I am the 1%! Occupy Dakar!

It’s heady times for the 99% - finally having a crack at capitalism, getting on TV, being spoofed up by Sesame Street.

Good on ‘em I say – you don’t have to respect all the haircuts or sign up to all of the more dubious ideologies on offer to agree that these protests have something important to say that needed said: that this system is not working for 99% of us, but seems to be working just fine for the rest.

Good on ‘em, I say, rather than ‘good on us’, because I just realised that in Senegal I probably am the 1%.

Devastating news for a child revolutionary.

A decent senior NGO job – reasonably well paid while not extravagant – quite probably (I think, but not 100% sure) puts me in the richest 120,000 people in Senegal – the dreaded 1%.

So what’s it like I hear you ask ?

A little uncomfortable, obviously, especially when the purpose of you being the there is supposedly to try redistribute wealth and power to the 99%. But not too uncomfortable obviously – the appartment, restaurants and cleaning lady do take the edge off.

(Ps. I know you’ve just rolled your eyes at the colonial embrassment having a cleaning lady… but uppity morals don’t get kids to school, fairly paid jobs do).

In many ways being in the 1% is the most difficult of being abroad – not of course, actually difficult, but difficult in the way that your values and idea of what working for a charity and living in a poorer country should be like clashes with the standard of life you are used to, and what you want to go home to when you’ve been working your arse off for the 99% all day.

But again, not actually difficult - not difficult in the way that people who struggle to make ends meet or send their kids to school find things difficult. More difficult in a ‘should I send Tarquin to Eton or Westminster’ sort of way.

But it does mean that almost no matter what you do, you won’t live a ‘normal’ life, won’t really understand life that well here – just like wealthy people in the UK who, even if they do hours of volunteering and are as 'right on' as you like, are just too insulated from risk and chance to know the stress and pitfalls of struggling along.

I don’t really notice rises in food prices and petrol, but around the world they are worth rioting about – not surprisingly if you they take up half your income.


But what’s the solution ? NGOs manage multi-million pound budgets and contracts so you need good salaries to get good people to manage it well, and make best use of the money people have generously given. It would just be nice to not accumulate so much while trying to give it away, and to do so more humbly – a ban on NGO workers having nice 4x4s would be my dictatorial starting point…

Anyway, the 1% is not all bad. There’s me (I think). There’s people who invest and create wealth. And yes of course there are the guys (usually guys) who get rich on the backs of us all.


In the global context there’s maybe even you – might you be one of the 70 million richest people in the world ? If not the 1%, there’s a good chance you’re in the 10% at least… That 10% own 85% of the world's assets, the bottom 50% own just 1%...

So please try and not tar us all with the same brush with your rather exciting protests, but good luck with them (genuinely). But please, please cut your hair. And please, please stop doing what your doing in this video – you’re just giving us up here the thought that you down there are never going to clobber us as you should. Toodle pip !

(hat-tip Emmanuel Trepannier)


(And if you want some stats on world wealth distribution, look no further than Wikipedia obviously)