Poorest or numerical aspersion?

I guess we have had a couple of interesting stories this year. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita versus poverty struck me out. Luckily, a few of colleagues in the profession will have an opportunity to undergo training to distinguish GDP on the notions of the “Atlas method”, the act of simply dividing it  by a population number and “GDP purchasing power parity”, the act of measuring GDP by including  prices ifferences.

That is how I can simplify these terms. I suppose that by the end of such training, whoever could not distinguish being poorest and lowest per capita GDP will be able to do so. One would call this a learning objective of some kind in curriculum design theory.

I hope it will be known clearly that no allowances will be available. There are some free lessons on the “University of Google”. Otherwise the poorest tag, to me is some statistical aspersion.

But today, I thought I should join the debate, surely not from the view point of misinforming anyone. Does it matter whether you have the least GDP?  Does it really mean you are poor?

Tale goes of a young British girl aged 10 that simply defined being poor as a simple act of not having two mobile phones. You would liken it to a subjective kind of definition of poverty. Under such notions, one cannot find fault in the argument that our country is the poorest. I agree. We are not.

Former Vice-President of Malawi did add his line to this thought many years ago. His thinking tempted me to believe he was one of us in the economic accounting profession. Malawi is not poor, he argued and put a line to suggest that it is the citizens, not the country. If you would put a dollar value to our natural resources such as the lakes, game reserves, fresh water rivers, untapped minerals, our peace, surely it becomes clear that we are not a poor country. But   maybe the average person is, except a very tiny few.

As the honourable minister plans to train our economic reporters, our focus should be to jealously guard the assets that define our national wealth within a legal framework that puts the interests of our citizens at the top. Our next 50 years are likely to be defined by how the untapped wealth will trickle to each one of us. Some of our natural resources are fast diminishing and the safeguards are quite critical in how we are going to deal with the notion of poverty as often described in the global circles.

I believe in the business unusual policy and hope the indigenous protection bill will be tabled soon. The fact that much of our untapped wealth is in natural resources, it is important that such a bill makes partnerships with Malawi businesses or a public trust a must to ensure that there is maximum benefit and, if anything, allow us to un-tag ourselves from the poorest banner.

So, let us get this poverty thing right. It has global connotations. It has relative dimensions and it can be subjective in some cases. There are things we should not ignore though, whether we agree with the notion that we are the poorest or not.

The basics are that a majority should access world class health care and education. Similarly, it should be easy to find jobs and no family should simply struggle to pay water bills and, indeed, electricity should not be a luxury of five percent of the population. No one should be using a bush a toilet and that piped and clean water be accessible to all of us in this country not just urban centres.

No matter how you define poverty or richness, these are the things that we should deal with and pay attention to our current indicators. Our Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reports provide heaps of them. That could be the first lesson for colleagues that will participate in the economic reporting workshop or workshops.

Like many others, I contend, Malawi is not a poor country, but very full of untapped wealth. How we convert that wealth to national prosperity is a different thing all together. Remember, a pile of current cases in court or the unfinished Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) investigations.  We know the threats well. I look forward to the training.