Money, badge of fools

A Ghanaian bishop once ministered at our church and talked about money. I can’t recall his name now but vivid in my mind and more important is the message he left behind. The youthful bishop defined money as a piece of paper with the picture of a dead man.

That set me thinking. Until then, I never paid attention to the pictures on our currencies. I just knew they bore pictures of great men, or women. However, after that message, I investigated and realised that truly, all the men whose pictures adorn our currencies are dead.

I have not ceased wondering why only dead people’s pictures are used on currencies. I learned that, in the United States, for instance, this tradition originated from the founding fathers of God’s Own Country who felt living persons were unfit to be honoured by putting their image on the currencies. In fact, George Washington declined the honour. It is also believed that Julius Caesar’s attempt to put his image on a coin contributed to his assassination. So, the tradition stuck and spread that only dead persons’ images qualify to be on the currencies of nations.

What relationship does the dead share with money? Is money a deadly romance, or what? Is there an underlying pull?

As a matter of fact, the Good Book says money is the root of all evil, and rightly so. Money is the driver of all of man’s cravings. We want to be rich so as to be celebrated. We want to be rich so as to dominate others. We want to have piles of money so that we can buy up the earth and all therein. We want to be rich so that we can become omnipotent and wild, beyond control of anyone, and even the law. We want to be rich so that we can install and dethrone political stooges. We want to get rich and qualify to be among the movers and shakers of society, who do not know that there is something much more precious than money, the badge of fools.

So, we go on and on, acquiring more and more of those pieces of paper with the images of dead people.

Unfortunately, the more of we have, the closer we are drawn to those whose images are on the bills until we eventually drop and follow them into their dark hollow world in the great beyond.

When the angry tongues of fire start searing our flesh and, perhaps, we espy the relics of our inordinate cravings, the meaning of vanity dawns in full, vicious glare.

The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just and those who did not labour for it; who pay his memories scant regard; who do not know the value of his labour and more likely to fritter the fruits away.

Any wonder too the Good Book asks of what profit is life when we gain all and ultimately lose our soul.

That is thought for food for the avaricious rogues in power and industry. The thieving government officials and their coterie of jesters.

Now, make no mistake about it; money is good. Without money we cannot afford the good things of life or live meaningfully. However, danger looms when money becomes our idol and takes us over so much so that nothing else matters.

Sure, money answers all things, so the Good Book also says, but all things do not answer to money. There is a limit to what money does. Unless we acknowledge that now, the devil would have sold us a dummy and it would be too late to realise that.

This is why I find what John Ogunlela wrote on his Facebook page interesting and share with you hereunder:

“What astonishes me is that in all these stealing, our people have not the faintest idea of how to use money.

I am getting scared we are caught up in an age of fools.

What does the Nigerian do with money?

He buys things.

Then he buys power and more power.

He traumatises his community with his wealth; he makes the poor feel their poverty and the average person bemoan his ‘averageness’.

Then he builds things:

Some big towers here and there, which become the talking points of lesser idiots whose place in life is to praise those structures even as they hope to build the same someday.

He then gets honoured by religious homes devoted to mammon where he gets praised by the worshippers of the idol there who promise the money man life hereafter for a slice of his goodies.

Then he dies in hopes that people will be talking about him.

Soon he is forgotten like other fools.

Why do we Nigerians find it hard to understand the use and meaning of big money and are stuck on this selfish, this perverted notion of wealth?

All you get is, the man came to that party in a big jeep, he has an aircraft, oh, two.

He has an estate in Maitama or Lekki; he built up a street in London.

Then he unleashed that money to buy up consciences and to stamp down truth.

His shopping list will include judges and policemen.

He funds his political party and he is rewarded with even more money, which he recycles the same old way.

Why is our idea of wealth so narrow and underdeveloped?

The challenge is not money; it is a lack of the knowledge of what actually to do with it.

Where people have wisdom the use of money is to build your community and to build your nation.

You invest wealth in people, beginning with your own children and those in your extended family who can be raised.

Isn’t it wonderful that not a single man or woman among these people who have spirited away billions of naira has thought of establishing a factory manufacturing cellphones in Nigeria?

None has thought he should put together something to address such a huge market and potential for homegrown development?

They can’t come together and say, ‘Let’s solve the electricity problem’.

None has said, ‘I want to make a dent on the housing challenge. I will go into affordable housing and build new cities’.

None has said, ‘Most of our universities have a shortage of hostel accommodation. I’d like to address that’ and put in two billion per school.

It is a proof of lack of sense, a proof of scandalous stupidity, that with all those billions, there is no impact on society and people are mostly unemployed and there are no spectacular undertakings to fire the imagination of the younger ones.

Why haven’t these guys come together and built the second and third Niger bridges and the 4th Mainland bridge in Lagos?

Why can’t they make their money work for the society and push people forward?

What’s the use of money that doesn’t serve society but only buys little things like cars and airplanes, just toys to flatter the little ego of the owner?

It is foolish to think this limited way, and even more foolish to admire and applaud such people.

It is like drinking from a gutter.

I hope we can start to discuss money in terms of impact, not consumption.

And when I say impact, I don’t mean those demeaning things politicians do when they give out okadas and wheelbarrows to mock the poverty of their people.

I mean real impact.

Let’s solve the electricity problem.

Let some rich persons decide to fix the 48km road linking Ado Ekiti and Akure.

Let someone say, I want to train 500 corps members through an Oracle certification course and drop a cheque.

Someone should fund the development of the Nigerian automobile in a university or two with N4 billion.

Another should rise and rebuild all the houses in his village and connect them all to a potable water source.

Let’s have some devotion to our country, to our people and put an end to this  barbarism.

Let’s make ourselves great on earth!”

Sure, let’s put an end to this grandiose stupidity, idolising ill-defined wealthiness.