The challenges facing our urban poor
The challenges facing our urban poorBy The Post
Sun 14 Feb. 2010, 04:00 CAT
Most Zambians living in urban areas find themselves in a state of poverty, the injustice of which cries to heaven for vengeance.
Therefore, there is need to take seriously the warning given by Simon Kabanda, the executive director of Citizens Forum, about the serious social instability that awaits us if the government does not control the high levels of poverty that have invaded our urban areas.
The alienated masses in our urban areas are increasing at an accelerated rate. The painful truth is that, despite increased political rhetoric to eradicate urban poverty, it persists and tends to grow. Hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, unemployment, lack of opportunity, insecurity, inequality and hopelessness are the terms that could well define the living conditions of a great part of the population of our country, especially that which lives in urban areas.
It is an affront to our collective conscience to see so many people live in such dehumanizing conditions. It is an imperative need of our times to be aware of these realities, because of what a situation affecting so many of our people entails in terms of human suffering and the squandering of life and intelligence.
The cold eloquence of the reality Kabanda puts before us is in itself terrifying enough. But beyond the fears of what Kabanda is warning us about lies the tragic situation of hunger, abject poverty and neglect that is individualised several times over.
The poor in our towns and cities suffer from various deprivations such as lack of access to employment; adequate housing and infrastructure; and social protection and lack of access to health, education and personal security. Urban poverty is often characterised by cumulative deprivations: one dimension of poverty is often the cause of or contributor to another dimension. But urban poverty is not just a collection of characteristics, it is also a dynamic condition of vulnerability or susceptibility to risks.
Our urban poor live in overcrowded and unsanitary shanty townships and squatter settlements and often do not have access to basic infrastructure and services. When we have heavy rainfall, they are the most affected by floods. Visit Lusaka shanty townships and see the conditions under which our urban poor are living. Some are forced to live in illegal and informal settlements because they cannot enter formal land and housing markets. The reasons for the formation of shanty townships and squatter settlements are numerous.
Children of the urban poor are unable to access good education. Often the standards and facilities of educational institutions they can afford are lower than those available to children of higher income groups. Moreover, poor children often drop out of school earlier to support their families. Poor education also contributes to the entrenchment of the cycle of poverty.
The poor suffer from both traditional and modern environmental health risks in urban areas. They suffer from diseases associated with poor sanitation, lack of clean water, overcrowded and poorly ventilated living and working environments. While the poor suffer the most from dysfunctions in our towns and cities, they are the least able, as individuals, to influence how towns and cities are governed or managed.
And both the formal structures of government and the culture of governance tend to exclude the poor from decision making and tend to concentrate decision making among a small number of formal and informal elite.
The poor have a greater possibility to influence decision making under conditions of good governance, that is, a system of government and a culture of governance that is participatory, inclusive, consensus-oriented, based on the rule of law and devoid of corruption and other abuses of public resources and power, responsive to the needs of the population, efficient, transparent and accountable.
It is for this reason that we all have to pay a lot of attention to good governance, to transparent and accountable political and civic leadership.
We should not also forget that the poor often lack access to information that they can use to advance their case when dealing with other actors in our towns or cities. Even when information is available, it is often in media and forms that are neither accessible to nor understandable by the poor.
Urban poverty has also a gender dimension. The poorest of the poor tend to be households headed by women. Even within the family unit, the poverties of money access and power vary based on gender, with women and female children suffering more than their male counterparts.
In general, women suffer incredible exploitation and discrimination, they are forced to bear the brunt of poverty in the economic sphere as well as in the spheres of health and culture. Women suffer doubly all the calamities related to the living conditions that exist in our towns and cities.
This is because they are the ones that bear the heavy burden of the home, they are the most hit by the lack of hospitals, medical care, schools, children’s institutions, child-mother programmes, hygiene, so on and so forth. A high number of them die during delivery without any type of care; and it is women who must see a high number of their children die before they are 15 years old.
This problem is first and foremost, a political fact. The poverty situation, we feel, is the product of unjust economic structures. And we are citizens of a nation, and we are also the products of a society that has taught us to look coldly on the impoverished plight of our fellow citizens.
It is difficult to understand how we can remain indifferent as citizens of this country in the face of the tremendous social injustices existent in our country, which keep the majority of our people in dismal poverty, which in many cases becomes inhuman wretchedness.
A deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of men and women asking their fellow citizens, their political and civic leaders for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else.
This poverty which results from the lack of the goods of this world necessary to enable our people to live worthily as human beings, is in itself evil. The prophets denounce it as contrary to the will of the Lord and most of the time as the fruits of human injustice and sin.
This places before all of us a challenge and a mission that we cannot sidestep and to which we must respond with a speed and boldness adequate to the urgency of the times.
We ought to sharpen the awareness of our duty of solidarity with the poor, to which charity leads us. This solidarity means that we make ours their problems and their struggles, that we know how to speak with them.
This has to be concretised in criticism of injustice and abuse, in the struggle against the intolerable situation that a poor person often has to tolerate, in the willingness to dialogue with the groups responsible for that situation in order to make them understand their obligations.
We should openly express our desire to be very close to those who work in the self-denying apostolate with the poor in order that they will always feel our encouragement and know that will not listen to parties interested in distorting their work.
Human advancement has to be the goal of our action on behalf of the poor and it must be carried out in such a manner that we respect their personal dignity and teach them to help themselves.
As long as social and economic rights are not recognized as a fundamental right of every Zambian and a duty of the community to guarantee or insure; as long as the responsibility of the state and of society in this regard fails to be recognized; as long as inequalities fail to disappear in our country; as long as poverty, hunger, ignorance and squalor fail to be directly fought against, little will be achieved in improving the conditions of our people, especially the urban poor.
And while poverty is the very basis of the present social situation in our country and is directly related to the serious problem of lower income for the great majority of our people, it is in turn closely linked to the employment situation.
The phenomenon of unemployment is another facet of the present social situation of our country. And it should not be seen as a mere quantitative issue but as a qualitative result of the irrational and unjust nature of the existing system of economic policies.
From it stems the paradox that productive human capacity is not fully used in a nation where there is so much poverty and where the most basic needs of millions of human beings are not being met.
The phenomenon of unemployment in our country is aggravated by the growing migration of large rural masses to urban areas, due to extremely poor living conditions and to lack of employment in rural areas. This is the paradoxical attempt to solve by crowding into shanty compounds where living conditions are not so different, thus also swelling the vast army of urban unemployed.
A comprehensive approach is required to fight this situation and to struggle for diminishing or eradicating urban poverty in our country.
These realities are irrefutable. Everyone must be aware that such complex and difficult problems do not have easy solutions. Our aspirations clash with lack of understanding, selfishness, greed and vanity. The existence of such a large number of poor people in our country constitutes an affront to all of us. A stable, permanent solution must be found for this serious problem.
We have no alternative but to struggle, trusting in the great moral and intellectual capacity of our people and of humanity in general and in its instinct for self-preservation, if we wish to harbour any hope of moving our people out of this type of poverty and in meeting this Millennium Development Goal (MDG) by 2015.
Labels: CITIZENS FORUM, POVERTY, SIMON KABANDA
posted by MrK @ 7:51 AM
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