Poverty, again.

While reading an article in the BT on poverty in Brunei, I was thinking, how sad the reality is. It is almost unbelievable that there is extreme poverty in a country so rich (the lives of those in the article are examples of extreme or absolute poverty, and if it is indeed true that there are families earning only about $12 per day, gosh! that's defined as $1/day poverty! ). It is true that Brunei's GDP per capita has doubled within a decade but that unfortunately does not mean the income is more equally distributed.

So, how bad is the poverty in Brunei? Another article (click here), can give the picture. I cringed when I found out that there are 16,186 poor people = 3,747 families! Based on that statistic (the number of zakat recipients), about 4.3 % of Brunei's population therefore falls under the poverty line. And if my calculation is correct, each person is receiving $46 per month from the zakat fund. So a family of 8 (such as Hj Dullah in Kg. Tamoi) will receive $368 a month.

An easy and straight-forward solution to help Hj Dullah would be to give him a boat so he can operate his own water taxi. However, a few years ago, somebody mentioned that this type of aid (i.e. giving boats to Kampong Ayer's poor) actually backfired. The recipients who were supposed to earn a living with the boats, ended up selling the boats for an easy lump-sum money. I must admit, this puts a pressure on policy-makers. To give or not to give? How can we prevent such incidence from happening again? But I also believe, we can't simply just NOT give based on bad past experience.

Nevertheless I find this really is a challenge. While there are many ways to reduce poverty, I however cannot think of any policy measure that can solve the human attitude problem: the ungratefulness and the lack of responsibility that seem to exist rampantly in Brunei.
I often ask, what did we do wrong? But remember this:

“…Surely Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition…” (Qur’an 13:11).

Salaam.