Last week I went to a funeral. Nomvula is dead. You are asking yourself confusedly who Nomvula was and I will tell you. To her children, Nomvula was a 27 year old mother who left behind three children aged ten, five and two. Nomvula was the third child of a pensioner mother who had six children, two of whom are now dead before the age of thirty, and three of whom are unemployed. To me, Nomvula was a friend I met while volunteering with an HIV/AIDS community based organisation that continues to struggle to feed the community it serves in Soweto in spite of the number of people it is assisting. But to the world, Nomvula is just another statistic. A statistic of teen pregnancy, a high school drop-out rate in South Africa, a high HIV/AIDS prevalence and so on and so forth. And yet too, although Nomvula and those who have died or live like her or those she left behind may just be statistics of how ‘1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day’, tomorrow being October 17th, a day annually marked optimistically as the Day of Poverty Eradication, I thought it fitting to tell Nomvula’s story as one of the victims of that poverty that though we may not eradicate, we need to drastically reduce.
I am unsure whether much will change in the future for Nomvula’s children, whether their lives will be better than hers. Her mother receives an R840 pension grant (less than US$100 at current exchange rates) and while the family gets some food parcels from the CBO that I got to know Nomvula from, the food is never enough to last the family of seven a week let alone a month when they will receive the next food parcel. Granny subsidises her income by running a shebeen (a home-based liquor outlet). So while hunger is a distant memory of boarding schools to some of us, to Nomvula’s kids it’s a reality and if gogo doesn’t make enough money from her liquor outlet, they will be hungry until the next food parcel comes through. It is admirable that granny is ensuring that her children and grandchildren eat through whatever hustle but one cannot help wondering whether the grandchildren will ever be able to do their homework or study in a house that has drunks from nine in the morning until late at night (serious!).
It is here where I, knowing Nomvula’s family and many other families like hers in the neighbourhood, start wondering whether poverty will always be with us and I should ignore it or whether the world can indeed do something.
If developing nations like South Africa, did not have crazy loans to repay to the developed world, could that money be better used on getting better social services for our people? Now before you start questioning…a lot of the loans that many in the developing world are servicing have often come with ties. Question is, is it really a loan if a country is given US$5 million for, say education then told that 40 percent has to be used to pay a consulting firm which just happens to be from the same country as the loan and yet when the developing nation repays the loan they pay back 100 percent of the $5 million plus interest. Whose interest and in whose interest? And yet many of our governments will take these loans with conditions because we don’t have a cash flow and …may be the gold price will keep rising, may be the next administration will change the fiscal policy to favour the nation, may be may be…well, half a loaf is better than no bread at all and all that. And don’t get me started on forced programs from the Bretton Woods institutions. Everyone knows what happened to Africa’s star pupil of IMF’s ill-thought out Structural Adjustment Programme, Ghana. After implementing the programme as per instruction, situation just got worse and not better for Ghana’s citizens and a few years ago they had to declare themselves one of the 40 Highly Impoverished Poor Countries (HIPC).
Do you know how crazy it is when I sometimes read of these programmes that are always emphasising the need for developing nations to improve infrastructure so that ‘you can attract investors’ and yet well I know that whatever investors do make it to our shores will always end up getting large subsidies for ‘investing’ although generally they will never reinvest that money in our economy but will take it elsewhere (just ask the car manufacturers in my home province of the Eastern Cape). These are the type of programmes that were pushed on Ghana. Imagine how many Nomvulas IMF created in Ghana alone and you have Western economic institutes that do not give a toss about poor nations. We have Western nations and institutes that find it favourable to keep the developing world poor because so long as we owe them and have no economic independence, our governments will always dance to their tune. And seriously if there were no poor countries, what would happen to all those expatriates working at the USAIDs and Oxfams worldwide?
Developing nations continue having the resources but developed nations continue reaping the benefit of those resources. Our people die while we are told to monetary policies we must comply. Hello? What is up with the developing world’s inability to unite for a common cause? Why don’t they ever stand up together for a common cause but rather seem to prefer grabbing whatever peanuts are offered? I keep thinking how powerful Africa, never mind the rest of the developing world, would be if our governments could talk to each other long enough to negotiate deals as blocks instead of as individuals. But alas, ours is always the Look East or Look West Policy but never once, ‘the look within’ policy for solutions to some of our largest problems.
So long as developing nations do not work together, there will be many more Nomvulas in each of our nations.
And then there is the other senselessness of the leadership we have in power in our developing countries. No. I am not going to talk about corruption. After all, the corruptees are generally western companies and they are just as guilty. Patricia de Lille would have us believe that South Africa’s greatest tragedy post 1994 – the arms deal- was the corruption shown by the powers-that-be in the post-apartheid government. And while the corruption cannot be wished away, I personally believe that the greatest tragedy was the belief by our government that they needed to procure arms at all when our country is not at war. Could the billions given to arms procurement not have been used for something more useful? Education, or health perhaps so that our doctors can finally get a starting salary that’s higher than some personal assistants and stay in the country so that they can be there for Nomvula and others like her when they need medical advice? I will probably never get the answer to this and many other questions about how our governments are complying in ensuring that our people continue being mired in poverty.
What I do hope will happen is that by telling Nomvula’s story, each of us can pause for a moment and think about how we are maintaining the circle of poverty every time we vote in governments whose policy are not pro-poor. We should remember what an indictment it is on us any time another Nomvula dies and we have not questioned those we put in power to find out how they will improve life for the poor. May be it’s time we did more for the poor than just going to the other side of the street when we see one of them or their children coming towards us. May be its time, we who live stand up and make a difference by teaching those who are worse off than we are a trade in our area of expertise. May be its time we make the rest of our lives worth living by giving more of ourselves to those who are not as fortunate as we are.
Nomvula is dead. We live.
