A choice called poverty – 4

The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the Maker of them all – Proverbs 22:2

For a long time, my interpretation of the above Bible passage was that God made some poor and some rich. However, one day, as I read the scripture again, it dawned on me that it does not say “God made them so”. Yes, God created all men, but no one was destined to be poor while others were destined to be rich. Every man’s outcome in life will be determined largely by what he does with the time allocated to him on earth, the opportunities he is exposed to, and the relationships that characterize his life.  These are largely the raw materials that God gives to everyone as the seed for their prosperity. The rich man and the poor have twenty-four hours in their day. Even if God equalizes opportunities, He cannot equalize wealth or success. Assemble ten people and give each of them $1m each. Follow them up in six months and you will discover that some have become richer while some would have become broke or totally derelict! Inheriting wealth is not a guarantee that a man will be sustainably rich. I have seen children of wealthy people who came into a fortune after the death of their parents but who became derelict a few years thereafter. Wealth that is not increased will soon be depleted.

For the poor, cash is the currency of trade. When the poor need money, they are looking for someone to give it to them out of benevolence. When the rich need money, they recognize that cash is only a physical denomination of true money. To create it, they look for how to create a significant value that solves a significant problem that produces a reward bigger than what they need. While the rich invest their time to create value that is universally or at least locally lucrative, the poor believe that those who are rich owe them a living. When they don’t get what they expect from the rich, they get angry, resentful and sometimes, proceed to steal or even kill to get it.

It is good to be current when it comes to information. The digital age has democratized information to the level where there is no excuse for ignorance as you can learn almost anything online. Social media is a huge pot-pourri of information, good and bad. The greatest time wasters for anyone alive today are the gadgets that are supposed to make our lives easier, but which have rather turned out to complicate it more. The rich hardly watch TV. When they do, it is a tool of relaxation or to get updated on latest happenings around the world, especially as it affects their livelihood. But the poor hardly do anything else, forgetting that time is an irreplaceable asset. If the rich feature prominently on social media, you can be sure that someone else is employed to manage the pages for them. Television and social are two largely meaningless addictions that are very easy to get hooked on. What the average person forgets is that those who spend all their time before the television hardly feature in it, except for the wrong reasons. Vision is what gets people on TV for the right reasons. It is amazing how people will spend long hours watching sports as spectators while the players smile to the bank with millions, collected from humongous population of poor people, some of whom have nothing else to do except place bets on which team is the projected winner! Poor people know the names of every player in every team in the league. Leisure is good for one’s health but not to an excessive, indulgent level. While the poor pay to watch the games, the rich strategize on how to build a business around the activity. Sports viewing centres in Nigeria have spun other businesses around them. Beer parlours know that if you want to have a steady flow of customers, just incorporate a viewing centre for foreign soccer leagues.

The diet of the poor is very limited and is largely junk food. This is because they eat what they get, not what they want. If you offer to take a poor man to a high-end restaurant, he would rather you gave him the money to go and eat more junk. In the Western world, poor people are beneficiaries of food stamps which guarantee them a regular supply of some food weekly. However, the food items covered by the food stamps are largely processed and canned products which, in the long run, are detrimental to their physiological and mental health.

How many times have you or someone you know ever used the expression, “I can’t afford it!”? When a poor man sees a car priced at $400,000 or more, even though he likes it and would secretly love to own one, he convinces himself that it is too pricey and that anyone who spends that kind of money on one car must be greedy and wasteful. Then he tells everyone who cares to listen how many poor people he would send to school or help to establish a business or how many orphanages he would support if he had that kind of money. That way, he can console himself that the reason he is not currently doing any good is because he does not have money yet. Never mind the fact he has never bought a meal for a hungry child in his neighbourhood. Whenever a value or an opportunity for investment or personal growth and development is extended to the poor, their first consideration is the cost. When the rich are offered the same thing, their first consideration is the value inherent in that offer. If they consider it valuable, they will come up with the money required to get it.

Recession frustrates the poor, but it inspires the rich. This is because the rich recognize that crisis or adversity walks hand in hand with opportunities. While the poor are busy throwing tantrums at the crisis, the rich are busy looking at the opportunities inherent in the collective dilemma. There is no shortage anywhere under the sun. Poverty lives in people, not in the land. What men call a recession is nothing but a migration of value. Value creates money, not the other way round. Where value goes, money follows. When supply outstrips demand for any value proposition, its price crashes. Those who cannot smell the cheese and who continue to hang on to that particular value proposition or the way it is currently presented will be caught lamenting about “the good old days”. Those who recognize that the train of value has left that station or who hopped on that train when it stopped at the station will simply take advantage of the situation to create an alternative value proposition that is in high demand but in short supply. Sometimes, that could be something as simple as tweaking the current value proposition to give it a new presentation or to project an inherent value in it that was not so obvious… continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!

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