January 28, 2019

Yawning wealth gap a pointer to everything that is wrong with the world

editor:	Bob Koigi

Every two days a billionaire is created in the world, with the wealth of an estimated 2,200 billionaires in the world growing by $2.5 billion each day. 

On the flip side, 262 million children are out of school as their parents struggle to raise school fees. 10,000 people die daily the world over as a result of a lack of healthcare in what points to the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the impact this is having across every sphere of humanity.

Development organisation Oxfam has aptly captured this wealth gap crisis in its latest report ‘Public Good or Private Wealth’, which argues that the inequality continues to defeat efforts to address poverty has devastated economies and is sparking public outrage globally. Women and girls are the worst hit. Girls are the first to be removed from school when families cannot raise fees and women work numerous hours a day without pay tending to sick relatives as a result of broken healthcare systems. If all the unpaid work done by women globally was to be quantified, it would have a $10 trillion turnover every year, about 43 times that of Apple according to the report.

The rich continue to amass wealth, with the top 26 richest billionaires owning assets equivalent to those of the 3.8 billion poorest people in the world. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, can fund the entire health budget of Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people with just one percent of his wealth.

Governments have come under criticism for underfunding vital sectors, including education and healthcare, even as they watch how the wealthy and multinationals engage in tax malpractices like evasion and misinvoicing.

While addressing global poverty is a journey of a thousand miles, the formative steps include having the one percent of the wealthy pay just 0.5 percent extra tax on their wealth would go a long way in addressing the inequality. Governments' efforts in channelling resources into affordable and quality public services while sealing revenue leakages remain the silver bullet that guarantees every citizen of the world the chance at a bright future.