Poverty has the tendency to be self-perpetuating

“Poverty is a crime….. some of the poor black brothers suffer all the time…..” – Andrew Tosh, 1988. While the sentiments expressed by the son of reggae legend Peter Tosh, give some insights into the universal problem of poverty, this columnist would describe it as more than a crime. It is a curse.

It is a curse because it is self-perpetuating. Poverty begets poverty. Before one realises it, they will be trapped in a vicious poverty cycle, which will be extremely hard to jump out of.

One of the basic requirements for a person to get released from the jaws of poverty is to plan their life effectively. To be organised you have to be disciplined and be prepared to make some sacrifices. In Kigali, Rwanda, you see thousands of organised motorbike operators. Each one of them has a duly registered bike, a helmet, carries only one passenger at a time and ensures the passenger has a helmet 100 percent of the time. It is easy to see that these people are gradually breaking free from poverty.

You cannot even begin to place similar requirements on our motor bike operators as the obvious response will be, “we are too poor to afford those.” Too poor to register a bike, too poor to buy helmets, too poor to limit the number of passengers – errr, too poor to do anything helpful. That is what poverty does. It is truly a vicious cycle. By contrast, the Rwandan motorbike operators are liberated. It is not just because they fear the police. In fact, police presence on Rwandese roads is far less than it is here. These people observe the rules because they are convinced it is the right thing to do.

Bags of charcoal being pushed on a bicycle or displayed for sale by the roadside is something you will never see in Rwanda. As a result, their forests are free from the devastation caused by charcoal burners. Situated only 121 kilometres south of the Equator, Rwanda enjoys a climate that favours the proliferation of rain forests. It is one of few countries where the giant primates, gorillas, still exist. If charcoal burning was rampant there as it is here, the rain forests would have been wiped out long ago, as would have been the gorillas.

Poverty prevents the charcoal burner in Malawi from exiting the trade. I remember visiting a village at Chikuli, beyond Chileka Airport. All the young men were not there when I arrived. I was told they went to dig up tree roots to convert them to charcoal by a traditional gasification process. They were resorting to roots because they had long depleted all the trees. A popular argument by charcoal burners against stopping the vice is that they have no other source of income. Because of poverty, they cannot abandon the trade.

The truth is that with a bit of discipline and patience, they can actually sustainably produce charcoal year in, year out. It is natural for people to want to reap where they never sowed. Going to a natural forest to cut down trees for firewood, charcoal, timber or any other purpose, is reaping where one did not sow. With careful planning, a family or a village can plant a woodlot and wait for an initial period of, maybe, five years, before they start harvesting from that woodlot. To ensure continuous harvesting, the planting will have to take place every year so that the trees in the woodlot are always at different stages of development.

Five years sounds like an eternity for most people to wait. However, the alternative is to plunder natural trees without having to wait and then have no trees eventually. This is what appears to have happened at Chikuli. In my view, the second scenario is a lot worse than the first.

In any case, special bamboos, which are convertible to charcoal, can be used instead of trees, in which case the waiting period can be reduced to three years. Either way, discipline and patience will be indispensable.

Surely, there is a way out of poverty. To every problem there is a legitimate solution, but people usually perceive the solution as too hard or too impractical to be of any use.

Let us search within our society and see what can be done for poverty to be dealt a final death blow.