Ken Gordon hits handouts

BUSINESSMAN Ken Gordon criticised the Government for giving handouts which create dependency and instead called for “hand-ups.” He was addressing a symposium of the National Association for the Empowerment of African People (NAEAP) at La Joya, St Joseph, entitled “An African perspective on Vision 2020.” Gordon slammed the prevalence of a dependency syndrome. “The politics around which our society has developed encouraged us to look to the State for answers, rather than find answers in ourselves.” While some required special aid, he said otherwise a mendicant culture had been created by handouts and State patronage. “For significant pockets of our younger population this has eroded accountability and channelled considerable creative energies away from the disciplines of hard and demanding work.”

Gordon said a recent study had diagnosed our depressed urban areas as having social depression and learnt helplessness. While welcoming the State’s social programmes, he said their success would depend on making them “hand-ups” rather than handouts. “Institutionalising, State-engineered, unproductive, human labour is tantamount to a death sentence to human ambition.” He said the learnt helplessness syndrome must be transformed into a system of reward for getting a job done, but first there must be hope. “Whereas learnt helplessness destroys, productive effort brings hope.” He cited a project in Mayaro in which people were loaned $2,000 and given guidance to do productive things like rear pigs, rear chickens, or sell coconuts.

“The results have been extraordinary,” he effused. “After two years of operations, total loans are expected to exceed 2,000, with a default on repayments of less than three percent.” The project had changed lives, he said, with clients saying: “The children can go to school every day” and “We stopped the leak by changing the roof.” Gordon praised those persons. “They are finding self-respect. They are becoming business people. They are finding hope.” Moreso, he added, their children were growing up in a positive environment of growth and progress. He said, in contrast, living from day-to-day without targetted and identifiable goals was inefficient and unproductive. Gordon said the starting point for Vision 2020 must be to give hope to even the most disadvantaged persons in our country. He said in contrast to the theme of the symposium, he preferred to consider not an “African” but a “National” perspective on Vision 2020, saying: “We live here, not in Africa.”