The Challenge of Empowering Poor People

With the dawn of globalisation, the empowerment of people has suddenly become very important if we are to successfully compete with the rest of the world or at least hold our niche.

Empowerment is important because it will raise the performance of the people as a society and an economy. The alleviation and eventual eradication of poverty have elevated from being a Christian kindness to being a necessary national priority.

It is very evident that we are rapidly moving "from quantity to quality" and if the people we are calling poor are not given the opportunity to keep up then the country as a whole will suffer socially and economically.

Not Maximising Education

We count ourselves as lucky in Barbados because education has improved our lives. Free education helped to bring a better quality of life to its beneficiaries and has pulled along a few more who failed at the opportunity.

One of the failings of our educational system is that it perpetuates the idea that the ultimate goal is to get a job; "to get a good job you need a good education". This was good for a time and indeed those who left school with the minimum amount of 'O'Levels was guaranteed a job in that time.

They say that old habits die hard and in this case that is very true. Quite apart from the brain drain, the perpetuation of this idea beyond its usefulness served only to tether our best brains and suppress initiative and creativity.

It is initiative and creativity that we need right now in order to cushion the impact of globalisation. We need the beneficiaries of a good education to create jobs not look for jobs. For example, our first priority is to cut down our dependency on imports and develop services and products that can substitute and that are exportable.

This can only be done by encouraging research and offering fiscal incentives for this type of development. Virtually everything on the shelf is imported. Even the vendors, in the main, resort to purchasing fruits and goods from importers to ply their trade.

While this represents good economic activity, it certainly is a strain on foreign exchange. More important is the fact that when we import goods we export capital without adequate foreign exchange returns to make it worthwhile.

Archaic Legal System

The most challenging factor to empowerment is that the legal system which we inherited is so structured that it tends to marginalize people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum.

We say that man is evil by nature but the fact that there are more good people than bad people makes the statement that man prefers to do good but will resort to evil under certain conditions.

Yet it is the proverbial bad apple that spoils the whole bunch. For example, the importance of tourism to us is its capacity to bring in foreign exchange but we know that this can easily be compromised by a negative reputation of the country.

Given this importance, we should do everything in our power not to create bad apples. Where laws marginalize people they should be suitably amended or repealed.

"Evil by nature" may very well have been addressed by the legal presumption that laws are not made to create hardship, but beyond that it ought to be considered that man is a survivor and therefore this explains why a man will resort to evil against the suppressor.

Evil is a relative term when you also consider that the status of some men have moved from "criminal" to "freedom fighter" or "hero". In this regard, there is no doubt that some laws remain on the statute books as a convenient tool to control people rather than regulate activity.

Control replacing Regulation

It is sad that where rules are purely regulatory, those with the authority to regulate use it as a power to prevent or hinder. The decision against the Town Planning Department in Trinidad case demonstrates the meaning of regulatory powers.

On appeal it was held that the Town Planning Department had no right to demolish a building simply because the builder had no planning permission. It was held that the salient factor is whether the builder constructed within the law.

It was further held that the Department's sole responsibility was to ascertain whether or not the builder was in contravention of the law and can only act against him if there is contravention.

Since then, the law was changed (at least in Barbados) to make it an offence to proceed without planning permission, thereby moving the law from regulating activity to controlling people. So even if you proceeded within the building code now, you are breaking the law if you do not have permission.

Crime, Mendicancy or Empowerment?

When we speak of empowerment, we speak of removing the barriers that marginalize people. Elements of marginalization are entrenched both in the law and in the society.

We must always be mindful that the main reason for pursuing empowerment is that marginalisation leads to frustration which in turn can only lead to deviance and crime. Therefore empowerment is a means of helping to reduce crime.

The negative effects of marginalization are such that it prevents people from reaching their full potential. It stifles creativity and initiative and prevents full expression of the person. The qualitative difference is that a frustrated person goes through the motions while an empowered person gives it his best shot.

If we say that the attempt by the Minister of Housing to deliver house and land at $60,000.00 to low income earners is an attempt to remove the housing barrier, then we can say that the removal of vendors off the streets of Bridgetown is an attempt to marginalize.

Our society is such that the unaffected mount severe criticism upon the Minister and embrace the actions of the police to remove the vendors; leaving the affected like voices in the wilderness.

In the end it is about self interests, but to those who think they will only remain rich if others remain poor, it seems more logical that if you think you are rich now then the empowerment of the poor will make you richer, less threatened and more stable.

Improving the quality of life of the poor is therefore a priority and this can only come either by massive handouts where the employed will work for the unemployed or, more practically, where the poorest man is empowered to hold his own.

Roosevelt O. King
Secretary General - BANGO
admin@bango.org.bb .