PEOPLE EMPOWERMENT: The Genuine Variety of It

Ruel F. Pepa
[Reprinted from SENSICAL Journal Volume I, Number 1, September 1996]

People empowerment becomes essential only in the context of praxis, i.e., theorizing on the basis of experience/practice and making the theory applicable to experience to test its correctness and usefulness. First and foremost, the true prophets of people empowerment must therefore be keenly aware of the reality of widespread disempowerment that has gripped a society or a nation. In this situation, the call for people empowerment gains the character of genuineness if and only if these very prophets themselves are the ones who lead movements to break the fetters of oppression and exploitation that openly manifest gross people-disempowerment in all levels of social involvement. All other considerations besides this point become pure and simple propaganda whose true character is disorienting, deceiving and deteriorating to further disempowerment.

A national leadership who on the one hand has been repeatedly calling for people empowerment but on the other had has been trying to disempower the social fiber of a nation by promoting labor exportation and foreign exploitation of local resources is nothing but a mouthpiece of farcical commitments and false promises which are attributes of a blatant betrayal of an impoverished people. The call for people empowerment can never be genuine in a situation where survival is the game and the rules are for it perpetuation. When the leading option of the people is still survival beside the hard reality of a downtrodden dignity, people empowerment is but an unreachable destiny.
Genuine people empowerment is located in a socio-political space where survival has already been transcended and dignity is what matters most. People are truly empowered if the decisions and choices they make are expressions of their dignity and not their desperate wish to survive. Genuine people empowerment is truly manifest if the people do what they do because it is an expression of their highest principles and not because they are forced by the powers that be to do it and they are doing it because they do not want to perish. Genuine people empowerment is the strength of the people’s will to assert their humanness amidst a dehumanizing situation.