Features
South’s grinding poverty further jeopardises democratic development
It was left to the ‘World Inequality Report 2022’ to make one of the most thought-provoking disclosures on the consequences to the world of increasingly widening wealth inequalities, internationally and locally. Referring to yawning income disparities the Report states: ‘They are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.’
The above revelation begs the question: How has decolonization and national independence benefited the South, in terms of national wellbeing? The Report’s findings oblige the independent observer to quip: ‘Almost nothing whatsoever.’ If income equality is to be considered a prime measure of development, then the South in particular has nothing very positive to show in these terms.
Accordingly, re-distributive justice issues continue to bedevil the South as well as the North. But these problems, of course, are of greater magnitude in the South rather than in the North, on account of ‘structural’ questions that have not been showing any signs of going away over the decades. In other words, the development experience almost the world over has failed to bring forth the anticipated positive results.
The celebrated Frantz Fanon outlined these expected development failures in the South decades ago in his seminal work, ‘The Wretched of the Earth.’ He stated emphatically that the local political elites who took over from their colonial masters in the earliest years of decolonization would be failing their peoples very badly unless they placed nation-building above self and sectional interests in the governing of their countries.
For Fanon, and he was absolutely right, nation-building involved the melding of a post-colonial state’s communities into a single national social formation on the basis of equality, in all its relevant senses. But Fanon predicted that this laudable aim would be difficult to achieve in consideration of the parasitic tendency among local political elites to amass wealth and other material assets for themselves at the expense of the people. The ‘World Inequality Report 2022’ proves that Fanon was profoundly prophetic.
The above report while focusing on India’s inequalities states the following, among other things: ‘While the top 10% and top 1% hold respectively 57% and 22% of the total national income, the bottom 50% share has gone down to 13%. India stands out as a poor and very unequal country with an affluent elite.’ What is said of India is largely true of the rest of the South, which includes the so-called emerging economies.
Needless to say, development questions would be further aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the continuing political and social instability assailing the South. The continued educating of children should be considered an area of principal importance, for instance. This process has suffered gravely over the past two years and unless restored vibrantly, could negatively impact the overall development of countries.
UNICEF is on record as stating that more than 400 million schoolchildren in South Asia alone have suffered seriously as a result of extended school closures. It goes without saying that unless countries empower themselves with educated labour forces, their development would be considerably derailed.
However, an equally crucial area to watch is socio- political instability. As this is being written, tens of thousands of Afghans, reduced to wretchedness as a result of endemic war and conflict have been taking in a big way to poppy cultivation as a livelihood. Poppy cultivation is nothing new in Afghanistan but the ruinous occupation has been assuming unprecedented importance in post-US withdrawal times as a result of the country’s economy suffering a total collapse. And poppy cultivation is receiving the blessings of the Taliban regime because it cannot provide other employment options for the people.
When an Afghan poppy cultivator was recently asked by a foreign journalist as to why he was engaged in the infamous occupation, the reply he received was that the cultivator would be compelled to rob passers-by to satisfy his hunger if he didn’t resort to growing poppies.
Tragic stories of the same kind are bound to be rife in other Southern war zones. Syria, Iraq, Libya and Lebanon are a few other cases in point. Reduced to stark poverty and wretchedness more and more people of the South would find that they have no option but to take to crime to eke out an existence.
A connected phenomenon to watch as it grows is the mammoth exodus of migrants and refugees from the South to the West. The development is not only confined to the Belarus-Poland border, where thousands of Southern migrants eager to brave it to Germany are gathered. There are also the refugees taking on the dangerous challenge of crossing the English Channel from France to the UK and the vast in-gathering of migrants from South and Central America on the Mexican-American border; desperately chasing the ‘American Dream.’
Even if the point is granted that the vast majority of these migrants are ‘economic refugees’ and not political asylum-seekers, escaping impossible political conditions at home, there is no disputing the fact that widening economic disparities are driving them onward into an uncertain, hazard-filled future. They have been pauperized to such an extreme degree that they have no choice but to flee to what seem to be greener pastures, thanks to parasitic political elites at homes.
Accordingly, the unpleasant truth needs to be stomached that the majority of Southern states have gained little or nothing by way of development over the decades. Equality is at the heart of development and since this goal has not been achieved, failed state status could be said to be awaiting quite a few of our Southern countries.