Poverty and Abuse - Include Focus on Personal and Household

I do share all the sentiments, pain and grief that we are witnessing in the world today, especially in Africa. I feel that there is a lot we can do at a personal and household level.

The value of each human being: When we omit or fail to emphasize the value of human life, we are leaving others to place it at commodity level and human beings become mere statitics. Lets us start teaching, coaching and mentoring at a personal and household level to ensure that every age groups starts to value human life. After all, what other asset surpasses the human being when it comes to basics.

Sharing: In the traditional society, people grew up knowing that they had to share and there would something, even if no surplus for each person. We have described such societies as "I am because we are" and advocated to the new value of "me, mine and myself. What can we expect when such a person gets to the position where they have to decide on allocation of resources? The greed, corruption, selfishnees and outright theft that we witness today is born out of this self-oriented thinking and acting. We have to shift gears and start adressing the value of "the other" at personal and household level. Start at home, in schools, in religious gatherings and teach ourselves and others that sharing does not lead to dispossession. We are not going to change anything about poverty until and unless the spirit of giving and sharing is ingrained in the mind and heart.

Debts: You will remember the saying "A borrower nor a lender be". I know someone will scream about this but the truth is, we have become so committed to begging and borrowing that we are fast losing the capacity to see even what is under our very nose. No one who is in a decision making position today is ignorant of the effects of structural adjustment programmes on the economies of developing countries. Yet, we - or our governments on our behalf - have continued to adopt economic programmes that go against the grain and throw us deeper into the pit of debt. We have seen the pain of unserviced debts all around us and we keep going for more.

For example, Kenya was not able to get donor aid for some time and yet the country survived even though the GDP and other economic indicators hit an all time low. Why are we now trying to get back to more borrowing rather than get serious on assembling and harnessing our resources. We are still getting outsiders to come and do feasibility studies on issues that we are living with daily, and then getting a prescription on how to resolve what we know we can do by simply being fair, just and committed.

Abuse of women and children - or even men has absolutely nothing to do with poverty. It is a matter of loss of values at individual and society level. When a father rapes his infant daughter, where does poverty come in? When a soldier rapes a mother who has just delivered, how does poverty come into play? When a minister rapes a girl who is seeking employement, where is poverty in his act? The girl is seeking employment that should be there and she might have appropriate qualifications and the minister may not even be the right contact but greed and selfishness makes the minister act as if they have the key to the job. Abuse is abuse and is bred by attitude and loss of values. We cannot keep blaming poverty for our loss of morals or values. We have to be honest and handle the situation of abuse openly and directly. There are hardly unknown sexual offenders. They live with us, we protect them. While I would be the first one to want to find out why they do it, I would also like to be counted among the first to call for punishment and removal of sexual abusers from civilised society. After all, they are robbers of the very essence of human worth.

We in Africa and the rest of the world have to face the truth of our situation if we are to save ourselves.

As for the debt, we need to simply say no to them because those who came to be owed have been looting these countries for centuries and that is how they accumulated the wealth they claim to lend out.