Our Children Beg While Our Leaders Live in Luxury

By: Bobby Cadle Jr.

A child begging in the streets is an indicator of social decay within our communities, the communities in which our children must live the realities of their daily lives. This phenomenon can be caused by various factors, but in today’s economic climate, the primary factor is an urgent need. Families need to eat to survive, but food costs money. In Belize today many of our poverty-stricken families are single parent families, or cases of children being raised by an aunt or grandmother. Sometimes the guardian is forced to stay at home or to eke out a living outside of the home, thus the responsibility for assisting with a little food for the evening meal rests on the child who takes his plea for assistance to the streets.

While there will always be instances of lazy, negligent parents or guardians slacking off while sending their wards to reap the meager rewards of begging, with 43% of the nation below the poverty line and another 16% at risk of falling below the line, there is cause to think that things have changed. In Belize, we have gotten to the point where every day is a struggle for survival, and every member of every family needs to put in their pound. In instances where a mother is caring for two or three babies while taking in washing for a little $50 a week, the onus lies on the older child (anywhere between 5 to 10 years of age) to do whatever they can to help. That is the reality. We see it every day at the major supermarkets, on street-corners, at Chinese stores and popular fry chicken spots. For these children, it is not a matter of begging for the fun of it or to buy two ideals and a toy, it is about making enough to buy a loaf of bread and maybe a wedge of cheese to feed a family of four.

In today’s economy life is hard for all of us. Businesses are closing their doors, employees are being laid off, those precious few tourism dollars are tapering off and there has been no indication of a light at the end of the tunnel. The Prime Minister has stated that things are picking up and the economy is on an upward swing. He has said the same thing for the past three months. But there is no evidence on the streets to support his claim. Ask anybody, from the smallest entrepreneur to the largest business and the story will be the same. Throughout this time of recession, there has been no obvious move by this government to stimulate the economy in any way or to provide incentives as buffers to businesses which are hard hit. Likewise, there has been no obvious move by government to provide relief to those most disadvantaged persons who have been hardest hit by this recession since they are at the bottom of the food chain, realistically speaking.

For many of us who live ‘on the other side of the streets,’ so to speak, it is difficult to imagine the abject poverty which results in children being forced to beg to survive. It is perhaps difficult to imagine children sleeping on the floor of a broken down shack without electricity or running water. It is difficult for us to imagine going to bed without any food in our stomachs and waking up to the same predicament. It is impossible for many of us to imagine the desperation which grips so many Belizeans when they see their children at the point of starvation and there is nowhere to turn. It is this abject poverty, this desperation which has led to this phenomenon of children begging on the streets.

Our Government has fallen down on their responsibilities to the people of Belize, the people who needed them the most. Our leaders have been rendered aloof by their wealth to the point where they can drive by the slums of the nation in their air-conditioned luxury vehicles and not waste a second glance at the barefoot, shirtless children on the street-sides. The priorities of our leaders have become skewed. Our ministers and their families and friends are enjoying the bounty while the people who should be most in their thoughts sink deeper into despair. Our leaders think nothing of spending a quarter of a million dollars on a luxury vehicle and are uncaring of how many mouths that money could have fed. Our Prime Minister attends cocktails and ballroom functions in all corners of the globe where he hobnobs with the wealthy and privileged while the people he pledged to care for rummage for scraps to feed their children. Our leaders who pledged to serve all now serve the special interests which can return favours when requested.

Too many of our leaders are content to roll down the windows of their luxury SUVs and instruct their drivers to give the children begging at the stoplight a dollar before rolling on feeling like they have fulfilled their obligations. It is past time for this government to focus its priorities on the social decay which is fragmenting our nation. It is not right that our children have become beggars while our leaders live in luxury.

| | | | | |