The Road to Wealth–Why We Are Poor (Part One)

By Franklin Otorofani

There is so much weeping and wailing in the land about economic conditions all over Africa, and quite frankly, even in the so-called developed countries as well lately, due to the lingering global economic recession. Admittedly, some countries are worse off than others, but none is entirely free of its ravages—not even close. It’s only a matter of degrees of hardships from one country to another. The difference in the degree to which nationals of affected nations are impacted by the global recession lies in the presence or absence of social welfare programs to cushion the hardships. While by tradition, impacted individuals tend to rely on extended family structure in African nations, for example, in less traditional societies in the West where government is everything, the responsibility invariably falls on the government. Even so, millions of their poor citizens, who fall through the cracks of social welfare programs suffer economic hardships manifesting in homelessness amongst other social ills. (San Fran Wants Homeless to Leave Tent Camp, but Some Vow to Fight…).

In New York City alone, there are officially close to 70,000 homeless people in public shelters that could be accounted for, but probably that many are out there in the streets unaccounted for officially, because they’re hard to track and pulled into government shelters are dens of criminality. Recently the New York State governor Andrew Cuomo, was forced to issue an executive order mandating municipal officials to forcibly remove homeless people from the streets when the winter temperatures fall below freezing point which is 32% F. Drastic measure, no doubt, but absolutely necessary to avoid unnecessary deaths in the brutally cold winter temperatures such as occurred this last weekend. Over in San-Francisco, California, homeless people are being cleared out to make the city clean for visitors coming for a major sporting events. They don’t want the embarrassment and must therefore make haste to hide their homeless population before visitors’ arrival for the Super Bowl. See: San Francisco Clears Out Homeless Ahead Of The Super Bowl See also, Homeless Woman Gives Birth In SUBWAY Bathroom, Leaves Baby In ; Poverty up, services diminished in Chicago‘s…

With that said, it’s time for a long overdue reality checks and some home truths for the younger generation. It’s time to get rid of illusions and delusions about the world we live in. Yes, it’s time to displace wishful idealism with a heavy dose of hardnosed realism. It’s time to face the real world as is not the make believe one of socialist theoretical constructs and imaginations of daydreamers. Practically and realistically, life is not a bed of roses but the school of hard knocks, whether you live in developing or developed countries. The good news though is that you can make it anywhere you find yourself, because wealth creation is not a geographical point on a map but an attitude of mind living within YOU. Folks, it’s as simple as that. Truth is not complicated. All you have to do is cultivate the right attitude (positive) and everything falls into place albeit gradually, but surely. Pointing fingers at others and playing the blame game is the wrong attitude to life in general, and won’t get you far in life or anywhere near where you want to be.

In this series, therefore, I intend to share some serious thoughts with our youths generally in Africa, and particularly in Nigeria, who are either getting in or getting out of higher education with their heads stuffed with fanciful academic theories and little experience in life, and about to be confronted with the real world—“Realville”—apology to the American talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Throughout their higher educational careers they have been busy sponging up on fanciful theories of wealth redistribution spun by doctrinaire robotic academia rather than wealth creation. It’s indeed a matter for regret that our publicly funded institutions of higher learning are bristling with opportunistic rabble rousing, wealth redistributionists rather than practical, level headed realists and wealth creationists. And you wonder why there are endless cries of unemployment and acute poverty in the land? Why wonder? Who is creating the wealth when our graduating youths have learnt nothing and therefore know nothing about wealth creation? How can there be employers when our educational system is only producing employees? There can be no employees without employers in the first place. And there can be no wealth redistribution without wealth in the first place.

Here, I’m not just concerned about African, but black youths in general. How, for example, could black youths in the United States be wealth creators when their leaders, including President Obama, Al-Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and indeed the entire Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are busy telling them that they have no future in the United States due to racism in the “American DNA”? How can they become serious players in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street when their leaders despise and demonize wealth creation as an evil to be avoided like a plague and instead seek ways to dispossess the rich and redistribute their wealth to fund food stamps for the poor? It’s not going to happen, period. Until blacks master the ropes in wealth creation, they will continue to be AWOL in the citadels of capitalism, including Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and corporate boardrooms, just to name but a few. Until they refocus their energies from hating the rich to learning from the rich, they will never be rich but remain in poverty. Those black youths who quietly ignored the banal rhetoric of the race merchants in the black leadership and wisely chose the path of wealth creation, are the successful ones with name brand commercial enterprises to their names rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers of the American society. They don’t see themselves as victims but capitalists and wealth creators just like their fellow citizens. Yes they’re not looking for government monthly welfare handouts!

