We have been taught to think in adversarial terms, that there are freedoms and responsibilities, that there are rights and duties. In the process we have lost the essence of concepts like Ipelegeng. I submit that Ipelegeng is a liberation concept. Sure it was not invented by liberation movements, but so what? All the more credit to the wisdom of our ancestors! I believe if we look at Ipelegeng as a liberating concept we can see its centrality to eradication of poverty.
Supposing we have a working poor who earns P500 per month, and he spends P300 per month on food. Of this P300 the retailer takes P100 as profit and overheads. To assist a poor person we must therefore find ways that reduce what he purchases from retailers and what gets taken from him as profit and overheads. Given that we do not have price controls, that instrument is lost to us. The best option we have is to get the working poor to produce a significant portion of their food basket as cheaply as possible.
Instead of keeping people working in Ipelegeng Projects sweeping the streets and cutting trees all the time, we should split their time between doing these tasks and agricultural activity. In an area like Gaborone our government can make land available at Glenn Valley farms. The people on Ipelegeng can then be formed into a co-operative to produce food at these farms. They would then sell some of the produce to the retailers and buy some at cost thus saving the profit and overheads portion that would otherwise have been taken by the retailers and acquire some profit themselves.
When we close borders to produce from other countries the working poor would be able to get a portion of the income of the upper classes. The upper classes spend a small proportion of their salaries on food, so closing borders to produce from other countries does not harm them, but allows the working poor to get a bigger portion of the market. The use of working poor cooperatives benefits a greater pool of our people instead of giving farmland to the rich and well off, who appropriate profits for themselves and their families and spend such money in luxury goods not produced by the working poor.
My understanding is that government as the employer is responsible for the job description of those who work in Ipelegeng. It should therefore not be too difficult a task to introduce an agricultural component to the works under Ipelegeng. Our working poor having been given exposure to agriculture would be able to graduate out of poverty on the back of their own knowledge and effort. This builds pride and dignity and a better citizenry.
Food does not have to be produced from far away places. If we make agricultural land available within the periphery of our major settlements we concentrate our people in manageable centers, achieve critical population numbers and concentrations to make these centers economically viable, and also reduce the costs of providing social services as we will be dealing with a reduced geographical spread.
Most of us understand freedoms within the arena of freedom of expression largely because of the extent to which politics dominates our print, radio and electronic media. As a result we have failed to grasp the liberating effects of agriculture. Much as we are wont to dismiss rural people as not being sophisticated we fail to understand how through agriculture they have managed to limit their reliance on government. Their interactions with government revolve around social services like schools and clinics, but overall they could not care less about government for their survival. This is hardly surprising given that our tribes predate the form of centralized government that we now have.
Agriculture therefore has a freedom dividend. Those who live in cities have a lower index of this dividend for they are largely dependent on salaries paid by the government, and get supplies from retailers. Those in rural areas have a higher index of this dividend for they do not depend on the government and retailers. I am not suggesting that there are no poor families in the rural areas. What I am suggesting is that if we recognize the freedom dividend of agriculture we may find that there is no real worry about people moving from rural areas to cities if we can raise the agricultural freedom index of the urban poor.
I must confess that I started seeing the freedom dividend of agriculture only recently when I realized that our government has been unresponsive to calls for a citizen economic empowerment law, and also that it was possible for someone who is dependent on government tenders to be marginalized if he was not in the good books of those who made decisions.
With agriculture if you have your own field and a few cattle you are less susceptible to marginalization since people will always need to eat. You rely on God to provide the rain and the grazing. Enemies in government have less leverage to do you harm if you are into agriculture than if you are not. It was whilst these thoughts were going through my mind that I realized that agriculture has a freedom dividend and it is a concept that can be brought to the question of the working poor.
Instead of promising every family to have a graduate by 2016 we should instead promise that by 2016 when we ask every family the question, “Who feeds you?” every family will be able to say “we produce so much of our own food”. Our government should in my view take this approach to reduce poverty. Employment on its own in an environment where there is no price control will in my humble view not make a significant impact on poverty levels if we do not have people on Ipelegeng projects keeping the bulk of their meager income.
We cannot ask the working poor to save by eating less. We cannot ask them to have fewer children for we need the numbers. We can however help them spend less on food by paying them to produce more of their own food. As shown above we need not increase their pay package, all we need do is change their job description to increase their agricultural activity.
I submit that we can do the same with those on welfare. Instead of taking them off welfare we must get them to produce some of their own food as we continue to assist them. We can even have this as a requirement for anyone to remain on welfare. The people on welfare can be incorporated into co-operatives in each and every village and town. If we are prepared to subsidize some farming activities why can we not look at welfare within a farming perspective as a subsidy? Why can we not say to those on welfare “you produce food valued at P1000.00 per month and we give you a subsidy of P280 per month?”
I believe the approach that I set out above reduces the dependency syndrome that current schemes nurture. The approach allows government to move away from schemes that keep people permanently on welfare. Payment of welfare becomes a subsidy that triggers government’s right as an employer to determine the job description. With the approach that I set out above we have a way of weaning people out of welfare schemes and assisting them to graduate from poverty.
What I am suggesting is not a new idea. I understand that under the old fencing scheme people who did not have cash could contribute in kind in order to access government assistance. That was primarily a contractual relationship. You provide labour of a certain value and government supplies you with fencing materials valued at so much. One is just using a little imagination to apply the underlying subsidy and contract concept to the Ipelegeng program in a manner that is true to our ancestors’ understanding of Ipelegeng.
For a nation that has been involved in mining ever since independence the manner of thinking that I set out above should come naturally. Do we have a mining engineer who has never heard of reprocessing of gold mining dumps? Do we have those who are processing these dumps claiming that they are smarter than those who did the original processing? Do we have those who did the original processing walking with their heads down in shame for failing to extract all the gold out of the ore? The trouble with our people is that we are pre-occupied with claiming credit. In the process we forget that reprocessing of old ideas and their refinement is very much part of life.
We need a leadership that appreciates that there can be re-processing of their ideas by others. Re-processing is a natural phenomenon that evidences innovation and should be encouraged. We cannot purport to have innovation hubs if our people cannot re-process ideas to unlock value. I believe what I set our above demonstrates how we can unlock value from Ipelegeng without taking an adversarial posture.
