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All Ghanaians having information concerning the activities of a certain Mr. Poverty are urged to stop being scared and tense about �his threats concerning their future and to remain calm�. In fact in a few weeks� time, the celebratory gongs from the akyeame of the Mass Social Welfare Scheme (MSWS) will start tolling to announce the primary stage of an assault mission on that individual known notoriously for rendering people vulnerable and helpless, destitute and desolate especially in developing countries. Welfare Development Officers, the �linguists� of the scheme, have just received orders in a policy statement from their leader to begin engaging and enlisting members in a quest to halt the onslaught that Poverty has been constantly waging against them. At the helm of affairs is De-Ben Elikplim Selassie, President of MSWS who has literally given the dog a bad name in order to hang it. In this interview, he is quick to state his case. �I believe poverty as an entity is even more dangerous and more callous than any weapon of mass destruction that the world is afraid of�, he says. �Personally I see poverty as a human being that needs to be called to order. It takes people�s pride away and makes a lot of destinies go waste; even some peoples conscience have been sold to the highest bidder due to poverty. It is high time we personalized poverty, create an image for its attributes and its weapons so as to mobilize resources to attack it�, he adds. One such strategy is the creation of the Mass Social Welfare Scheme � a non-profit organization to provide nationwide welfare to all classes of people across the social divide in Ghana. The scheme seeks to profile welfare for individuals and communities by electronically collecting data on them and profiling them into their varied needs. These needs are envisaged to fall into any one of the 6 welfare preferences that MSWS offers � Financial Help; Hire Purchase; Employment, Training and Capacity Building; Shelter and Affordable Housing; Top-Up medical insurance; and Education and Scholarship. With a current staff strength of 2,000 plus �army of helpers�, the MSWS seeks to reach an estimated 18 million Ghanaians by employing a structure of deployment for its Welfare Development Officers to populate zonal, district and regional MSWS offices. All this with a view to bring the welfare services to the door step of every inhabitant. Selassie himself has had long drawn out brushes with poverty. �I have been there and I know what I am talking about. You are morally weak when you don�t have money. How do you even talk? People are voiceless, a lot of serious things are going on because of the word poverty. Some people exploit cheap labor, prostitution, living on the streets �� he says forlornly. Selassie gets misty-eyed as this stage. Even at the early age of 6, it is his toils that would put food on the table for the family. He�d come back home with proceeds from sale of alikoto, a traditional boyhood game involving spinning of snail shells, garnered from break period sales at school in the Volta Region town of Dzita when his mum had to re-settle elsewhere to set up a small midwifery concern. The excitement his siblings exhibited when he came home with such proceeds spurred him on tremendously. Due to the nature of his mothers� work, Selassie and his family moved around a lot. He got to see much of Ghana but it also meant that he suffered academically. Selassie was made to repeat some classes and even earned the nickname Class 3 Papa. On the flip side, those were times that gave rise to his assuming and honing leadership roles and skills. However Mr. Poverty was always a constant partner of his. In the final year of Junior High School at the Sukladzi Roman Catholic School in Agbozume, it was proceeds from his sale of locally made ice cream that augmented the infrequent support he occasionally gets to be able to pay school and registration fees among others. �What we had then was a local version of Tampico which came in different colors for kids and the ladies, he reminisces.� �It even earned me the nickname Tampico,� Selassie recollects with a smile. Selassie trekked to Accra on his own after completing Senior High School. He had �invented� some kind of decorative lighting appliance � using colored water plastic cups and a bottle!! Surely he must have thought that owning a patent would bring about a situation where Mr. Poverty gets to quarrel with and part ways? No! Sleeping in dilapidated bus terminal sheds and in front of closed shops and kiosks also present another challenge � thieves! And Selassie soon learnt that in order to survive machete attacks for not �offering� the hoodlums anything at all when they come searching pockets on their night raids, he needed to stuff his pockets with low denominations notes and coins and pretend he didn�t know what was going on when the crime was being committed on him. �I did that to a point where one of them said that, �this guy it is like anytime we want to come and steal from him, he turns around for us so let�s take him as a friend� so though as bad as they are, they started protecting me. They realize that I see it�s their way of making ends meet. He realizes though that all these challenges have come to shape him up to face the world. �Whatever you want to become, you will see a trait from the word go as a child. I strongly believe that some of these things formed my entrepreneurship skills, it formed the way I sell in the field of marketing, and it also helped in making me a visionary. So all these things have played a certain distinctive role in my life� he admits. Selassie�s life journey has informed his passion to lift the vulnerable and the poor out of poverty. He says, �I have tasted poverty in its worst form to the core, so I have put it at the back of my mind that I am not the only person in that kind of situation so I will do everything in my power to come out, I should not forget my people I use to be in the same situation with so that informs my passion to fight poverty in its relative or absolute form. I believe I have been there and I know a lot of people have been there with me and they still remain there so why not extend my hand if the need be so that inform my passion. And that is exactly what the MSWS seeks to do. Extend that helping hand to its members who have proffered a need and then, in conjunction with the controllers of global resources MSWS will meet those needs. �� we must conscientize the afflicted and the world resources controllers that this is what the entity called poverty is doing to the masses and equally if they can contribute resources to fight terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, by that same way we are demanding some attention to be given to people who have the ability to take poverty and its relatives on a step by step basis, that is how come today we have Mass Social Welfare Scheme digitally identifying people and putting their needs and differences on a radar so that we will be able to put resources that address it by that way you able to take off any other form of its relatives,� Selassie posits. Selassie has a 5 year old daughter � Selinam Selassie � he dotes on very much. With a big smile on his face, he calls her his Angel. Unfortunately, however, he lost her mother to breast cancer in 2009. �We are moving on,� he says wistfully. �I am now an eligible bachelor with 3 years of experience, one lovely kid, and adequate snoring abilities.� When asked about what his favorite meal is, the man who heads the crusade to put a permanent stumbling block in the path of poverty drops his head to one side and as if too shy to speak, meekly states: �If only I can get banku 3 times a day, with mashed kenkey as desert I�d be very happy!!