Letter: Food handouts to the poor

Although food handouts to the poor is done with fine and noble intentions, the end result may not be good. Anything for nothing (a free handout) is going to attract not only the poor and needy, but also anyone else who thinks they can get away with it. Apart from it being humiliating to queue up sometimes for hours just for a small food handout, it is unhealthy and in some cases positively dangerous. One alternative is to stop doing it all together and find another more dignified way to help people.

That may not be easy as it would mean researching an area to find suitable cases, and when you do this the chances are the number of people in need of help are many, and far more than anticipated. So how can we decide who should get help and who shouldn’t — an almost impossible task that is fraught with jealousy, bitterness and the associated violent outcomes.

We have to find a more dignified way of helping people and this also applies to the President who should be working tirelessly to alleviate poverty in the country on a continuous basis. A lot of schemes have been put forward by the government, which indeed is admirable, but some of them (if not quite a few) have been corrupted by lower-level officials, who in all fairness should be identified and paraded on the streets as common thieves.

Desperate people will likely stampede if all of a sudden the food is drying  up, or impatience sets in. This is just part of human nature when people are subjected to confined spaces to either grovel or beg. If blame must be allocated then we need to explore the reasons why there are so many poor people.

That would not be too difficult as endemic corruption has contributed the most to that situation. So this gets back to the government and  their ongoing failure to curb corrupt practices which many of them have  endorsed. To a lesser degree you would have to blame the organizers of these free-hand-out affairs as it is their responsibly to ensure safety and humane conditions.
 
David Wallis
Medan