Banking for the poor or banking on the poor?
There are people who still believe that the British built our roads
and railways. This is utter rubbish. The labour was Sri Lankan. The
funds were obtained by taxing our people. As for the roads and railways
they were not designed to get Kusumawathi from Anuradhapura to
Kataragama but to streamline resource and value extraction.
This is how power imbalances play out. The powerful are able to make
the powerless inhabit a version of reality they (the powerless) have no
say in authoring. Bishop Desmond Tutu in his more progressive days,
speaking on the colonial encounter in Africa and in particular the
‘priest’-accomplice of the sultans of destruction and resource
extraction put it this way: ‘In the beginning we had the land and they
had the book; they said ‘close your eyes, let us pray’ and when we
opened our eyes, we had the book and they had the land.’
I have over the years found it safer to treat with suspicion those
who wear benefactor-garb. I am thinking here about a new buzz-term in
the development discourse: micro-finance. It is not new, really.
‘Banking with the Poor’ is a couple of decades old already, but it was
buried in a heap of other buzzwords for years.
Poverty alleviation
Today micro-finance is seen as the magic formula for poverty
alleviation. Sorry, it is SAID to be the magic formula for poverty
alleviation. The distinction is important and is indicative of my
cynicism.
Discussions on micro-finance tend to be liberally laden with
references to poverty alleviation and how it is important to rope the
poor into formal banking systems. It is the unsaid that makes the most
interesting reading, though.
Those who talk about banking with the poor will not tell you that
banks have always needed the poor. First of all, money doesn’t fall from
the sky. Value has to be created. Profits have to be EXTRACTED. It is
called ‘exploitation’. I don’t have to re-write Karl Marx’s Labour
Theory of Value here. Someone gives and someone takes, to put it simply.
There are TERMS of extraction and these can even be legal.
Next we get to savings. Who saves? The poor! The rich don’t save.
They invest. Take the People’s Bank, the Bank of Ceylon and the National
Savings Bank. They are made of poor people’s money. Salaries. Pensions.
The little something put aside every month in numerous savings schemes.
Who gets the loans? The rich!
Commercial banks
The rich have always banked ON the poor. They NEED the poor.
‘Micro-finance’ in its banking-only manifestation then is nothing else
than the banks realizing that little drops of water can make big bucks
at the end of the day. The margins are obtained by volume. They have
figured out, these rich micro-finance gurus dressed as do-gooding
poor-lovers have, that the poor outnumber the rich by about 100 to 1 or
more. Any idiot with even an iota of business sense would see this as
‘potential’. You can get the one rich guy to save 100 bucks or get the
other 99 to save 10 bucks each. That would make 990 rupees or an 890
rupees difference. It’s good business, ladies and gentlemen. Now factor
in the loans, the micro-credit and the profits from interest.
Astounding!
The problem with micro-finance is that it is marketed as a
delivering-all kind of tool. It is nothing of the kind. Stripped of
rhetoric and promise it remains just another banking product. It has a
sound-good feel to it, yes.
It is made to fatten CSR portfolios, yes. At the end of the day,
commercial banks are interested in profit and little else.
Micro-finance in its thrift-and-credit avatar was essentially a
collective effort that was governed by cooperative principles. Today,
micro-finance is a term that the ace defenders and approvers of
shameless resource extraction and labour exploitation, the World Bank,
has appropriated. Today it is a concept that the World Bank has
re-defined and is dishing out to each and every naive and/or pernicious
taker who does a google search, courtesy the CGAP (Consultative Group to
Assist the Poor). CGAP is ‘addressed’ at the World Bank and focuses on
financial services.
National development
The focus itself tells a story. The assumption is that it is all
about money. Well, it is. At least from the point of view of the banking
outfits that micro-finance. How about the poor, though?
Where issues of comprehensive betterment of a given community are not
addressed, when sustainability is not a concern, when culture is
factored out, when national development frameworks are not referenced,
when training and education so necessary for resource and potential
identification are ignored, you don’t get poverty alleviation. You get
PLAYED.
In your name. That’s the beauty of banking on the poor. You don’t say
you need the poor, than you are literally banking on them, you say you
are doing it with them.
To me, banking WITH the poor is like raping WITH the victim. There is
an element of ‘consent’ that gets scripted in. You can say ‘We are doing
it with you, brother,’ even as you do him in.
The British, they tell us, built our roads. Micro-finance is a road,
I think.
The poor are building it. With their money and labour. Someone is
using the road to take out cartloads of value away from the places that
the poor inhabit.
Roads are good though but only as long as those who build them decide
what kind of road to build and from where to where and why.
Micro-finance is not that kind of road, I am afraid; certainly not in
its dominant articulation.
It boils down to a simple matter: who owns the road. Let’s think
about it.
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