I wrote a while back about how the media waters down select topics and criminalizes individuals or groups because of ideological reasons. It all came back tonight when I finished Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. While majority of the book focuses on the plethora of facts and figures about abject poverty more than half the world now lives in, the book really shines when the polemicist in Davis comes through and debunks the neoliberal policies of the Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF and the World Bank – and urges us to be mindful of those increasingly getting left behind and ignored.
Davis makes it plain: the West, in particular, the loan-sharking conglomerates of the IMF and World Bank are largely responsible for the misery of the poor in the South. On top of the regional wars and families of dictators the West so generously bequeathed the Third World post-colonialism, it also left behind a legacy of destroyed economies and heaps of debt these countries never had a chance of paying off. The problem worsened during the 70s when soaring oil prices forced them to seek financial assistance from foreign banks.
In came the IMF and the World Bank.
The idea was to leverage the debt of the Third World to “restructure” loan-seeking countries into export economies existing primarily to service the West. Of course, the official line went more along the lines of “helping the poor help themselves.” One of the earlier examples of this help came through the Urban Development Department, led by the genius of Robert McNamarra, which took on the task of urban housing policy. “The intention was to make housing affordable to low-income households without the payment of subsidies, in contrast to the heavily subsidized public-housing approach.” The strategy, in essence, focused on improving slums by giving out self-help loans to residents who could then use the money to improve their homes. The program became an embarrassing failure when it was revealed that the money either “trickled straight up to the land developers and the construction industry” or “poached by the middle class or non-needy in the same way as had public housing.”
Subsequently, the IMF began work on the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The affect on the Third World was twofold: 1) Complete control of these ruined economies by Western banks and creditors, and 2) Full-blown privatization; removal of all import controls; uncontrollable inflation; massive cuts in public health care, education and sanitation programs; downsizing of the public sector; elimination of all subsidies to small farmers; an even wider gap between the rich and poor; further increases in the number of orphaned children, women who prostitute; rise in crime, gangs and narcotrafficking; and of course, even more poor people.
Writer Fidelis Balogum describes what the program meant for the Nigerian poor:
“The weird logic of this economic programme seemed to be that to restore life to the dying economy, every juice had first to be SAPed out of the under-privileged majority of the citizens. The middle class rapidly disappeared and the garbage heaps of the increasingly rich few became the food table of the multiplied population of abjectly poor. The brain drain to the oil-rich Arab countries and to the Western world became a flood.”
In closing, Davis argues that the future of humanity depends on how these “abjectly poor” will react to the vapid existence imposed upon them by these neoliberal institutions. Will they revolt, as the terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, or will they accept their misery and continue to provide the cheap labor and raw materials the West so desperately needs to exist? From narcotraffickers in Columbia to suicide bombers in Gaza, this question must be debated honestly if we’re truly interested in figuring out why this is beginning to hit us home.
