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Poor, poor, poor
Friday, July 20, 2007
We believe every government has a moral obligation to take proper care of its poor. Indeed, sensible administrations are well aware that a failure to take care of those citizens who, for one reason or the other, find themselves at the mercy of the State, will inevitably backfire on the entire nation through a vicious cycle of poverty-bred crime and other social dilemmas.
Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller - a self-professed champion of the poor - seems to have recognised this in her quest for a mandate to lead this country for the next five years.
One of the most recent expressions of this acknowledgement being her noteworthy speech to the Conference on the Caribbean in Washington, DC last month.
In that speech, the first item on the list of 12 factors that the prime minister recognised as a threat to the region was "poverty and its wide-ranging social and economic implications".
In an impassioned plea that waxed poetic, Prime Minister Simpson Miller articulated famous words uttered by Jamaica's first national hero, Marcus Mosiah Garvey:
"Poverty is a hellish state to be in, It is no virtue It is a crime
To be poor is to be hungry without possible hope of food,
To be sick without hope of medicine,
To be tired and sleepy without a place to lay one's head
To be naked without the hope of clothing,
To be despised and comfortless,
To be poor is to be a fit subject for crime and hell."
Few people could have put it better, and the prime minister's verbatim adoption of the excerpt was apt, as it gave her a solid foundation on which to ground her insistence that member states of the World Trade Organisation address the Caribbean Community's specific trade vulnerabilities in the Doha development round of talks.
So we were particularly disappointed to read the lead story in yesterday's edition of our sister title, the Observer West, about the slashing from $283,000 to $140,000 - a cut of more than 50 per cent - in the monthly allocation to the outdoor poor in the parish of Trelawny.
According to Telawny's deputy mayor, Mr Fitz Christie, the cut will put a strain on the parish council's ability to provide for the poor.
This space has already highlighted the deplorable conditions that attend infirmaries in other parishes like Hanover, where the inmates have to huddle together in the middle of the room like sheep to avoid getting wet when it rains. And had it not been for the personal efforts of Matron Icy Allen, the Falmouth Infirmary inmates would probably be facing a similar or worse fate.
We cannot, as a nation, expect outsiders to extend all sorts of concessions to us on the basis of poverty alleviation when we show scant regard for our own poor at the local level.
That, we submit, is really, really poor.
Friday, July 20, 2007
We believe every government has a moral obligation to take proper care of its poor. Indeed, sensible administrations are well aware that a failure to take care of those citizens who, for one reason or the other, find themselves at the mercy of the State, will inevitably backfire on the entire nation through a vicious cycle of poverty-bred crime and other social dilemmas.
Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller - a self-professed champion of the poor - seems to have recognised this in her quest for a mandate to lead this country for the next five years.
One of the most recent expressions of this acknowledgement being her noteworthy speech to the Conference on the Caribbean in Washington, DC last month.
In that speech, the first item on the list of 12 factors that the prime minister recognised as a threat to the region was "poverty and its wide-ranging social and economic implications".
In an impassioned plea that waxed poetic, Prime Minister Simpson Miller articulated famous words uttered by Jamaica's first national hero, Marcus Mosiah Garvey:
"Poverty is a hellish state to be in, It is no virtue It is a crime
To be poor is to be hungry without possible hope of food,
To be sick without hope of medicine,
To be tired and sleepy without a place to lay one's head
To be naked without the hope of clothing,
To be despised and comfortless,
To be poor is to be a fit subject for crime and hell."
Few people could have put it better, and the prime minister's verbatim adoption of the excerpt was apt, as it gave her a solid foundation on which to ground her insistence that member states of the World Trade Organisation address the Caribbean Community's specific trade vulnerabilities in the Doha development round of talks.
So we were particularly disappointed to read the lead story in yesterday's edition of our sister title, the Observer West, about the slashing from $283,000 to $140,000 - a cut of more than 50 per cent - in the monthly allocation to the outdoor poor in the parish of Trelawny.
According to Telawny's deputy mayor, Mr Fitz Christie, the cut will put a strain on the parish council's ability to provide for the poor.
This space has already highlighted the deplorable conditions that attend infirmaries in other parishes like Hanover, where the inmates have to huddle together in the middle of the room like sheep to avoid getting wet when it rains. And had it not been for the personal efforts of Matron Icy Allen, the Falmouth Infirmary inmates would probably be facing a similar or worse fate.
We cannot, as a nation, expect outsiders to extend all sorts of concessions to us on the basis of poverty alleviation when we show scant regard for our own poor at the local level.
That, we submit, is really, really poor.