entice private sector providers). However, means can be found to ensure that the private sector and the elites contributes to this task. Dutifully paying taxes is one way, provided the government uses its revenues to empower the poor - which is not the case. Donations represent another way. The private sector can also be persuaded to provide free services to the poor through pairing of free service outlets with those operating for profit, both run by private sector operators- and at the same level of quality. Tax cuts for the poor and incentives for the private sector could be effectively used to encourage for behaving in this socially responsible manner.
However, the primary responsibility for empowering the poor would still lie with the state. Hence, civil service reform, and governance reform, including local governance- to be truly representative of, and fully accountable to, the people-represent essential components of the new social order. Devolution of power programme is a good step in this direction.
Other than state, the most significant social actor in empowering the poor could be civil society, provided that constraints on forming accountable civil society institutions, and on their smooth activity, are lifted and the capacity of the sector for effective contribution to poverty eradication is built.
Significant achievement in social development, read poverty eradication, in Pakistan is not possible without major reform of the essence of governance, i.e. the state institution. However, the effectiveness of this principal reform requires, indeed ensures, substantial transformations in both the domains of profit-seeking enterprises and the civil society organisations. The bold contours of the required reforms are indicated below.
Genuine governance reform is conditional on free, honourable and effective representation of the people. In particular, governance should be truly representative, and fully accountable, to all the people, if the voice of the poor is be heard and their interests protected. There is need to reform laws, and administrative procedures, in order to guarantee the rights of citizenship and ensure consistency with fundamental human rights, particularly the freedoms of expression and organisation, for all citizens. The natural complement is to institute "rule of law" under a positively independent judiciary.
Reform of government service represents an essential component of the governance reform package. Reward to government service needs to be reformed through transparent structure, adequate wages, and equalising discrepancies among various parts of government service. Allocations for equipment, operation and maintenance, necessary for efficient functioning, should be made available. Sound public administration practices, leading to higher productivity, need to be instituted including basing recruitment, advancement and termination of service on merit.
In order to reduce budget deficits, the tax structure should be reformed to ensure equitability and fairness as well as raise the efficiency of tax collection, especially from the rich who generally manage to evade taxes more than the poor, and government spending should be rationalised. Effective local governance, and not merely the decentralisation of government, is an essential element of good governance in general, and ensures more effective participation of the people, particularly the poor, in combating poverty.
Legal and administrative impediments to the creation and efficient functioning of transparent civil society institutions surely have to be done away with. But, the community of civil society itself needs to metamorphose into a broadly based grassroots movement of collective social action with significant potential for sustainability. Unless the grass roots organizations develop into a strong pressure group along with the respective NGOs, the piecemeal efforts would never lead the government to change its exploitative ways and the political corruption would never come to an end. The present activities for poverty alleviation, for instance, can never force the government to fully disclose all public-spending provisions and make a commitment to protect social spending for the poor, or integrate poverty reduction measures into the macro-economic framework. And so far they have not provided the government with an opportunity to integrate social and economic policies or make necessary reform for ending social, political and economic inequalities
Nunc auctor bibendum eros. Maecenas porta accumsan mauris.
Manager
Nunc auctor bibendum eros. Maecenas porta accumsan mauris.
Staff
Nunc auctor bibendum eros. Maecenas porta accumsan mauris.
Staff 2
Nunc auctor bibendum eros. Maecenas porta accumsan mauris.