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We must end the world’s inequality

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The Covid-19 coronavirus and the response of authorities in proclaimed democratic states around the world to the pandemic have clearly shown that while all citizens are notionally equal, some are more equal than most others – with a minority much more equal than the rest.

While the media often concentrate on the fact that the likes of Britain’s Prince Charles or some other notables have contracted or succumbed to the virus, this does not mean that we are all equally “in the same boat”.

We are in the same boat only in that this particular coronavirus can be transmitted from person to person in a world that has become a global village, where the better off can travel freely almost everywhere.

This adds another dimension to the historical fact that earlier epidemics – from bubonic plague to smallpox – tended to follow the trade routes in a world that was much less integrated than it is today.

And throughout history, it has been the elderly and those with immune systems that could either not cope or were compromised, who mostly succumbed to these diseases.

The majority of the people in these most vulnerable categories are the poor, often living in cramped and squalid conditions. Most of them are malnourished and without adequate sanitation, let alone medical care.

And throughout history, it has been the elderly and those with immune systems that could either not cope or were compromised, who mostly succumbed to these diseases.

These are conditions where contagion breeds, where TB, dysentery and other debilitating and all too often deadly diseases proliferate.

But there is little official attention paid while these diseases are contained among the huddled masses in their shacks and makeshift shelters.

In a world of plenty, where the wastage of food and other resources occurs on a monumental scale, there can be no justification for these conditions to persist.

Yet, for far too long, and by too many, they have been considered “normal”.

This is a normal we should never wish to maintain or return to.

As a recent graffito in London, UK, noted: “We can’t return to normal because the normal we had was precisely the problem.”

And this has certainly not changed because some of the super-rich have thrown a few more crumbs from their overstuffed tables.

Read: Covid-19: Food security and wellness are likely to be compromised



It should be noted that this apparent largesse was aimed not at democratic change, but at trying to ensure a return to the world as it was – to maintain “business as usual”.

Yet this business – a system based on competition and which places the accumulation of profit before the welfare of people – is, as the London graffito correctly noted, precisely the problem.

It is also, incidentally, in contradiction of the Bill of Rights or even such policies as those outlined in government’s National Housing Code (NHC) of 2004.

In its Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme, the NHC promised to “upgrade the living conditions of millions of poor people”.

This pledge to provide “secure tenure and access to basic services and housing” repeated the assurance made a decade earlier by then housing minister Joe Slovo.

The majority of the people in these most vulnerable categories are the poor, often living in cramped and squalid conditions. Most of them are malnourished and without adequate sanitation, let alone medical care.

Instead, we have multiple squalid breeding grounds of contagion, rife with TB and awaiting the onslaught of Covid-19.

But this is normal in a profit-before-people system. And those who own, control and manipulate the system are also trapped within it.

As such, it is useless appealing to the good nature or morality of those at the apex of national and global exploitation.

Put bluntly: good bosses go bust.

In order to survive, let alone thrive, profits have to be maximised. It is a simple matter of cost-benefit analysis.

In other words, the benefits (profit) must always outweigh the costs – material, human or environmental.

This is a “normal” to which we should never wish to return.


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