I met Prof Fatimah Kari our UM poverty expert for the first time since COVID. She was practically in tears recounting the suffering she encountered on her humanitarian/research trips. Yet here we have a govt pretending everything isn't utterly awful. Here's a reality check for u. https://twitter.com/PhilipGAlston/status/1279912038400229377

I want u to know that our govt currently stands by our official 0.4% poverty rate. Sounds incredible right? 0.4% suggests less than 25k households in Malaysia are poor. Let's not kid ourselves. Statistics like this are an act of violence against the the masses who are struggling

When compared with other countries in a similar wealth band, our poverty rate shld be closer to 16% (UNICEF) or even 20% (Ravallion). If we're only acknowledging 0.4% of our pop. as poor, what in GODS NAME are we doing about the other 15.6%-19.6%? Thats almost 1/5 of our people!

I'm so angry bc I've been writing letters and researching and planning studies for multidimensional poverty for over a year - I had great hopes for at least SOME kind of change following Alston's initial report last year and the govts acknowledgement of it...but yet HERE WE ARE

Let me tell you another thing - our poverty line is really, REALLY low. It's RM980 rn for an urban family of 4. Yo... that's RM8 per person per day. That's like the absolutest barest minimum, a figure completely missing the mark for a country as supposedly """developed""" as ours

DID YOU KNOW? According to the Khazanah Research Institute, as of 2016, households with a monthly income of RM 2,000 (ie. more than TWICE the poverty line) spent 94.8% of their incomes on basic household consumption items. Savings pulak how? How is this not ringing alarm bells???

And this is only beginning to cover our own people. Migrants how? Refugees how? Stateless people?????? Our statistics only cover registered Malaysians...and even then they fail to acknowledge a huge chunk as poor. Think of all the hidden suffering happening on our shores...

The more you look into it the worse it gets. Let me tell u right now that Malaysia does not have a proper database of household data. I know bc I tried to get some. They don't know how you're suffering, or where u are. Whatever household survey data we got is woefully inadequate

And all my talk about poverty so far is only poverty with reference to income. If you start looking at Multidimensional Poverty...our current figures would be even bleaker. Poverty isn't just about having money or not, its also access to education, transport, healthcare, safety..

...access to basic necessities like clean water, and now after COVID, I'd argue even internet access. Remember Veveonah? There's so many like her out there. Mind u there was a Multidimensional Poverty Index calculated at the last RMK, and it was a paltry 0.86%. I'm... I'm tired.

There's still many things I'm angry about but I have to go (for now). Have a read of the actual report if you can - its admittedly long (which is why I wrote this thread) but it's so important. God knows I wanted to shriek into the abyss at the end of it https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/44/40/Add.1

Also while you're here you can read @n_izzah's pieces on MPI/poverty - it feels like we've been fighting this same fight forever

https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/526151 

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=648172069091934&ref=watch_permalink

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2014/04/15/low-threshold-masking-true-scale-of-poverty-in-malaysia-says-nurul-izzah/652941 (this one literally dates back to 2014)

I want to add the story Prof told me that day. (Trigger warning: rape.) She told me when she went to the East Coast recently for her work trip, she met an old lady who told her about how she knew her husband was raping their young granddaughter, but she was helpless to do...

Anything about it. Prof said: why don’t you report him to the police? The lady replied, because if he goes to jail, who will feed us? Prof said, go to the police, don’t worry, I don’t have much but *I* will feed you...weh. Aku sendiri nak nangis listening to her say this that day

I just cannot forget this story, or the look on Prof’s face as she told it. I just felt such sadness, such terrible guilt, and then - anger. These are the people our broken systems are failing every. Single. Day. One off cash transfers are well and good, and daresay are sorely

needed in the short term especially in this particularly precarious times, but yet why on earth are they backtracking on the long term poverty agenda? Tell me, how do you sleep at night when the segments of the rakyat **you serve** are starving and subject to such violence daily?