Over the years the government of this country has developed and implemented a number of social welfare programs which have been targeting quite varied groups of individuals and communities. I want to briefly take a look at some of them and attempt to see if government’s intentions were/are logical and of value to not only the target groups but to the nation at large. I will base my discussion on the old assertion by one Immanuel Kant who said “….welfare, however, has no principle, neither for him who receives it, nor for him who distributes it (one will place it here and another there); because it depends on the material content of the will, which is dependent upon particular facts and therefore incapable of a general rule”. I chose this particular statement purely for purposes of finding some argument and rational as to why social welfare has never been universally approached as a given in society, even when we all agree on its contribution to attainment of social or distributive justice.
We will recall programmes such as Drought Relief Programmes of the 1980s, Labour Intensive Public Works, Dam construction, village projects of varied types; today’s much talked about labour intensive projects, constituency tournaments and many others. Amongst these I would include the Financial Assistance Policy (FAP) and a few others which were not officially designed as welfare programs or projects. My reasons for placing them in the welfare category are purely on the basis of the statement quoted above. The justification for all these past and present programs and projects is generally pursuance for social or distributive justice, stated or not. What is/are issues with social welfare in our country?
If we look at the above referred programs and a few others not mentioned, the generic objective(s) was to provide a social safety net for the unemployed, poor, marginalised and disadvantaged groups of our communities. Each of these programs had its specific focus and the impacts/effects were also varying to some degree, but I would argue that a common thread ran through all these when it came to observable and real impact, especially falling on the unintended (but known) effects of these programs and projects. The common unintended impacts were mainly two fold. Firstly these tended to be more of short term benefit programs than long-term and their long-term sustainability degree was lacking. This meant that while in the short term people of the categories mentioned above seem to have and are still engaged, the programs could not sustain permanency of occupation of new “better” livelihoods. I will for now assume that indeed there were initial improvements in the livelihood of some of the targeted groups, even though elsewhere I could still argue to the contrary. In other words post the benefit periods of these programs, most beneficiaries relapsed back into either their original economic and social status or even got worse.
I am aware that some evaluations on some of these programs suggest positive impacts, but I am saying in the long-term they have had very shaky sustainability impact. The second major impact is that most if not all, did introduce the majority of the beneficiaries into the employment sector, where they could now have a regular monthly salary. It may appear not much of an issue but for communities in the rural areas some of whom would have never worked before this was a major shift in their patterns of life. The hitherto unemployed and even subsistence farmers of varied degrees now had this monthly wages they could get from drought relief, labour intensive and FAP employment opportunities. This had major shifts in peoples’ lifestyles at both social and economic levels and these shifts would eventually become of a national character.
If you ask me I would say here that the engagement of subsistence farmers into any of the above programs was in itself the beginning of the further decline of the agricultural sector, especially the crop production side. I will for now not go into other social repercussions of these programs safe to say there were dislodgement of families, with young children in schools left alone for long periods which resulted in an increase in youth problems in the process. That’s a topic for discussion on another day.
If social welfare programs are short term based and become only temporary relief measures, the long term challenge is how to deal with the issues of relapses, disengagement from sectors like the agriculture and general expectations that the communities now develop. Amongst the most difficult are people becoming too or over dependent on government for everything they need. The result would be people who never graduate from social welfare programs such as destitution rations, including even abuse of some of these government-provided assistance. The broader scenario is the transformation of citizens into helpless individuals whose survival is only through government handouts. When you have a consistent rise in the numbers of this lot then you can be sure that social welfare programs will soon be a very large and unsustainable portion of the country’s development and recurrent budget.
Unfortunately this would be taking place amidst current trends in economic recessions and the need for governments to cut their expenditures and reduce subsidies and this will make these endeavours very difficult to achieve. I am aware that we often get excited with the increasing numbers of people that get opportunities in the labour intensive or public works programs as well as constituency tournaments but I am going to argue that these are only short term and if we cannot rationalise them to be long term sustainable programs, beneficiaries will necessarily relapse back into even worse social and economic status along the way. The greatest challenge for us is to develop a long term social welfare framework to guide all our welfare programs such that we begin to look for more productive and permanent solutions to problems of poverty, unemployment and loss of jobs and security. The principles upon which we want to base our choice of types and degree of social welfare can only be subjective, but even then we could still do much better than we currently are, after all we are dealing with subjective social and economic issues.
*Molaodi teaches Public administration at the University of Botswana