The general theme of the series, therefore, is—you guessed right—wealth creation, which alone creates real jobs as opposed to civil service jobs and political appointments. The truth of the matter is that governments—and I don’t care which country—don’t produce wealth but rather regulate wealth and its creation. In an ideal free market economy, therefore, it’s the job of the citizenry, not government to create jobs. By regulation is meant all those governmental activities geared towards the establishment and enforcement of base rules for the management of economic activities in a given polity. This is where the youths and citizens in general come into the picture prominently. It’s the quantum of economic activities of ordinary citizens that drive the economy and move it forward. Those who look up to the government for jobs have already missed the economic train.

Now when the entity, which regulates wealth and its creation becomes wealth creator itself, there arises serious conflict of interests, which ipso facto, prevents it from effectively creating and/or regulating wealth and its creation, eventually undermining the economy in the long run. A regulator cannot impartially and effectively regulate itself and others at the same time and thus become a judge in its own cause. This is what usually happens in communist countries that caused the demise of the USSR and its socialist satellite states in Eastern Europe. And that’s why all socialist nations end up poor and beggarly. I’m urging the African youth therefore, to utterly discard those anachronistic, utopian Marxist theories stuffed into their rather idealistic and impressionable heads by bearded campus Marxists/Leninists, who have not produced a single job nor wealth all their lives, but full of wealth redistribution theories, and get real with real life.

As former British PM Margaret Thatcher once said, socialism is great until it runs out of other people’s monies, because it is by nature utterly incapable of producing wealth itself. This ideological debriefing is absolutely necessary for the aspiring wealth producer and therefore the starting point on the road to wealth. A proper mental reorientation is the foundation upon which all other endeavors must rest. As an aside, this is what has been conspicuously missing in the current Obama administration in the United States that has left Americans, particularly African-Americans, gasping for air and seething in misdirected anger, because it turns out Obama is, like all socialists, a wealth redistributionist rather than wealth creationist that millions had hoped for but found missing in the last seven years.

With that said, the prevalence of poverty in society raises the age-old question as to why this social condition exists in the first place. The question then is why is there poverty in the citadel of capitalism and the world wealthiest nation? Why are some nations super wealthy and others dirt poor? Why are certain racial groups super rich and others dirt poor? Why are some individuals within nations super wealthy and others dirt poor? And coming back home, why is the African continent and blacks in general dirt poor and at the bottom of the economic ladder? Why are blacks in every multi-racial country at the bottom of the social and economic ladder and constituted themselves into objects of charity and pity, relying on government programs and handouts? The conditions of blacks in Brazil and Mexico are the same as those in the United States, India, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and yes all black nation of Haiti, being the poorest nation in all of the Americas. Why are African leaders always in Western capitals clutching the begging bowl for one financial aid or another in the midst of abundant natural resources crying for development in their home countries? Why? Why? Why?

These are questions that have agitated the minds of philosophers for centuries from diverse ideological standpoints from Adam Smith in “Wealth of Nations” to Karl Marx in “Das Capital” and everybody else in between. And the answers is not nearer today than it was when it was first raised centuries ago. There is reason for that: political demagogues have from time immemorial positioned themselves to exploit the poor in order to perpetually maintain themselves in power. The Democratic Party in the United States, for example, feeds on poverty. If feeds itself off the poor and the needy the population of whom it must, by deliberate policy and actions, expand in order to have a permanent voting bloc from one generation to another. Democratic Party’s immigration policy, while pretending to be humanitarian, is therefore geared towards recruiting poor immigrants from Latin America to fuel its ranks because they will always vote for it without fail, come rain come shine. It is classical case of you rub my back I rub your back.

Now if you were to pose these questions to the average black politician in the US, his stock answer would be: blame the system—racism and what’s not. What he cannot answer is why other racial groups such as Jews, Asians, Latinos/Hispanics and Arabs, are getting ahead in the US leaving African Americans behind? His simplistic finger pointing simply begs the question rather than addressing it. It is a political rather than economic answer, one that is designed to cast blacks as victims of the system to be pitied and helped with government politically motivated welfare programs rather than as masters of their own fate like every other racial group. For him slavery has not ended but well and alive. He must maintain this myth in order to remain politically relevant in the black community and hold on to power, all the while rubbing shoulders with whites in the halls of power. While he condemns wealth, he plays the same capitalist game with his white counterparts and make himself and his family nice and comfortable.

Therefore, it is not how much the system (capitalism) has failed blacks anywhere but how much blacks have failed the system wherever it is practiced. When you have black leaders like Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al-Sharpton and Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) demeaning wealth creators and beating the drums of welfare programs for blacks this is what you get. Blacks are simply reaping what they sowed. You sow corn you reap corn. You sow wealth you reap wealth. You sow poverty you reap poverty. Promoting welfare programs at the expense of wealth creation is tantamount to sowing poverty in the black community and therefore impossible to reap wealth. Again it’s a simple law of sowing and reaping. This is why we are poor—over dependence on government! This might be shocking to African youths enjoying no social welfare programs but who nevertheless for the most part look up to the government to create jobs for them after graduation..

