Statistics SA released figures that show more than 50% of South Africans, i.e. 30 million people have been condemned to poverty with about 13 million living in extreme poverty.
The slide towards poverty is illustrated by an apocryphal story of a man standing beside a river. Suddenly he notices a baby struggling in the downstream current. He immediately jumps into the river to rescue it. No sooner has he deposited the baby on the shore, than he sees another. The babies come faster and faster. He is so busy rescuing them that he fails to look upstream to see who is throwing them in.
Who or what is responsible for throwing so many people into penury? Has our struggle to bring a better life for South Africans failed?
We have, fortunately, not yet reached the spectre of famine haunting parts of Africa again, where more than 20 million people face starvation across Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan.
The question is- how is it that South Africa, with its excellent infrastructure, gold reserves and modern economy, has collapsed to this level just 23 years after liberation?
In fact, how does such a scale of suffering occur on our continent of 1,2 billion people, so rich in mineral wealth and oil and land mass, that it can hold almost every other continent in the world?
Whilst poverty afflicts many countries and famines are a regular occurrence across the world, a closer examination of the recurrence of this misery in Africa suggests there is very little natural about it.
From the 1950’s African national liberation movements broke the yoke of colonialism and were granted sham independence, but continued to be invisibly looted under private auspices.
South Africans should have had the good fortune to learn from other liberated countries such as Angola, Mocambique and Zimbabwe and avert the pitfalls that confronted them.
Former and current imperial and colonial powers such as France, Britain, the USA and Israel, all of whom supported Apartheid South Africa that prolonged the oppression of its people, use the military-industrial-corporate complex, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations to exploit and capture Africa’s resources.
African governments have been forced, through structural adjustments, to divert funds from agriculture, health and education, and divert it into infrastructure that benefits the West. Are we in SA headed that way?
A major cause of poverty and famines, however, is corruption, conflict and war. Geographically strategic Somalia has been at war since 1995 with numerous foreign interventions and famine has been a parallel occurrence. It now faces its third famine in 25 years. South Sudan has half of its population facing starvation and is a country floating on oil.
Western oil companies in cahoots with corrupt government officials loot some $140 billion a year of Nigeria’s black gold whilst nearly two-thirds of its people live on less than R30 a day. Yet, Nigeria has the largest, best equipped army in West Africa, benefitting mostly Western military industries. Instead of being wealthy and the envy of the world, its cities are filled with homeless children begging for their daily bread.
Just drive through our streets in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban, and you will notice the same.
Tom Burgis in his book The Looting Machine describes a network of anonymous multinationals, corporate investors and bankers, who strike opaque deals with coup leaders and African elites to drain the continents resources.
At independence in 1960, the DRC was the second-most industrialized country in Africa, after South Africa. It has been plundered to such an extent that most of its population is ravaged by poverty. The same scenario afflicts 14 West African states where France holds $500 billion of the wealth of these West African countries, in its treasury.
African leaders who dare resist the West are killed or become victims of coups. Those who obey are rewarded with security and a lavish lifestyle whilst their people endure extreme poverty.
Corrupt governments are unable to provide their citizens with even the most essential of services such as clean drinking water, medical care, electricity, education and basic infrastructure.
There is minimal primary health care, schooling, electricity, clean drinking water and sanitation.
Many revolutionary leaders who freed their people from colonialism now rule through the same oppressive structures they overthrew.
Why is it that the diamonds that we mine must be sent to Israel? Why can’t Africans refine their own oil but buy back refined products at exorbitant costs from the West? Why is it that no African country can produce a car or train or plane or computers, and that it should be bought from Japan or China or Germany or the USA? And why is it that to fly within the African continent, 80% of the routes are controlled by non-African airlines?
Combating poverty will involve processes of political, economic, cultural and social change, and eradicate institutional corruption. This requires a paradigm shift.
A higher socio-economic order needs to evolve whereby wealth is deployed to meet human needs and not political leaders’ greed. This also requires a significant change in the mindset of those who own, control and manage corporations and businesses.
We will never stop rescuing babies from the river until we hold accountable those responsible for throwing them in.
Dr Firoz Osman
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