Spare Change Is Big Business in a Culture of Generosity

Pete's Points

Published by the New York Times there is this article that I think highlights some interesting issues


Some excerpts:

"DAKAR, Senegal Aug. 16 — Every morning at 9 a.m., Mamadou Sorro makes his rush-hour commute through this seaside capital, expertly guiding his wheels through the stream of pedestrians, cars and scooters.

His journey is short from the patch of sidewalk where he spends his nights to his regular corner, outside a government building. On a good day he can clear $5.

Mr. Sorro is a beggar, one of thousands who ply the streets here in a city famous across West Africa for its generosity. He moved here from Ivory Coast after a war injury left him disabled. He had heard about Senegal'’s tradition of charity, born of its particular brand of Sufi Islam that requires its adherents to give freely in the hopes of increasing their bounty a thousandfold.

These days, though, Mr. Sorro is feeling trapped, and not just by the wheelchair he uses. Dakar's benevolence is being strained as ever larger numbers of beggars, many of them from neighboring countries like Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, choke the streets.

Begging here once brought in as much as $10 a day, which is about what a blue-collar worker in the region makes nowadays. But, the police have begun chasing Mr. Sorro and his friends away from their normal posts, trying to clean up the city'’s image, and the generous hands of Dakar are growing fatigued."

Dakar has another category of beggars as well. Impoverished village families often send their boys to the cities to attend Koranic schools, where they are expected to support themselves by begging.

The boys are known as talibé, and 100,000 of them wander the streets of Senegal'’s cities.

There are thousands perhaps millions of people across the world who are forced into begging to stay alive.

Many of them have been displaced from one location or another as a result of wars, insurrections, civil disturbances etc. Many of them like the cases referred to in this article end up as refugees living in squalor and becoming a "nuisance" to others.

The reality is, that while some people think that these beggars are exploiting them, there are others much higher in the food chain that take exploitation to a level that, if you will pardon the expression, beggars the imagination.

Who benefits?.

Who benefits from all of this poverty and misery?

• Sure there are rip off artists who 'organise' begging in some places.
• Sure there are unscrupulous people who rip off the beggars themselves by taking a cut of their meager "income".
  

These people are small time crooks.

Let's look at the whole industry that supplies weapons to the various warring factions around the world that create the misery in the first place. They make trillions of dollars.

Arms dealers, drug dealers, governments filled with corrupt politicians who make personal fortunes from the misery of others - these are the places to look for the culprits.

I wonder what other useful purposes we could find for money that amounts to trillions of dollars that are currently enriching a handful of people?

Some possible basic thoughts come to mind immediately:

• pollution
• global warming
• new sources of renewable energy
• food, shelter and clothing for those who do not have any