Want to fight poverty? Ask the why

Pope Francis is certainly a “Pope of the poor”. Is it enough to only “associate” with the poor? The Catholic Church has in the past called for radical changes in the structures disfavouring the poor and the marginalised.

In the apostolic letter, octogesima adveniens: call to action, Pope Paul IV in 1971 says “it is not enough to recall principles, state intentions, point out injustice and utter prophetic denunciations...these lack real weight unless they are accompanied by personal responsibility and effect to action” in fighting social ills.

In Mater et magistra: on Christian Social progress, John XXIII, decried the social structures that continued to breed material poverty.

This is emphasised in the letter “The development of the peoples” that unless the economic machinery is changed, the gap between the poor and rich will continue to rise.

The message in these documents is that, praying or empathising with the poor is not enough; economic justice can only be ensured by changing the very structures that make it difficult to live in dignity. Francis’s soft spot for the poor is understandable, having been formed when Liberation Theology (LT) thrived around him.

This brand of theology (US detractors called it marxist-Jesuistism), urged Christians to actively fight injustice. Its extreme brand asked the poor faithful to take up arms. In some Latin American countries, priests often said mass with Kalashnikov dangling on their shoulders.

Francis’ tete a tete with Liberation Theology founder and career Vatican gadfly, Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, mirrors the Pope’s support on the structural change to fight poverty. The danger in merely ‘associating’ with the poor is that it implicitly perpetuates the ‘Poverty Gospel’: Happy are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven...

Furthermore, financial structures, and the powers that create, sustain and benefit from them have ways and means of adapting and capturing pro-poor initiatives.

An example is the capture of the Fairtrade initiatives by the global agribusinesses. Fairtrade began as a noble movement to make world trade ‘fair’ by helping producers to retain more profits from raw material like coffee. After three decades of the venture, farmers are still poor.

The gospel of poverty won. Nairobi hosts the world trade organization summit this month. There is unlikely to be any resolution on practices that continue to make farmers in the South poorer, for instance, market distorting subsidies to farmers in rich countries. Pope Francis’ call for the youth to fight injustice and exclusion is timely.

But what would be the nature of this fight? Take up arms? What would be its ideological thrust? These are not idle questions. Underlying them is the question of structures that mould the youth: many Kenyan youths identify with same structures that oppress them.

Any discussion in the social media, the very conduit of youth expression, quickly turns tribal.

How can they then change the institutions that create poverty? Can they be expected ‘to shape a more just, inclusive and humane society’ as the pope advised?

Without changing the underlying structures, mass poverty will continue.

Brazilian “archbishop of the poor” Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara lamented. “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, when I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist”. The youth need to ask the ‘why’ of things’. The ‘why’ is the seed of revolutions. It precedes the ‘when, how and who’. The ‘why’ interrogates the structures that prompt particular social conditions.

Only when we started addressing the “why” of governance did we change the Constitution. There is no clear answer, as institutions, even in developed countries including the Vatican, serve special interests.

Whereas rich countries have developed institutions to cushion as many people as possible from poverty, in Kenya, we are just beginning to “evolve” through a more inclusive constitution. But this is more on the paper. The attitude still favours an economically divided class society.

Note the lukewarm interest in funding mass public transport, irrigation, SME, housing and other pro-poor strategies, and massive theft of public funds.