A MAN-MADE APOCALYPSE

Sir,
 
Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction that even the physically blind can see. What is more painful about poverty is that it is a man-made disaster. I robustly believe that poverty is not a natural result of life, it is produced by men. Nelson Mandela once said; “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” Poverty is made from bad policies of governments, incompetent, corrupt and greedy leaders and capitalists; poor execution of good policies and many more bad and selfish deeds of humans.

Reality

Living on less than US$2 a day feels like an impossible scenario, but it’s a reality for around 600 million people in the world today. Approximately eight per cent of the global population lives in extreme poverty, commonly defined as surviving on only US$1.90 a day or less. According to the World Bank, in sub-Saharan Africa, 59 million children between the ages of five and 17 work instead of playing and going to school. They fight poverty for their families. In Africa, every fifth child is cheated out of childhood and forced into child labour. In Eswatini, about 65 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, which means they survive on less than US$2 per day.

Resources

There are enough resources for all of us in this world to live a poverty-free life. I know that some of us have learnt economics and we have been made to believe that there’s limited or a lack of resources to satisfy all of us, but that is not the truth. The problem is capitalism; greedy capitalists want to accumulate everything for themselves while others languish in poverty.
Capitalism is an economic system that has placed a price tag to the life of a human being. This is why thousands of people can die as a consequence of a single capitalist trying to protect its assets. We have millionaires and billionaires while at the same time we have people dying because of lack of food and medication. The life of a human being under capitalism has a price tag and it is less than a thousand.

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