The Importance of Sovereignty |When Poverty Itself Becomes the Crime

The Importance of Sovereignty|When Poverty Itself Becomes the Crime

Sovereignty can be far from our mind when we listen to the lyrics of a Freddie McGregor song with the lyrics: ‘to be poor is a crime – man have fe know that in a dis ya time. That is unless we have the energy and resources to solve it.

I sit typing this with my jaw swollen, a condition that first appeared in August 2020. Five years on, after GP visits, private dental checks, and inconclusive blood tests highlighting unexplained inflammation, the cause remains a mystery the system seems unequipped or unwilling to solve. It is a physical manifestation of a deeper stagnation.

This personal struggle found a chilling echo in the news this week. I read the story of an 18-year-old Senegalese footballer, Cheikh Touré, lured abroad by the promise of a career that would lift his family from poverty. It was a scam. His captors extorted his mother for money she could not fully raise. He was later found dead. He trusted the promise of a system, and it killed him.

Closer to home, a UK employment tribunal case surfaced. A cleaner, working double shifts to provide for herself, was dismissed not for substandard work, but because her hours breached the Working Time Regulations. The system, designed to protect, was instead used to punish her initiative to work her way out of her circumstances.

A young man dead for wanting a future. A cleaner dismissed for working to secure hers. And me, navigating a five-year health mystery.

The common thread is a brutal clarity: Trying to beat the system within the system is not the way to go.

The rules will always be used to justify why you cannot have more, be more, or heal properly. The promise of the ‘dream’—whether it’s a football contract, a stable income, or simply diagnostic healthcare—is often the very mechanism of the trap.

This pattern of a system pre-determining our value echoed beyond the news and into my evening. An episode of Criminal Minds depicted two brothers who, after their sibling died because emergency services took 27 minutes to arrive, began attacking people every 27 minutes. Their twisted goal? To prove a point we all feel in our bones: the system is built to triage us. Help comes according to where we live, who we are, and what we’re worth to the machine.

A young footballer in Senegal, a cleaner in the UK, a fictional victim on a screen, and me with a five-year health mystery—we are all data points in the same devastating equation.

The conclusion is inescapable: Trying to beat the system within the system is not the way to go.The rules were not written for our liberation. They were written for our management.

This is the core of why I am building the Sovren Creator Ecosystem. It is not just a business. It is an act of secession. It is about building new ground—a sovereign space where our value isn’t dictated by an algorithm, our time isn’t penalised by a remote tribunal, and our growth isn’t conditional on playing a game designed to keep us in our place.

To be poor should be treated as a crime – not against the poor, but against humanity. The real crime is accepting a system that makes it so, poverty is not a personal failing, but a collective, human one. It is the crime of a society that fails its people. The only way out of poverty is to build a system of our own. The poor and unwise try crime, some try to beat the system within the system, today I am inspired to build my own.

The only way out is to build our own.

Sovereign / Sovereignty

Tags:
Sovereignty, Poverty, System Failure, Social Justice, Economic Disparity, Creator Economy, Build Your Own System, Algorithmic Exploitation, Empowerment, Collective Responsibility, Lita Goddess of Growth, Sovren Collective, Social Commentary, UK Society, Personal Manifesto