Beware of the poverty line, lockdowns can be death traps

Kibra residents wash their hands as part of the measures to arrest the spread of coronavirus, on March 23, 2020. PHOTO | EVANS HABIL | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Imposing a curfew without breadbasket for 40 per cent of the population can be a lightning rod for social chaos.
  • Covid-19 is a wake-up call to African governments to put in place functioning public assistance programmes to counteract poverty threats.

Certainly, the renowned Pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois did not have the coronavirus in mind when he declared: “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.”

Uncannily, US President Donald Trump, who labelled the 2019 novel coronavirus as the “China virus”, seems to project the colour line as “the problem of the 21st century”. He is dead wrong.

The coronavirus is an equal opportunity global pandemic. On March 27, the US became first country to report 100,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, becoming the country with the most confirmed cases globally.

And across the Atlantic, the pandemic has a new prime victim, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who tested positive on Friday, March 27.

Luckily, countries are beginning to take the pandemic seriously as an existential threat to humanity, and imposed curfews, lockdowns and related restrictions to check its spread.

In Kenya, President Kenyatta announced a nationwide night-time curfew effective March 27.

POVERTY LINE

But the stay-at-home orders are unveiling the real problem of the 21st century: the poverty line or the minimum level of income considered as adequate for survival.

Clearly, the shelter-in-place orders can contain the spread of the pandemic, but not everyone has the means to stay at home.

Basic conditions are needed for those citizens below the poverty line to observe the curfews. The poverty threshold, like poverty itself, is relative.

This dictum should guide responses to Covid-19. However, in practice, breadlines vary considerably among nations, with developed countries having considerably higher levels than developing countries.

However, in October 2015 the World Bank upgraded its daily per capita international poverty line (IPL) from $1.25 per day to a global absolute minimum of $1.90 (Sh190) a day — widely considered better, reflecting today’s reality, particularly new price levels in developing countries.

Obviously, living above or below the poverty line is not a permanent or static position.

BASIC RESOURCES

Perusing through recently published autobiographies and biographies in Kenya, there has been a distinct upward trend from “charcoal to gold” or “grass to grace” of many Kenyans in the past five decades.

But the downward trends from gold to charcoal or grace to grass are understudied.

A third of the world’s impoverished people were not poor at birth, but sank below the poverty line over the course of their life.

At any level, the poverty line is a mark of social inclusion/exclusion. As such, the obvious casualties of shelter-at-home orders to combat Covid-19 are those without enough resources to secure basic life necessities — trapped in the “absolute poverty” or “extreme poverty” bracket.

Without access to two or more of the basic needs — healthcare for serious illnesses and pregnancy; food; safe drinking water; sanitation facilities; adequate shelter; education; information, and access to vital services — these are at the dire risk of double jeopardy: coronavirus and extreme poverty.

Based on the World Bank IPL measure, the United Nations has estimated that roughly 734 million people in the world remained in absolute poverty, the vast majority of them in Africa.

SOCIAL CHAOS

The bank’s "Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report" (2018) indicated that 17.6 million Kenyans (about 40 per cent of the population) live on below two dollars a day, effectively living from hand to mouth.

This is the sixth-highest number of poor people in the world after India, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Madagascar in terms of extreme poverty.

As such, imposing a curfew without breadbasket for 40 per cent of the population can be a lightning rod for social chaos.

Moreover, imposed in the absence of affordable universal healthcare, and therefore, medical response to Covid-19, in the majority of African countries, curfews and lockdowns can morph into death traps.

The focus of interventions should be women, children and the elderly, who face the devastation of absolute poverty more than other social categories.

Informal settlements and slums in African cities are full of single-mother families, which reflects the feminisation of poverty.

FINANCIAL RELIEFS

Moreover, the Horn of Africa region can only forget to put measures in place to prevent the further spread of Covid-19 among refugees at its own peril.

Governments should work with the UN refugee agency UNHCR to effectively implement measures to stem the spread of the virus among refugees and host communities.

Covid-19 is a wake-up call to African governments to put in place functioning public assistance programmes to counteract poverty threats, and the impact of Covid-19 on household incomes.

A model case is America’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as “food stamps”, that provides food-purchasing assistance for the low- and no-income people, and benefited roughly 40 million people in 2018.

Three pro-poor responses to Covid-19 are discernible. First, wealthy countries are drawing on their vast riches to contain the virus.

President Trump has signed a sweeping $2 trillion coronavirus spending package into law.

Second, developing countries like Kenya have introduced a raft of measures to halt further spread of the virus across the country while saving jobs, incomes and shielding the poor from sinking deeper into absolute poverty.

COOPERATION

Third, Covid-19 is galvanising humanitarian action. China’s business mogul Jack Ma, through his Alibaba Foundation, has pledged to donate kits for testing the coronavirus to each of the 54 African countries. Kenya has already received a batch of 25,000 kits.

Blissfully, the world’s major powers are toning down rhetoric and starting to cooperate in combating the pandemic.

In an evening telephone call on March 26, President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to deepen cooperation, reiterating their commitment to work together to protect lives and livelihoods.

With the promise of cooperation, a future without Covid-19 looks brighter.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the chief executive at of the Africa Policy Institute and a former government adviser.