Fight poverty while promoting sense of agency

A COUPLE of weeks ago I was interviewed by a French journalist interested in white poverty. She is making a documentary about poor whites, who are not, in her view, given enough airplay. I had to spoil some of her fun by pointing out that President Jacob Zuma ’s surprise at white
poverty’s existence does not mean the rest of us never knew that some whites are also poor. But focusing on this aesthetically interesting fact misses the bigger debate on poverty.

Poverty has simply become democratised since 1994. It is an equal-opportunity bastard. And so to impute to a black government a deliberate attempt to impoverish whites or to ignore poor whites is hasty. All poor folk in SA, black and white, are failed subjects of poverty relief. We should instead review existing strategies for poverty relief and ask why current policies have not yet dealt the scourge a fatal blow. To that end, one initial thought has been simmering in my head. It is this: the package of welfare policies that has evolved over the past 16 years wrongly treats the poor as subjects rather than as agents.

Take the child support grant. There is no doubt that the intention behind the system is noble. It is aimed at alleviating the material conditions that prevent many kids from poor families from growing up healthily. It can be particularly useful in helping an unemployed single mother ensure that a child attends school and is not deprived of the social capital that an education represents simply because a school uniform, for example, is beyond the household budget. The money can also be used to buy food for the entire family. It is not just the child who becomes dependant on the R250 a month. It is often the entire family.

Many members of my extended family, for example, make use of this grant as a crucial buffer against abject poverty. I’m therefore personally familiar with the importance of a welfare system that helps stave off utter destitution within families. Furthermore, I would not want to generalise in the absence of facts so am happy, for the sake of argument, to imagine that a majority of grant recipients use the money honestly. The bigger evaluative question then jumps out at us: does this grant system enable families to become self-sufficient? Does it, in other words, act as a catalyst to activate the agency of poor people? I am sceptical.

For one thing, there is no built-in incentive for families to become independent of the state. Whereas the dependency of the aged is understandable on account of their frailty, thereby justifying the old age pension system, there is something about the dependency of a healthy teenage mom that is far less forgiving. Many of these dependent individuals also abuse the system.

In my hometown of Grahamstown, for example, it is well known within the poor coloured township that many single parents ignore their children’s needs by spending the money on overdue alcohol accounts in the many taverns designed to offer antisocial escapism from the boredom of sitting around, unemployed. Again, there is nothing in the grant system that catches out those who abuse the system. Monitoring is poor to nonexistent. All the system does is to breed a culture of dependency.

This is disastrous for the individuals implicated and for society at large. From the perspective of grant recipients, it means a permanent underdevelopment of their agency, a permanent sense of victimhood. From society’s perspective, it means we will continue to have one of the largest welfare states in the world. That is fiscally and ethically unsustainable. The question is where it is all going wrong on the welfare front?

The starting point is to review the principle underlying our package of welfare interventions.

Our welfare policies have to stop being built on the idea of the poor as mere objects of social policy. This habit extends to essential services more generally. The phrase “service delivery”, for example, is one of the most unfortunate bureaucratic inventions. It legitimises the expectation, on the part of the poor, that some dude from the state has to rock up at your door in a debonair outfit with a bag of goodies in hand. This mistake is going to haunt the state because such vertical relationships between government and citizens is not sustainable nor desirable.

Many policy gurus will claim that our policies do aim to activate the agency of the poor. But if so, the policies have failed and we need new ones at any rate. I am more sceptical. I think our government never approached this debate with a view to incentivising self-development on the part of the poor. That route to poverty relief often seems callous and right wing. Hence it is politically unattractive.

But it need not be. A sensitive balance between handing out fish to those in distress and compelling the healthy to learn to fish for themselves is crucial. Anything less is actually an expression of condescension towards the poor because it disrespects them as fully capable beings just needing a break with the help of both carrots and sticks. Ke Nako!

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112945