A beggar pictured along Muhindi Mbingu Street in Nairobi on November 7, 2024.
These shall be known as the lamentations of the Sage of Makadune.
Poverty is the worst fate that can find a man. It is a deadly, silent violence that leaves no visible wounds. It will not announce itself; it slithers in quietly, in the form of an empty wallet, a landlord’s imperious knock, a child’s fearful eyes searching yours for an assurance you cannot give.
Poverty is an intimate violence that grabs the most guarded parts and men, who take pride in and define their own worth almost entirely based on their capacity to provide, drink it and its hangover is profound in biological and psychological ways: they leak manhood. What is left is a pitiful, despised, wrinkled, empty skin.
I don’t mean to say go out and steal and grab public property. No. Work for your money, but fight with everything you have against all causes of poverty. For any person who wishes you poverty wishes you a fate a million times worse than death. If you thought poverty was morally and spiritually improving, you are a fool. So, what is wrong with poverty?
It shortens lives. Raj Chetty and colleagues Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz in landmark 2016 studies of 1.4 billion income records in the United States, found that the wealthiest men outlived the poorest by nearly 15 years. That gap is not explained by genetics. It is explained by the cumulative physiological cost of chronic insecurity – a perpetual state of stress, elevated cortisol, suppressed immunity and the relentless inflammation that quietly destroys cardiovascular tissue over decades of financial worry.
Major depressive disorder
It colonises the mind. Poverty makes you stupid. It is not merely a condition; it is an occupation. Research by Mullainathan and Shafir, published in Scarcity, showed that financial insecurity consumes cognitive bandwidth with the same ferocity as a severe sleep deficit, reducing IQ-equivalent function by as much as 13 points. Men managing poverty do not simply have less money. They have less of themselves – less attention, less patience, less capacity for deliberate thought. Their minds are perpetually engaged in the exhausting and draining calculus of survival.
It manufactures depression in silence. Poor men experience elevated rates of major depressive disorder, yet the diagnosis arrives late or not at all. The demands of masculinity, in most cultures, are founded on the prohibition of visible suffering. A man who cannot provide is a man who has already failed; admitting that this failure has broken something inside him is a humiliation too far. The result is depression expressed not through tears but through withdrawal, irritability, substance use and eventually, the irreversible silence of harm against self. Men kill themselves at a rate three to four times higher than women, and poverty is among the sharpest predictors of that fate.
It destroys identity at the root. Sociologists have documented how male identity in most societies is not merely associated with economic productivity, it is made by it. When poverty strips a man of his provider role, it unmakes him, tears him up like a piece of paper and scatters him to the winds. The resulting identity vacuum produces what researchers call “masculine protest” – compensatory aggression, risk-taking and dominance behaviour in an attempt to reassert a selfhood that economic failure has torn out.
It severs social bonds. Poverty is profoundly isolating. Men who cannot reciprocate social obligations – they can’t buy a round, contribute to a harambee, attend a wedding in dignified clothes – withdraw from social life rather than endure the corrosive shame of visible inadequacy. They are responding to the poisonous Kenyan culture of social comparison. I don’t mean to make light of a serious issue, but isolating is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day as a mortality risk factor. Loneliness is poison.
Not witchcraft or a misfortune
It degrades the body through its vices. Alcohol, tobacco and substance use rates are consistently elevated among low-income men. These are not moral failures, they are the painkillers for a man in chronic pain. And this sets up a cruel vicious cycle: substance abuse damages health, diminishes earning capacity and deepens the poverty that made them necessary in the first place.
Worst of all, it is transmitted, silently, to the next generation. The sons of poor men will likely be poor. A poverty-damaged father is physically and psychologically less available to his children. Research shows that a father’s economic stress measurably shapes children’s neurological and psychological development, infecting future generations with the curse of today.
Poverty is not witchcraft or a misfortune. It is a managed outcome of political choices. The bodies and broken minds of poor men are not tragedies of fate, they are the receipts of a society that has decided, in its institutions and its silences, that its menfolk are expendable. Sometimes poverty is the calculation of Mobutus who believe that to break and dominate a man, make him poor and take his woman.
Anything that causes poverty, including these perfidies of yawning mouths called “development projects” into which we pour, by force, our wealth while some sharp boys (“suppliers”) bleed it on the other end, is an existential threat to the innermost sanctums of our manhood.
Amen?
Mr Mathiu is a communications consultant and farmer. [email protected]
