AN ENVIRONMENTALIST'S VIEW OF POVERTY AND HOW TO APPROACH IT

 

 

By

 

F.C. OWEYEGHA- AFUNADUULA

Website: http://www.afuna.org or http://www.afuna.o-f.com

Email:afunaduula2000@yahoo.co.uk or afunaduula@afuna.org

Tel: +256 78 555 222 or +256 71 845461

 

 

24.1.2004

 

 

 

During the last Century, whenever wasteful, global large-scale projects were conceived, planned, designed and implemented, particularly in the poor regions of the world, the justification was always the same: eradication of poverty. Most of the projects, unfortunately, failed to defeat poverty but this did not prevent newer ones still being committed to eradicating poverty being conceived, planned, designed and implemented.

 

This justification has been aggressively allowed to spill over into the 21 st Century in the name of maintaining and developing the global economy and modernizing the poor. However, what this has meant is that governments in the poor countries continue to be coerced to spend energy, time and money on hatching what Graham Hancock (1989) saw as irrelevant big, ambitious and absurd development plans, big ideas and big bureaucracies dependent on foreign “aid” and really collectively manifesting as “an antithesis of true development” since they tend to suffocate or ignore local-level initiatives, relevant and realistic strategies and the energy and enterprise of the poor.

 

Alternative approaches to development, which would have been more socio-culturally acceptable have, for example, been relegated to a category of “substituting alternatives” if the desired approaches fail to achieve the economic rather than social targets. This is perhaps more true in the energy sector where governments in the poor countries will unwillingly talk of solar, wind, geothermal or biogas if large dam-base hydropower electric installations have failed to deliver, or to symbolise commitment to these alternatives.

 

In Uganda , for example, where huge amounts of money have been committed to hydropower development, legal instruments have been developed to legitimise this approach while alternatives have not been so treated. Although there has been talk of eradicating poverty via hydropower development, increasingly emphasis is on satisfying energy demand rather raising the capacity of citizens to afford electricity. In my view, the target is to expand the market for corporate in the energy sector to sell their goods and services and, therefore, make money.

 

In pursuit of this, some corporate entities involved have even gone to the extent of engaging themselves in public relations stunts or lobbying to secure public approval of the projects even if they know it is they to gain. We saw this when the American Pesticide company, Aquatics Unlimited, wanted to sell its poisonous chemical, 2,4D, to Uganda, ostensibly to eradicate water hyacinth from Lake Victoria. We saw it with AES Nile Power when it wanted to hastily develop the proposed Bujagali dam with virtually no public questioning. And we are seeing it with the Uganda Electricity Generation Company Limited (UEGCL), which, like the Uganda Government, sees the construction of Bujagali as the only legitimately appropriate strategy to address the current electricity shortage in the country.

 

Of interest is the fact that as corporate publicly lobbies for large projects, the Uganda Government either gives approving silence or else comes out to speak precisely the same language (e.g., The Monitor January 24 2004 ). It seems that the two have established what can be called a corporate-government bond to ensure that big energy projects are not interfered with by public concerns.

 

In essence it is economics ruling. One will not fail to detect that even when it appears that we are being ruled by politicians, in reality the politicians have become unrepentant agents of economics and for that matter money and the corporate world. In Uganda all planning appears to be economic and assigned under the Ministry of Economic Planning. Whenever we talk of development we are more likely to talk of it in economic terms as if life and its ways are nothing but economics. Even when we seek to deal with the challenges of development, the yardstick for intellectualisation and action is likely to be econoministic.

 

Therefore, it is not surprising that this econoministic yardstick, whenever used, gives rise to self-serving (or individualistic) behaviour, arrogance, paternalism, moral cowardice and mendacity in development dynamics. In the poor countries, it serves and perpetuates the “foreign aid syndrome”, which itself perpetuates the rule of incompetent and venal men (political, intellectual and bureaucratic) whose leadership would otherwise be utterly nonviable. It also allows governments characterised by historic ignorance, avarice .and irresponsibility to thrive and sustain human rights abuses (Hancock, 1989) to the detriment of development that necessarily should be seen in the spiraling quality of life of the majority poor.

