Ugandans Humiliated by Poverty and stripped of Dignity

Poverty Humiliates Ugandans and are stripped of Dignity

Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto

In this treatise on poverty, I want to argue why I say so! A fundamental dimension of poverty is the inability to adequately feed oneself and one’s family and to meet other basic requirements such as clothing, housing and healthcare. There is broad agreement that poverty occurs when someone experiences a fundamental deprivation – a lack of some basic thing or things essential for human well-being. Intuitively, most people think they can recognise poverty – hunger, malnutrition, worn clothing, unwashed bodies, run-down housing or no home at all, begging, lack of access to clean water, primary schooling or basic health services, and so on. But this apparent consensus is considered deceptive because there is no objective way of defining poverty. The way that poverty is conceptualised is inherently about value preferences that vary between individuals, organisations and societies. Until the 1990’s, poverty was considered mainly in ‘material’ terms – as low income or low levels of material wealth. But other factors like vulnerability and multidimensional deprivation especially of basic capabilities such as health and education have been emphasised as key aspects of poverty. Indeed poverty is rarely the result of a single factor. Instead, combinations of, and interactions between, material poverty, extreme capability deprivation and vulnerability often characterise the chronically poor. On the other hand, poverty is not a static condition. This implies that the dynamics of people’s poverty changes, or does not change, over time. Nevertheless common to the poverty situation, is that poor people commonly experience several forms of disadvantage and discrimination at the same time.
The above consideration of poverty provides us with a background to initiate our investigation into its relationship with human dignity in the Ugandan context. In a situation of poverty an individual is reduced to a peculiar scenario since one is unable to supply oneself with all the basic material necessities of survival. The most distressing representation of poverty is that of the long term poor who are not economically active because of health, age, physical and mental disability. With this group, there is no obvious remedy for the causes of their poverty. Then, there are those who are economically active but unable to escape poverty because of the terms of their employment, their lack of access to productive assets or social barriers that mean they are discriminated against. Poverty renders its victims to the fringes of society and makes it thorny for them to participate equally in the opportunities, which are prevailing. So poverty is a form of injustice and “the poor are victims of injustice.” If this is the case, then there is a deliberate disregard for their humanity and an abuse to their dignity. In the Uganda’s development discourse, the poor are framed as part of the problem, lacking the level of economic activity to drive through the transformations required to move Uganda out of being a ‘backwards’ -agricultural economy. In a speech attributed to the President of Uganda, which aimed at articulating the government’s underlying project of development, Museveni argued that most of the 85 percent Ugandans engaged in the agricultural economy “are stepping on top of each other and not doing anything useful.” This is practically the same as saying that the poor are not worth existing, they are just good for nothing beings and a burden to the nation of which they are the principle components and hence a burden to themselves.
In addition to the above, one of the fundamental questions, which is distressing, is about the causes of poverty. According to the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-5, a group of disabled Ugandan women stated that, “Obwavu obumu buba buzaale. Abaana babuyonka ku bazadde baabwe, ate nabo nebabugabira ku baana” meaning that – some poverty passes from one generation to another as if the offspring sucks it from the mother’s breast. But this is a common belief among Ugandans and we can attribute this to the fatalistic mentality, which is a common anthropological ingredient in our society. Paulo Freire would characterise this as “semi-intransitive consciousness, that is, a mode of consciousness which cannot objectify the facts and problematical situations of daily life.” He assumes that men whose consciousness exists at this level of quasi-immersion lack what we call ‘structural perception’, which shapes and reshapes itself from the concrete reality in the apprehension of facts and problematical situations. For Freire, lacking structural perception, men attribute the sources of such facts and situations in their lives either to some super-reality or to something within themselves; in either case to something outside objective reality. If the explanation for those situations lies in a superior power, or in men’s own natural incapacity, it is obvious that their action will not be orientated towards transforming reality, but towards those superior beings responsible for the problematical situation, or towards that presumed incapacity. Therefore, it is not hard to trace here the origin of the fatalistic attitudes men adopt in certain situations.
Nevertheless if we consider the men and women’s perceptions of the causes of poverty in Uganda, we recognize a number of reasons, which are at the same varied. I have preferred the women’s explanation, which I suppose, is more representative of the reality on the ground. Women have ranked the key causes of poverty as the following. One, Ignorance, defined as a lack of knowledge; doing things, which are not helpful, and an inability to communicate the necessary information, for instance to husband or to wife. As a result people do not use their assets well. Two, laziness, defined as people who do not want to work. They are able, they have the knowledge, they aren’t stupid, but they don’t want to work. An example would be someone who has land, but instead of cultivating it, rents it to obtain money for alcohol or despite having their own land they do casual work to get quick money for alcohol. Three, drinking, that some people just get up to drink. Four, education, that is, most of the youth do not have skills so they spend their time drinking and then gang up to break into homes. The women link the lack of education to polygamy as the husbands concentrate on one wife and her children and the others are neglected and not educated. The girls are sentenced to marriage. Other reasons given are, theft of animals and crops; lack of cooperation within families, polygamy, poor soil fertility, variable climate, sale of household assets by husbands and decline in farm-gate prices. Men on the other hand discussed mostly the meso-level causes of poverty.
This state of affairs carry complicated repercussions for the individual human person and the wider social setting. According to a survey carried out in the health institutions it is claimed that patients are left to die in Mulago hospital. The report details the plight of the six-year-old Sadat Mangeni lying in agony and pain at the Cancer Institute in Mulago Hospital suffering from a heavily swollen cheek and deformed jaw. His father with seven more children had to sell all his cows to save the life of his child and as a consequence his other children had to drop out of school because of the expenses incurred on Sadat’s treatment. This is because the full dose needed to save the boy’s life reportedly costs between Shs3 million and Shs5 million (that is between 1500 and 2500 Euro) and the family cannot raise it. The report gives other appalling instances, for example, Lukiya Nakiwala, 17, was admitted to the hospital suffering from kidney cancer. Her parents failed to raise Shs3 million (about 1500 Euro), to buy the requisite drugs and going by the doctor’s advice, she went for the only free available alternative – radiotherapy with its adverse effects that she went into comma and re-admitted to the hospital. Other cases involve patients like Solome Banura, 16, suffering from leukaemia and her condition demand a dose of cancer drugs worth Shs300, 000 after every two weeks, but her parents cannot afford it. Some patients need drugs that range from Shs70, 000 to Shs100, 000 just for a start. And other patients recount their dreadful experiences in health institutions that even after one has spent Shs3 million to buy drugs from Nairobi, he could not get a doctor to administer the drugs on him. The high mortality and morbidity rate in Uganda can be attributed partly to poverty because many people are unable to get the necessary medical attention, given that they have no financial means to access the same. The only feasible alternative is to resign to God’s mercy. And again it has been reported that “Patients who cannot afford their own drugs from outside pharmacies are either neglected or pushed out of the hospital.” This is a precarious situation for the poor and the United Nations believes that “overcoming human poverty will require a quantum leap in scale and ambition: more nationally own strategies and policies, stronger institutions, wider participatory processes, focussed investments in economic and social infrastructure, and more resources, domestic and external.