To eliminate poverty, therefore, is to eliminate the Democratic Party altogether from the face of the earth. It cannot survive a day longer in power. Tackling poverty is not so complicated an undertaking. Its politicians that make it sound like mission impossible. Former President Jefferson Clinton, reformed the welfare system to encourage work and in the process reduce poverty in America. Now I read some black writers attacking him for taking welfare from the mouths of black people. That is the problem. When people are weaned on welfare they live and die by it and therefore see work as a huge burden if not punishment for them.

The road to wealth therefore begins with creating wealth. Wealth here means anything of economic value—a product or service or both of economic value. And just to make sure, wealth goes beyond mere salary. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with salaried work if the pay is good, especially in an environment of high unemployment. But that should not be the end of it if you want to create wealth for yourself and family. You CANNOT become wealthy with salary alone. It will not happen. You must learn the rules and rudiments of capitalism and profit by them. Unfortunately as indicated above, political demagogues in the United States have prevented African Americans from learning the rules of capitalism and profiting from them. They have instead demonized capital and capitalists and sought to steer their peoples away from it while they themselves engage in it with ownership of stocks, bonds, and other investments in their portfolios.

Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, have only a smattering of African Americans and so are the boardrooms of US Corporation compared to other racial groups, which is such a shame. Now unable to compete on merits black leaders like Al-Sharpton are now demanding quota system in the Academy Awards, just like in college admissions which is based on Affirmative Action! It’s clear these are people who are not ready for life. There are hardly black venture capitalists that drive business start-ups. Wealth cannot be created in the absence of venture capitalists and investors. Sad to note blacks are not currently in the game and if they’re not showing on the radar screen as yet—minimal/insignificant presence. The place to find blacks prominently where they dominate is on welfare rolls and other public assistance and prison cells where they routinely rotate in and out. They have the highest school dropout rates and lowest test scores in national tests. They have the highest number of broken marriages in proportion to their share of the entire population and families with children out of wedlock, many not even knowing their fathers. This is hardly an environment for wealth creation.

Blacks in their mother continent of Africa are similarly at the bottom of the pond in their own countries where they’re in the majority in country after country, namely: Sudan, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola. They’re the dregs of society in Mexico, India, Cuba, and the rest of Latin America and Brazil, just to mention but a few nations. .Want to know why? It’s not due to racism or colonialism as black leaders would have you believe. They have been left behind because they’re still clinging to feudalist economic mode that has been left behind for centuries. Failure of blacks to embrace capitalism for wealth creation is chiefly responsible for their poverty above anything else. You cannot prosper in a capitalist system by being alienated from it. Folks, it’s not rocket science. Wealth circulates amongst those who create and cherish it, not those who are alienated from it. Forbes Magazine recently celebrated Nigeria’s Dangote as Africa’s richest man worth more than ten billion dollars. He’s easily the richest black man in the world besting his peers in the United States itself. How did he get there? Capitalism of course! He learnt the rules and profited hugely from them. There are black millionaires and billionaires in Africa and the United States that had learned the rules and rudiments of capitalism and profited hugely from them. If they can make it anybody can as well.

Please don’t cry to me about racism or the system preventing you from getting ahead creating wealth because I have no ears for excuses. I have a better idea for you: How about leaving that for the Barack Obamas, Jesse Jacksons and Al-Sharptons, the political demagogues and rabble rousers of the black community in the United States looking for excuses to exploit and profit from? Excuse is not a plan of action and it gets nobody anywhere in life. Wealth creation is a matter of attitude. There are economic opportunities everywhere you look if you know what to look for and how to get it. That is the most critical part—training in recognizing opportunities then turning them into wealth creation machines.

But first you must cut out the idle charter and depressing noise from political demagogues and naysayers trading in negativities. Attitudes matter. Keep negative people at your arms’ length or at best simply ignore them with their perpetual whining and complaining. They’re mental obstacles and roadblocks to the fulfillment of your ambitions that must therefore be removed from your pathway. When you read the stories/biographies of the life of millionaires and billionaires of today, they didn’t start big nor inherited huge wealth. They started small, some from their garages or corner store, like the giant US Walmart stores, for example, started by an individual from a corner store in the street. That story is replicated the giant PC Richards electronic stores and others in corporate America. Apple, HP, Microsoft, UPS, Google, Sony Corporation, Dangote, and many others around you were started by individuals just like you. With hard work, they turned the tables to become the giants that they are today, employing hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens and giving them a living.

You too can. But remember, you’ve got only a certain amount of time in this world and every bit of it should be well spent improving your circumstances not whining and complaining and huffing and puffing at the failures of government and others. Do not dwell on the failures of others including the government of the day, but look instead for how you can profit from such failure because every failure presents an opportunity for success. Going abroad is not the answer either because there are poor people abroad too—in fact millions of them are in extreme poverty unable to feed themselves and their families.

