Sanusi is off-the-mark on poverty eradication

Must a leader have been poor to understand poverty?

This is the speculation of Kedah Menteri Besar Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor when he mocked Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s stated determination to abolish hardcore poverty.

Sanusi’s view finds an echo in Walter Bagehot’s musings. 

The first editor of The Economist, a weekly publication that’s now a byword among journalism’s practitioners, wrote: “To the rich poverty is an anomaly. They don’t understand why those who want dinner don’t ring the bell.”

Many of history’s renowned poverty-fighting leaders would disagree with Bagehot and Sanusi that a hardscrabble life is a necessary precondition to fighting poverty.

Nelson Mandela came from his society’s upper crust but that did not dull him to the need to fight the blight that poverty-inducing apartheid inflicted on the blacks of South Africa.

He endured 27 years of imprisonment to free his people from the shackles of apartheid.

Rich and well-bred Franklin Roosevelt came to the presidency of the United States via Harvard and Columbia Law School, whose spawning grounds did not preclude sympathy with the victims of the Great Depression whose scourge he lightened with economic stimulus packages that became known as the New Deal.

Roosevelt was accused of being a betrayer of his patrician class on account of the measures his administration took that lifted millions out of the joblessness and poverty of the worldwide Depression that beset the 1930s.

Sanusi is right to say that Anwar does come from the upper strata of Malay society, but his contention that the prime minister is only playacting at poverty eradication is a stretch.

There is an episode of a year when he was finance minister (1991-98) which showed his concern for the poor was palpable. 

He received news a relative of his was living in penurious conditions in a low-cost housing area. The lady fell under the disabled category, as did her husband. Anwar sent a car and an aide to fetch and then install them in more comfortable conditions elsewhere in the city.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim

Anwar’s aide description of the conditions under which his relative had anguished prompted the finance minister to sharply augment the allocation for low-cost housing in the next annual budget he presented to Parliament.

Personal experiences

There are several more stories of Anwar’s concern for the ordinary Malaysian’s struggle to keep body and soul together.

The most recent instance of this was his visit to a newly built food court in Bandar Tun Razak last Saturday.

The design, location, comforts, and parking amenities at this food court reflected his emphasis to Kuala Lumpur City Hall that it must build and provide amenable facilities for ordinary citizens.              

Sanusi is being too simple-minded in contending that a poverty-beset early life is a sine qua non of poverty eradication.

Yes, early life experiences of imprisonment and poverty inspired Charles Dickens’ searing depictions of those conditions in his novels which opened the eyes of the upper classes to the poverty that afflicted the working classes in Victorian England.

But it is not just the personal experiences of sensitive chroniclers that had brought reform and upliftment; it was also the imaginative sympathy of well-off politicians and social activists that goaded the movers and shakers in society to act.

Sanusi is using his personal experience of dire poverty in the Kedah heartlands as a superior badge of differentiation between him and leaders like Anwar, who came from a comfortable middle-class background.

His stance is redolent of arrogance and is as exploitative of the poor as, he imputes, is Anwar’s.

The arrogant poor are as insufferable as the imperious rich. - Mkini

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TERENCE NETTO is a journalist with half a century’s experience.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.