 

Yet economic considerations are and should be only one minute aspect of both life and development. Life is a complex whole. Development too is a complex whole. And even education is a complex whole although disciplinary tendencies have dictated that we divide it into arts and sciences and then go on to subdivide it into much smaller disciplines to create small, sometimes meaningless academic empires that nonetheless are idolised and defended by their owners and practitioners to the detriment of true educational development.

 

This might explain the declining capacity of our graduates to initiate, innovate, create and imagine new ways of doing things. Therefore, if one asked me whether I agree with the current preoccupation of government with giving excessive preference to what is being called “Science” I would say, “Please science is ONE, with social and natural aspects. Develop an integrated school or university curriculum in which all cultures of science -multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and, to a diminishing extent, disciplinarity -are allowed to flourish, dynamically interact and enrich the education system for the 21 st Century. This is an education system that will produce graduates, at whatever level, that value and gain from breadth rather than narrowness of mind”.

 

Breadth of mind dictates that if we are to get a fuller picture of life and development their diverse array of aspects and dynamism should be taken into consideration. These aspects include the moral, ethical, intellectual, economic, psychological, ecological, social, cultural, spiritual, technical, biological and environmental, to name but a few, all of which are mutually inclusive, interconnected and dynamically interactive with each other to determine life and development of whatever kind and at whatever time. It is this “holistic” view of life and development that should be used in pursuit of development and improvement in the quality of life of the poor. It is, in fact, the environmental way of looking at things. It requires that we do not overlook or underrate anything simply because we want something achieved as quickly as possible as is being urged by proponents of Bujagali dam.

 

What this means is that in true development all issues are important and should be considered in planning, design or implementation of development projects, programmes or strategies intended to improve the quality of life of the poor. In fact what is often taken to be insignificant so often has gradually turned out to be a serious issue, problem or challenge. To a holistic environmentalist, therefore, stressing economic or technical issues at the exclusion of political, cultural, spiritual, moral, ethical, social, psychological, biological, ecological, intellectual and other issues undermines true development intended to tackle poverty in the poor countries.

 

We, therefore, need to look at or perceive poverty beyond materialistic or income considerations, if we are really serious about development or enhancement of quality of life of the poor., to include these considerations, which may appear innocent and yet they have so much to do with the final outcome of development efforts. It is considerations of this nature, which make a holistic environmentalist's view of and approach to poverty different.

 

To the holistic environmentalist, poverty is seen as the greatest of the greatest of all environmental pollutants. He or she also sees it as a complex, multidimensional concept, whose consideration necessarily evokes or should evoke dimensional considerations mentioned above but without forgetting that they are not mutually exclusive. If this is done, then we can distinguish various types of poverty that must be targeted in a development scheme apart from material or income poverty, namely: intellectual poverty, biological poverty, spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, political poverty, ecological poverty, psychological poverty, environmental, and so on. I do not have time to discuss each of these types in detail, but I believe the reader of this article can guess the meaning of each type.

 

Therefore, before one starts on a mission to deal with poverty, one needs to know that dealing with only one or two types of poverty, for example income and material poverty, does not solve the poverty problem. Since all types of poverty are interconnected, the more solutions one provides the more these might become the new problems. Apparently this is usually the case. Even when welfare schemes are erected to deal with what are aggregately called social costs, no solutions ever come in sight, in both the short and long term.

T

he ultimate sufferer is the environment, which, for no fault of its own, has to act as the constant shock absorber of failures rather than beneficiary of successes in development (or poverty abatement). Many times the environment goes on to deteriorate, decay and collapse, sparking off a plethora of complex problems, issues and challenges, which unfortunately attract simplistic solutions further complicating the situation beyond remedy.

 

Intellectual poverty will affect the environment by denying it appropriate articulations and clarifications of its challenges, problems and issues. Cultural poverty will blur the unity between culture and the environment. Spiritual poverty will lead to decision-makers ignoring or underrating the spiritual value of nature or a particular environment. And political poverty will be characterised of narrow economic and social gains and constant failures to perceive the relationship between environmental security and political stability.

 

The overall result is continuing poverty in its widest and interconnected sense while recital of the meaningless phrase “eradication of poverty” continues to be used as justification for more and more loans to erect the often ill-conceived large projects. At the same time sterile, socio-culturally deficient ideas such as structural adjustment, modernisation, privatisation and globalisation continue to dominate the language of development and “poverty eradication” as innocent tools with which to help the poor escape from their poverty. Poverty is sold as a scourge to be eliminated via the application of these multifarious tools “of development.

 

In our more traditional but diminishing society, however, poverty is not a scourge but a predicament, difficult to escape and composed of both shortages and blessings. To address the injustices to which they are subjected, the poor have learn't to cope with these in a realistic and efficient manner. They show an extraordinary resilience and capacity for turning the shortages they suffer into blessings because, for them, poverty is a way of life based on the ethics of simplicity, frugality, conviviality and solidarity -a mode of living in accordance with the material limits of what is available (Majid Rahnema, 1993), and which, therefore, is environmentally conscious.

 

Therefore, in our traditional society, poverty is nothing but the art of making the best of a bad situation in the environment. It is not destitution or misery, which is the case in the developed world. It has nothing to do with starvation or homelessness, which current development agents target. And definitely it has nothing to do with lack of clothes. It is loneliness or lack of someone to call “neighbour”. It means breakdown of interconnectivity and interdependence of traditional society, which, until overblown privatisation was embraced by President Museveni's Government, we saw characterizing our extended family system, providing a cushion against social and economic upheavals..

 

Nevertheless, as Majid Rahnema (1993) points out, poverty remains the only honest way of living for people who cannot be indifferent to their neighbours. It reflects the moral principle that as long as everyone else has to live with less it is not acceptable to ask for or take more (i.e., become corrupt). Mahatma Gandhi said that to break this principle is tantamount to stealing.

 

In Uganda of the late 1980s and thereafter this moral principle has been almost squeezed out and right now there is an outcry about corruption and bribery throughout the sociopolitical fabric of the country. The poor of yesterday now in high offices even now talk of excluding the poor from the governance of the country when they insist that only the rich should seek elective office, while at the same time reciting Article 1 of the Uganda Constitution 1995, which reads that all power belongs to the people.

 

Today, therefore, poverty is taken as an evil, and those living with it are seen as almost subhumans. This means that the great traditions of our people that were associated with poverty are being insulted. In fact in his craze for full blown privatisation the President of Uganda once said that one Madhvani is worth more than 7000 Bakiga. At another occasion at Makerere University , he said he would not mind if some people became extinct so long as his investors were on course.

 

But see: the great princes of the poor such as Buddha, Christ, the Prophet of Islam, St Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, all of whom could have lived as very rich people, praised poverty as a great moral ideal. At different times, they praised poverty as the sum of qualities needed to live up to its challenges –qualities such as constraint, self-discipline, sensitivities to other people's hardships and the ability to build elaborate defenses against surprises of all kinds –be they human, economic or climatic. These constitute what has been called “subsistence ethics” (Majid Rahnema 1993).

 

Environmentally speaking the subsistence ethics helped to conserve the environment we are now busy destroying in the name of modernisation, which is equivalent to the erosion of social and environmental justice.

 

We, therefore, need a new language of development or poverty for that matter if we really want the poor to see social and environmental justice come their way. Such language would now ensure that the values of the poor are integrated into the process of sustainable development. This means that social and environmental justice is guided by the perspectives of the poor rather than by affluence and consumerism, or empty promises of illusionary richness in terms of expanding material needs or incomes. It also means listening to the poor rather than feeding them with ideas and solutions that will instead lead them into extinction via sowing the seeds of modernised poverty -a serious type of pollution that produces destitution, loneliness and surely kills.

 

Driving the poor of today along the road of extinction that the Maoris of New Zealand, Aborigines of Australia, Red Indians of the Americas , Nubians of Egypt and Hottentots of South Africa were forced onto is certainly not development! Extinction is actually impoverishment of the environment through the destruction of the culture-environment unity.