Don’t take this as an attempt to discourage you from going abroad but a friendly, albeit unsolicited advice from one who has seen it all. It doesn’t mean there are no success stories. But for every one success story there are hundreds of failures. Let me just say it’s a game of luck for immigrants—hit and miss like everywhere else. One thing is certain however and needs to be addressed right away: if you’re presently incapable of identifying, recognizing and profiting from economic opportunities around you where you have lived all your life, and spending all your time whining and complaining about how bad things are, chances are you won’t be able to recognize similar opportunities abroad in a totally strange land. And you likely will find more than one reason to whine and complaint abroad as well, because there is no perfect place on earth ruled by man—I don’t care where.

In the end you might wind up just going with the flow, living from paycheck to paycheck as many Africans find themselves caught up in the grind with little returns worth all the troubles. Just don’t sell your father’s house to go abroad, seriously. It’s not worth it. This could be the best advice you’ve ever received. It is not enough to live abroad living from paycheck to paycheck. It is not even enough to ride a car and own a home abroad on mortgage. Are there success stories of African immigrants in the Diaspora? Absolutely, just as there are success stories of Africans back home in Africa. Millions of Africans have created enormous wealth at home employing and mastering the rules of the capitalist game more than any African immigrant can ever dream of abroad. This is the hard truth not fantasies.

This piece is beyond living from paycheck to paycheck. It’s about creating wealth for real. Wealth can be created anywhere and everywhere and you’re better off starting off right where you are right now than daydreaming about going abroad and other distractions. Yes, it takes some self-discipline and rational thinking to get ahead in life. Cut out the fads and fantasies about living abroad and get real. Life is not a bed of roses anywhere, and I mean anywhere. Don’t fall for fads. There are no guarantees of better life abroad even for the citizens much less immigrants. I’m just shooting straight here based on hard facts and experience with no embellishments and you can either take it or leave it. Brainstorm, read wide, research, find opportunities and go for them. One of them could take root and rocket you from there. The entire world could become your playground afterwards. Dare to create wealth even as a hobby. The feeling is exhilarating and fulfilling.

Government failures? Fine. Don’t sweat it. You only have two viable options in the matter: 1. Get into politics and run for office to fix things up; 2. Get into business and turn the government failings into economic opportunities, whether they’re about bad roads, blackouts, dysfunctional educational and healthcare systems, corruption, insecurity of life and property—you name it. Each one of these presents great economic opportunity and there are literally thousands of them out there waiting to be fixed. Sniff them out and design an action plan to fix them up, one at a time starting obviously with the little ones around you to the biggies. Take a page from the politician out of power who not only criticizes those in government for their failures but seeks to exploit their failures by presenting solutions to the electorate. Think Nigeria’s former president Goodluck Jonathan. Think Mohammadu Buhari, the president leader who exploited Jonathan’s failures particularly on national security to gain power, and he’s moving to address it. That is the mindset that should be applied to all governmental failures and profit from them rather than just complaining and whining endlessly and doing nothing.

This is why I don’t want to hear people complaining about lack of opportunities in Nigeria and Africa in general. How can a developing country and continent crying for development not have economic opportunities, for crying out loud? It’s illogical and contradiction in terms. Truth is that people are not exploring and seizing available opportunities that stare them in their faces everywhere they turn! On the contrary, they’re waiting on other people to do the heavy lifting for them only for them to turn around and start complaining of lack of opportunities. Solution: They require training and be properly equipped to identify and seize opportunities. It’s the infrastructure of success. Like hunting dogs they will be able to sniff opportunities in the air and pounce on them as they come—in other words, developing business sense—the sixth sense which needs to be opened up.

In concluding this part of the essay, let me leave you with the immortal words of the pioneer Negro writer and capitalist, Booker T. Washington, a freed slave and probably one of the first black capitalists in the United States, in his 1895 Atlanta Speech—the much celebrated “Cast down your bucket where you are,” speech, which was regarded as pacifist by some radical militant political activists of the time in the molds of the present Boko Haram, OPC, MEND and MOSSAB in Nigeria, but embraced by others as down-to-earth thoughtful and pragmatic.

Pacifist? Tell that to the nation that celebrates and idolizes him. Well Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr who came after Booker T. Washington was similarly labeled a pacifist too, for adopting Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent protest style that effectively disarmed white supremacists and liberated blacks. Today, he has a national holiday in his name and regarded as black god. I would therefore commend Washington’s speech to the readership as excerpted below:

“A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded”.

“Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

 

Franklin Otorofani is a Nigerian-trained attorney and public affairs analyst resident in the United States

Contact: mudiagone@yahoo.com