The following were the opening paragraphs of my commentary of February 23, 2014. They were taken from a story in the January 2014 edition of the Jesuit magazine Lil Ħbiebna:
“Agnes (not her real name) is the mother of four children. Her husband is unemployed. Two of their four children are employed but they are also single mothers.
“Agnes has to take care of their children as well. One son needs constant vigilance for he is constantly hovering on the precipice of drug addiction. She is expected to solve all the family’s problems, provide for its financial and emotional needs, do all the housework and manage its meagre budget. On top of it all she has mental and other health problems.”
I remembered Agnes when I was listening to Leonid McKay, the young but energetic director of Caritas Malta, presenting their study titled ‘A Minimum Essential Budget for a Decent Living – 2016’.
I remembered that Agnes’s poverty was not about numbers but about people. Caritas’s professional study answered a question that can help policy makers help Agnes and others like her: how much money do different types of families need to live decently?
Caritas found that, at face value, a family made up of a father, mother and two adolescents needs €11,446 annually. A family consisting of a single parent family with two children needs €9,197 annually and a couple of pensioners need €6,527.
I purposely wrote ‘at face value’ as they could live ‘decently’ only if on top of that income they “reside in a Housing Authority subsidised dwelling, receive free food and the energy and water benefits, are all in good health, and free from any disability, and that they participate in free leisure and cultural activities”.
The calculations do not take into account, for example, that pensioners are the minders of their grandchildren, whom they feed when they ‘babysit’ and to whom they give the odd small present on birthdays, Christmas, and so on.
The budget does not cater for a couple of trips or a weekend break in Gozo.
In these figures there is not even a provision for monthly treat of a plate of pasta or pizza or the occasional packet of cigarettes or drink. Indulging in such ‘luxuries’ would seriously upset the household budget.
If these people dream of owning a small private car or they have to rent their home at commercial rates, then woe betide them. A major sickness could spell disaster. Agnes and people like her find no solace as these figures do not cover her plight.
Caritas is correct to take a conservative approach. This avoids the danger of having its study unfairly criticised as pampering to the poor. The frugal, not to say stingy, budget adopted by Caritas as a basis for its study notwithstanding, the hard and cruel fact is that there are many people who do not make this income. They live in abject poverty. This is unacceptable.
The poor should not be made to pay the bill for corrupt dealings
Caritas quite rightly hopes to put poverty on the country’s agenda.
Such a discussion about poverty is undoubtedly an eminently political discussion. It has to do, among other things, with our concept of society, social justice and living together as well as budgetary decision about how to raise revenue and spend it. Anything more political than that is difficult to imagine.
But this discussion should not be framed within a purely partisan debate. Though there is a place for that, particularly if it is of the informed kind, it should go beyond this. Probably it will unfortunately happen but this is not what worries me most.
There are arguments that cross party lines and are ingrained in the world view and cultures adopted by different social classes. The myths spread about poverty are deeper than being red, blue or green. They are based on social class rather than based on party.
‘The poor are poor because they are lazy’ is one belief. ‘They don’t want to work’ is the other. And what about the canard that ‘they are not really poor – they just don’t manage their money properly’.
These myths enable politicians with a skimpy social conscience to cast a blind eye on the tax evasion of the super-rich while waging war on single mothers and other vulnerable people, accusing them of benefit fraud. Abuse happens and should be stopped but this is not the country’s biggest problem. The poor should not be made to pay the bill for corrupt dealings.
Such myths conveniently enable people at large to pacify their conscience and keep on living comfortably or prodigally without feeling guilty.
The main causes of poverty are structural, not personal. As Pope Francis said recently, the cause is “an economic vision geared to profit and material well-being alone… an economy of exclusion and inequality”.
Please re-read what I wrote earlier about what poor people in Malta have to forgo and what they have to deprive their children of because of their poverty. Can you imagine living in the same situation?
Then neither should other people have to undergo this indignity.
The country should have a policy of zero tolerance to poverty.
• At the beginning of last week it was announced that The Malta Independent and The Times of Malta have been accredited as members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. This means that these leading newspapers now have unlimited and unencumbered access to the 11.5 million documents known as the Panama Papers.
This resulted in a new lease of life to the reportage about the antics of Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, their accountants and others directly or indirectly mentioned in this scandal of epic proportions. Those who follow the media could see from the new reports published that the stench is much worse than we ever believed it to be.
Pope Francis’s cri de coeur in Scampia, Naples, last year fits the present situation in Malta like a glove: “Corruption is a dirty thing! … A corrupt society stinks! … Got it?”
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt