Our World 3 PB Soc Stud Zambia 9789982180665, 9982180665

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ROBUST WEALTH How You Too Can Leave An Inheritance For Your Children’s Children Would you love to: Know how to pass value from your generation to the next in such a way that the results of your work continue even after your departure? Stop negotiating from positions of weakness, and let people call on you for your strengths instead? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just name your price and they pay? Beat the personal struggles that keep defeating you from inside, making you less productive than you know you can be? Stop complaining as hard as you do sometimes? Use diplomacy instead of much talk to get the best out of what life has delt you? Hand over protected, purposed and lasting wealth to your nexts of kin?

When you become desperate for anything, its price-tag to you will bulge to a point just outside of your ability to afford it Wealth attracts great human commitment to create even more wealth for the already wealthy. I call that auro-taxis. Others call it employment …inheritance is not just “a good idea” or some result of “fresh thinking”; it has been the practice of people of faith for thousands of years “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children,” I recalled. That was a Biblical line at Proverbs 13. Suddenly, everything became clear to me.” “Back in Difficult Lane, I was overheating. I was now facing daily complaints and threats. The little cash which my consultancy managed to eke out, this other business swept up like specs of dust in a tornado. I was spending sleepless night after restless day only to have any money I made wafted away by others, with insults and namecalling for a bonus. I was well and truly dumped! Even admiring my own employees because they could at least point to me for their troubles. But who could I name for my legion of daily tormentors?” But eventually, the mountain moved. Permanently.

Eng. Joy Simwaba has consulted with United Nations organisations helping to formulate national policies. He has helped to structure cross-border projects as a consultant to ZCCM IH plc and others. He has led operational audits of some of the world’s largest mines as well as longstanding multinationals such as Hitachi. A thirdgeneration Zambian citizen, he traces his roots to the Sudan region with long stops at Tanzania and Malawi.

ISBN 978-9982-18 066-5

ROBUST WEALTH How you too can leave an inheritance for

your Children’s Children JOY SIMWABA Stone Country Publications

Robust Wealth How you too can leave and inheritance for your children’s children Library: Non-Fiction / Motivational / African ISBN 978-9982-18-066-5

Published, 2020, by Stone Country Publications Ltd. 6471 Kariba Road. Kalundu. LUSAKA +260 211292300/ 966111871 www.stone-country.com [email protected] Stone Country Publications is not aware of any individuals who can rightfullly assert their right to be identified as originators, co-originators or be connected in any other way to the authorship of this book, except the following, who solely assert the right to be identified as authors of this work, including all uncredited illustrations, diagrams, charts and tables:

Joy Simwaba Artwork, Permissions, Indexing and Cover Materials: Stone Country Publications Ltd, Lusaka. Cover design: Stone Country Publications Ltd, Lusaka. Page design, Layout and Typesetting: Stone Country Publications Ltd, Lusaka. © Joy Simwaba, 2020 All rights of the publisher reserved. No part of this publication may be copied or placed in a retrieval system in any binding other than that in which it is published and this copyright restriction being placed upon any subsequent users. No part of this publication may be copied or otherwise reproduced, without prior written consent from the publisher of the work. The brand names that appear in this book are for identification purposes only and are trademarks of their respective owners. They are used for purposes of identification only and are in no way associated with the author or the publisher. Scripture quotations labelled NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations labelled KJV are taken from the King James Version. All rights reserved by copyright owner. Scripture quotations labelled NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS Inheritance: The One Differentiator of the Nations 6 The Under-Cultures 7 The Master-Cultures 8 Cross-Generational Thinking 9

Chapter 1: Naming Names 11 Ku seri kwe shumba 14 My Epiphany 16

Chapter 2: The Biblical Code 19 The child is the father to the man 25 Ready help to leave an inheritance 27 A wise son maketh a glad father 29

Chapter 3: Customary Codes 31 African Practices 32 Western Practices 33 Eastern Practices 33 Common Practices 34 A Call to Change 34

Chapter 4: Why the Third Generation? 36 A history of frustration and reset 41 Tailstarting 42 Three characteristics of the wealth that you must hand over 50 Why the third generation? 56

Chapter 5: Corruption of the Customs 59 Moral Escapes: Sustaining Cross-Generational Poverty 64 Silver Spoons: Debunking Myths and Reconnecting the Generations 67 What ‘Correct’ Looks like 69

Chapter 6: The Mechanisms of Wealth 70 THE HARD WORK OF BEING FREE 71 Ownership 71 Pretty good vs Brilliant 72 MONEY, WEALTH, POWER & THE VALUE CYCLE 72 Money is printed, wealth is created 72 Have wealth, will sell 80 Donating hippos 81 The relationship between money, value, influence and power 82 The Value Cycle 87 Aurotaxis: how the poor labour for the wealthy to get the poor to labour for the wealthy 96 Focus on your wealth 97 The concept of profit – seven questions for wealth creators 98 Adding value 105 The concept of poverty 107 The scapegoat of corruption 108 GLOBAL CRISES 109 The evidence of crashability 109 Where partners speak and work, results show 113

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HOW TO BUILD YOUR PEOPLEWEALTH 115 Good men being good 115 Peoplework 116 How to love thy neighbour 118 The new differentiator 119 Just doing their job 120 Lessons from Donegal 121 Before it announces itself 121

Chapter 7: How to Leave an Inheritance 122 The Seven Dimensions of Inheritance 123 The Eightth Dimension: A Differentiator 126

Chapter 8: Twelve Sure Death-Traps 131 BASIC TRAPS 132 Lusts & Curiosities 132 Pride & Justice 134 Doubt & Failure 142 Signs & Wonders 143 Distrust & Fear of Judgment 143 Laziness & Carelessness 149 PREPARING YOUR ESCAPE 155 Breaking Addictions 155 Hearing & Listening: The Simplepowers that Break Addictive Powers 158 WORKING YOUR ESCAPE HATCHES 176 The fightback: Do Not Engage 176 The fightback: power your escape with forward-looking questions to yourself 179

Chapter 9: To Know, To Love and To Leave 181 The Blessing of Knowing 182 The Love of A Father 183 The Sacrifice of A Father 188

Chapter 10: Labour Complications 191 Failure to find work 192 Charity: a beautiful name for a beautiful thing 196 Tithes, seeds, preachings and related transactions 200 Debt 207 Duty vs Delight 216

Chapter 11: Faith and Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability 223 A measure of faith in each one 224 The cost of faithfulness 229 Every father upsizes 230 Better fathers manage to downsize 234

Chapter 12: Dream or Die 237

What is in a dream or a vision that keeps one alive? 239 Your sons and daughters shall prophesy 246 The house on the hillside 247

Acknowledgements 252 Index 253 Robust Wealth

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Foreword

Inheritance The One Differentiator of the Nations

W

hat causes one group to speed ahead, becoming economic masters, and another to fall behind, supplying only slaves (labourers and employees) and eventually becoming an underclass? Some say that the difference comes from innovation. Others point to education. Others to natural resources. Some point to hardships driving one culture into becoming a plunderer of others for own survival – a Darwinian concept of Survival of the Fittest. Others still point to intelligence and say that the differences of fortunes proves that, in fact, not all cultures have the same inherent intelligence. The last group are close to the truth but only in so far as the inteligence they refer to applies to passing knowledge, wealth and experiences from outgoing generations to incoming ones. The common weakness of all the approaches mentioned above is that they limit their attention to what can be seen in a single generation or, if they observe more years, they fail to focus on the crossing points between the generations. Extremely useful insight can be gained when we expand our field of view so that we encompass some three or more generations and we then zoom in to see closely what happens as one generation phases out and another takes over. For the weaker societies, it will be seen that there is a regular resetting of starting points in terms of wealth, knowledge, technics, language, networks, social cohesion and more – aspects which place limits on quality of life and capacity to attack new challenges. To take a loose example, Zambia, has seen no less than four wholesale redesigns and mass printing of national currency in its 55 years (and six presidencies) of existence as a modern independent nation. By contrast, the United Kingdom – Zambia’s colonial masters until October 1964, have had the same design of national currency for some 100 years – only printing new notes to add needed volume for expanded economy or to replace damaged notes. They have concentrated their rapid changes instead on developing, deepening and mordernising their industrial, economic and military technics as the Robust Wealth

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generations have come and gone. That change happens is not the problem; where it happens is. The correct thing is: Constant Spine; Rapidly Changing Peripheries. Unfortunately, Zambia’s case has been the reverse: the places that need rapid update (the peripheries) have been constant while the places that need to stay the same (the spine) have been changing too often. The result has been an economy and its political back-bone that are rickety and easy to break. And the rest of this society can never be stronger than those two things. Stated differently, the changes that have happened in Zambia are of the reset/rebase type while those in the United Kingdom are of the update/upscale type. The earlier type of change takes the new generation back to a starting point that had already been crossed before, while the latter type of change builds upon the advancements achieved by the outgoing generation to give the incoming one a higher starting point. The result is an everincreasing gap in the quality of life experienced by the two peoples. While they may both have prepared their farmlands using hand-hoes at one point in their pasts, even used ox-drawn ploughs later on, when one looks at them now, hand-hoes still appear widely in Zambia while only tractors, combine harvesters, greenhouses, drone-based farm monitoring and satellite driven land management will appear commonly in the United Kingdom. The cause of the difference? Parents in the more advanced society ensured that their successors inherited from them much more than just their names and genes. Inheritance is the one most important differentiator between the nations. Mind: I did not say “one of the most important…”, I said “the One most important”. Cultures that are poor at crossing the generations with their wealth, i.e., passing knowledge and other prepared and secured resources down from the parents to their children are the dominant ones. Cultures where individuals try to run the entire rags-to-riches story as some sort of one-man-heroes become the slave nations.

The Under-Cultures Some of the features of the under-dog cultures are: have weak record keeping across the generations, have low respect for home grown systems, labour hard but retain little to pass on within the families, have inconsistent justice structures and, overall, have little forward passing of added value. In fact, the worst under-classes feature adults who look to their children for survival! Particularly in their old age, such cultures make it seem totally normal Robust Wealth

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– even mandatory – that children take care of their parents every need like the children where the only retirement plan. This is a back-passing of wealth and it has become a complex in these cultures. The back-passing has become a double-edged sword keeping these cultures imprisoned in unending cycles of poverty. How? Well, not taking care of one’s parents is morally wrong (and so the children must oblige) but having no retirement plan other than one’s children is just as wrong (but the parents have already lived their lives and cannot correct anything at this stage so they are quietly excused and all the tonage of complaint is poured into the laps of the children). Eventually, this situation not only taxes the children’s energy but also chokes their minds from functioning most effectively to tackle problems of development. As a result, the same hand-hoe their ancestors used for farming hundreds of years ago in the bronze age is the same one they import from China and also use today. And with peace humbly procured that way, their society ticks on. If the children were to look away at this stage, trying to focus on forward matters more than they do the backward facing obligations, that action would be roundly condemned as parental neglect. To the casual observer, the problem would have been acquiesced when the children turned back to go and take care of “their responsibilities”. In reality though, the children would have only been turning the other cheek for a second slap. The first one was finding poverty, the second one was being demanded to live in it or face curses. To speak of the problem at this stage as having been caused by the parents in failing to prepare adequately for their old age is the slippery slope upon which one risks being seen as excusing the children from their rightful duties. This is how the back-passing has grown into a complex. And that complex is a major part of the overall inferiority package that keeps these under-cultures bound.

The Master-Cultures In the master-cultures, however, forward-passing of wealth has been developed into a natural minimum, so much that old people feel the need to apologise to their children if they have to depend on said children for all their needs in retirement. Everyone is expected to have prepared adequately for their own needs in their years of economic dormancy. This is not a lack of social connection to their own offspring. Far from it. It is, in fact, a strong proof of cross-generational duty. Parents in these cultures must provide for their Robust Wealth

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children and must in fact reach so far that they even leave something for the third generation down. What is owed backwards in these master-cultures is emotional and moral connection in addition to physical presence to develop a trained identity on top of the genetic one. In these cultures, the very least that is done is that parents begin to put aside something for their children the moment these children are born. The next step up would be that such parents begin to put aside something for their grandchildren the moment that the children are born, i.e., one begins to prepare for the children of the child that has just been born. The parents assume that each of their children will have as many of their own children as the parents themselves plan to have. If I plan to have four children, for example, then I must prepare that each child of mine would also have four of their own offspring. That would be 20 people to prepare for (16 grand childen and 4 direct ones). I hand over to these twenty souls not only my genetic material through procreation but my value systems, economic wealth, land, education and much more besides through preparation. Procreation and Preparation: man’s chief activities on earth. Not necessarily what man admits to doing all the time but what man actually does all the time anyway. The overiding task is to ensure that the incoming generations are emotionally, socially and intellectually ready to manage the inheritance that should also be handed over. Economic and social progress of the wider community then comes as an aggregate effect. Afterall, what, other than the combined wealth of families, is the wealth of the nation based on? What, other than the aggregated activity of individuals is the economy of the nation based on?

Cross-Generational Thinking But for the above things to happen, there needs to be a disorientation – an aggressive breaking of paradigms – from the small, individualistic thinking that boxes people up into lonely corners where they feel that they must fight alone for all things. Our societies need to shift to a shared existence of the generations. Instead of looking at my children and feeling sorry for their feeble selves, I look at them as my soldiers who should build up from where I left off and fight bigger adversaries than I did. I must prepare them adequately for that. I must arm them to do good strategy and to fight well. They will scale their challenges if I can show them how I overcame mine. If I fail, I fail and we struggle through Robust Wealth

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the consequences together until it is their turn to try, using my failures or successes – whichever it turns out to be – as their own launchpad. Bottomline is that I must never shy away from taking my best shot at everything that I do. Because soon, I will have to pass the button on. Now, I have heard many on the other side of the inheritance divide hating on inheritance and saying that it causes the children to be dependent and unable to fend for themselves. Well, such people have never met inheritance! What they have met is bequeathment. And bequeathment and inheritance are far from being the same thing! To bequeath something is to simply give someone a handout. Inheritance, as will be seen in Chapter 7, involves eight specific aspects being given over a long period of time. One cannot “hand over” family values or education or people skills or relationships or a grasp of livelihood and management processes in nearly the same way that they can hand over the title deeds to a house. The title deeds can be said to have been bequeathed but those other aspects can only be “handed over” in a process of inheritance. Underline the word process. So in a very real way, all of us – without exception – are participants in unending processes of inheritance. Only some, by serious cross-generational thinking, have learnt to do inheritance far more effectively and efficiently than others. The only wealth that is robust and sustainable is that which crosses the generational boundaries from one group of parents to the children-cumparents and to their children after that and so on. I invite you to read this book in order to develop and improve upon that CrossGenerational Thinking so that you can see clearer how you too may become a better player in your own process of inheritance both from your folks and to your own descendants. The book is a crystallisation of over two decades of active observation on three continents, ten years of writing and five intense ones of disorienting experiences which finally tipped the bucket over for me, effectively shouting at me to “Finish. Now!” PS: If you have time to learn only one thing from here, then let it be the Value Cycle of page 88. All the thinking in this book can fit into that one little diagram with its 11 words, 7 arrows, 4 boxes and a one-line footnote. Joy Simwaba. Ndola, 2020. Robust Wealth

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1 Naming Names Events conspire to get me asking questions of inheritance. I find that it ‘s not just my family that has this problem; I find that our society has the matter of crossgenerational burden-sharing so twisted that it is chocking our very lives out one generation after the other like toys on a continous production line. I find that crossgenerational parenting has lost out to a form of robbery whereby babies are carrying mothers on their backs, little boys are having to sweat hard to feed their fathers and we are all applauding.

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B

Naming Names LUEFIN Bay Resort was where I was going to live, work and play for some three months while vacationing on a J1 visa in the USA in summer of 1999. I was as excited as they come. And why not, seeing as I had successfully completed my first year of study, passed all my exams and was now in my second overseas country working to earn a real wage for the first time in my life. I had relocated from Zambia to the UK a year earlier on an engineering scholarship from one of the largest copper mining companies in the world at the time. My father had never paid a penny for my education since I entered secondary school as I had managed to secure a scholarship back then. It was a relief for my father, a government worker raising eight children. And here I was now, going to earn some money into the family in hard currency! I was doing quite OK by any standard. Sending my first salary home would make me a darling to my parents. And I did send the first $300 I received at the end of the first few weeks of engagement, my employer having deducted costs of air-tickets and the like. I sent all the cash to my father back in Lusaka. This was the custom I and many like me were taught – to honour our parents by giving them our very first pay packet. All of it if we could. Then all salaries thereafter would be blest. I wanted to be a ‘good son’ and ‘proper example’ so I gave all of my pay packet. And, yes sir, I was roundly blest because all my stay in the USA was in perfect order. I visited where I wanted to visit and I never lacked a thing! Epcot in Orlando, Chinatown in New York, even the Empire State building. And I went back to the UK with a healthy pocket. These things work, I thought, and continued to send some money to Zambia when I could during the rest of my student years. Fast forward some eight years and I am back home helping one of my younger brothers to complete his degree. Firstly, I had to convince him to try again to enter Copperbelt University after an unsuccesful first attempt. He got in! Then we had to deal with his top-up payments since he only received 75% bursary. I told him he had to work for his cash but any amount he made, I would multiply by three and let him have it to cover the remaining 25%. He started making money so fast I had to cap the amount in the deal to avoid having to hand over my entire salary to him month after month. In my mind, I was helping to alleviate my father’s responsibilities by taking up school payments for at least one of my siblings. Fast forward a couple of years and I am about to marry. My father says to me “you know I do not have money to help you pay for whatever the bride’s family will demand, right…?” I say “no problem, I will handle that.” Fast forward a few more paces and my parents, my fiances’s parents, my fiance herself and I are together in the Reverand’s vestry at Chongwe UCZ church being walked through the very final (as in tomorrow is wedding day type of final) paces of what this step was going to mean for both families, and to caution both sets of parents not to exert undue pressure on the new couple for children to emerge Robust Wealth

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Naming Names quickly. At the end of the meeting, my father asks for just a minute with the Reverand and they discuss some matters for a while. Then I get called back inside. My father leaves. The Reverand asks me if I know of any thing which my father would have been unhappy about concerning my marriage. Of course, I say “no” because I know nothing! Well, he says, please try to talk to the big man. He has left a dossier of complaints against you. That you never gave him any money, you never bought him a suit or shoes and he has had little financial benefit from you. My head goes into a spin. I have never been so shocked with a man in my entire life! Let alone my own father! This is my father – couldn’t he just have said all that to me? Even if it were true that I never transferred any value to him, couldn’t he have sat me down about it without handing the supposed problem over to his vicar? And over money…? All this time my thoughts had run along the lines of my father being the one man on earth who would never care how much cash benefit he got out of me as long as I ended up a ‘good son’, a unifying elder brother and a useful representative of the family! Now both my definition of ‘good son’ and my understanding of the expectations my father had of our relationship had to radically shift. Fast! It hit me hard to learn that my relationship with my own father had to have direct cash benefits, even to the extent of him sending investigative agents to sniff out my salary! Did he not know he was my father and could simply say, “son how much do you make monthly? Here, sit down and let me walk you through some things you could do with any excess…” I was in total disbelief! Having managed to pick myself up, I asked that we drive to my father’s home so that I could have a short chat with him. We found him. I accorded him the chance to highlight what he still felt – to which he responded by underlining the demands he had made via the vicar that, for sure, I hadn’t bought him a suit or shoes. He said that earning over ZMK6,500,000 (about $1,300) per month (where he got that number from I do not know to this day, but yes, I had at some point in the past received that level of salary). Had he known that by the time he was registering his complaint, I was receiving nearly three times that much, things would have only been worse for me. He said I had a lot of money and I could have easily given him all these things he was talking about! But this from a man who had just retired and received the lump-sum cash component of his pension for distiguished service in government covering the better part of 30 years! My only words to him were: “I am your son and I will never stop needing your correction. I wish that you wouldn’t document my faults but simply summon me to talk them through. I hope to see you tomorrow, sir.1” 1I

had a ‘sir’ kind of relationship with my father, although we did not use the word sir because we spoke in our mother tongue, Nyika

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Naming Names One might say he was trying to teach me responsibility to the extended family. However, if that were the case, personal benefits to him would certainly not have been at the centre of discussion. Being a teacher by profession, my father knew better than most how to set his points using examples, and when it was time to go straight to fact. I am convinced that he was going straight to fact on this one. It was much later that I worked out that the money excuse was just a rider: his real problem lay elsewere, in a place I had nothing to do with. For several months I wondered why he had created a plan of not turning up for the wedding and why, even after being given uninterrupted chance to let things off his chest, he had gone through with Operation AWOL. But now I know that he simply feared the awkwardness of running into his ex wife, the mother of my birth, and having to navigate the emotional gymnastics around that subject in the presence of his current wife, the mother of my upbringing. His actions later seemed to prove that peace by avoidance was what he chose for my wedding day. The money excuse was just a rider on his real discomfort. The endless questions and murmurings within the families involved were simply collateral damage. Fair enough, I thought. A man’s gotta do what a man feels he’s gotta do, right? The events that unfolded at his funeral some six years later proved beyond doubt the needless battles that he had been facing all along. I struggled long to forgive the pretenders who would smile and speak with me nicely like they had the good of our family at heart when in fact they were working full time to ensure that our family became divided, for reasons only imagined by their own minds, concerned more for money and property than anything else. These were the people dad was worried about in ultimately deciding to simply procure peace by skipping my wedding festivities. I thought he had made a fair call.

Ku seri kwe shumba Now, there was another way of looking at my father’s apparent troubles. But this one would need one to be open minded about all things. That we, the children born out of his two marriages, would have to sort out our relationships with each other was our exam question, not his. Who knows, maybe our history would even make us much more useful to each other; but that was our question to face. Why, we even had plenty of cousins in exactly the same positions as ourselves – or even worse – and we were all very useful to each other, to the point where the word ‘cousin’ was never used but ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, so I guess there was nothing big for us to solve here. But dad’s own question was different and he was not going to be allowed to exchange it with any other. Yes, it was more uncomfortable than ours but he was a man, too, wasn’t he? The truth does indeed set free but we are the ones too scared of our own shaddows to even let its light begin to shine on us. We are so scared of truth that we don’t even want to consider other possibilities. When we dodge it and duck it Robust Wealth

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Naming Names and pretend around it, little do we know that we are choosing constant pain over freedom. And all because we over-rate our own worth; we do not want people to look down on us, to talk about us negatively or to think that we are less than them on any count. And so we choose to win our peace by pretense. Ducking and dodging what might even turn out to be our best path to freedom. I had absolutely no problem dealing with the fact that due to my father’s personal decisions over his own wellbeing in his younger days, I had two loving women to call ‘mother’ in my life. Peel away the title of “mother” and they were simply girl children dressed in women’s clothes, longing – just like anyone else – for unwavering commitment.2 I had no problem giving both of them the respect due to them. And I was lucky that both of them sacrificially gave all that they could to the best of their abilities to ensure that I turned out well in life. One silently suffered the pain of losing her babies for decades while the other was thrown into the deep end of family politics before she had even started to know what was going on, married off as she was, while just at the top end of her teen years. I would never ask for anything more than what these two women had done for me. But I am a man, so perhaps I can be forgiven for being just a little tougher with dad’s side of this. I think that my father simply couldn’t deal with his end of that reality. Or had he simply reached in and made a cross-generational sacrifice?3 How many Zambians were in positions just like my dad’s? Or even worse? How many of his own brothers had extramarital offspring, in fact? All his children were begotten within legal marriage, so what on earth was he here flustering about? These uncomfortable social events – like weddings, graduations and funerals – were repeated opportunities for him to put closure on his past decisions but here he was stumbling at first hurdles. If only he had mustered the courage to face his unpleasantries – who knows, he might have discovered they had been nothing more than paper tigers4 all along. I have come to discover that the truth works like a hospital jab – your imaginations of how painful the prick of that needle will be are always exaggerated! When it actually pierces you, the pain tends to die away quite quickly and you wonder why you hadn’t trusted yourself much more in the first place. After that, you are a free and healthy man for a very long time indeed compared to the seconds of tiny stab you had just endured. My yellow fever jab that took less than 5 seconds to endure, remained good for me for at least ten years! So the doctors said. It seems then that the long and drawn out process of expecting that little needle is the bigger part of the pain of this activity. As happens with much 2

Proverbs 18:22a: what a person needs is unfailing love. A decision that may be misunderstood in the short term but which shows itself to have been the correct thing only in later decades 4 Paper tigers are situations that look like violent predators but in reality are nothing more than flimsy images made out of something as frail as paper. 3

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Naming Names else in life. The waiting, the expectation and the imaginations are much heavier to carry than actual item. Zimbabweans have a song they sing in some churches which has the following lines ku seri kwe shumba kune huchi; aha kune huchi; ku seri kwe shumba kune huchi aha kune huchi; pinda mukati! which literally translates to behind the lion there is honey; yes, there is honey; behind the lion there is honey yes, there is honey; [now] go on in [and get it]! That is the type of bravery I am speaking about here and which was required of my father. As it is of every man. For our part as his children, we now needed to learn something from our father’s struggles – both the successes and the failings. We cannot escape the fact that it is his legacy that we are carrying on. He made his decisions to the best of his ability at that time, but he also provided an insurance policy in educating us to think with open minds. That way he was attacking his question from many angles. Will he win? Only we, as his children, can provide an answer to that one.

My Epiphany Back to wedding day. Fast forward two years and our first-born daughter arrives. I reserve for her the middle name Tontela, literally translating to “be gentle”, but in full referring to the graceful overlooking of faults which needed to be exhibited for us to finally receive this baby safe and full of health. In keeping with tradition I asked my father for the young lady’s first name and he came back with Leya, saying the name was short for his mother’s home village, Muleya. He used to love his mother very much but her name had already been given to my elder sister, SantaMaria – much easier known as Mary – so this granddaughter of his would simply remind him of those roots which were dear to him. He added that we might all desert him some day but he felt that this little girl would never. “Lovely,” I thought; “she is not Jesus to never desert anyone but, hey, it is good to think such good thoughts toward each other.” And so Tontela Leya Namwaba acquired her deep rooted identity (which in full we could now translate to grace that will never desert me) courtesy of her father and her grandfather working together. Peace had returned. Robust Wealth

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Naming Names When our second child was born, the first person to arrive on scene – other than myself and close collaborators – was my father! He was the second family member, after mom from Chongwe, to take a picture with the little boy, and it was one of those extremely rare moments when I saw dad smile and even hold the smile for the camera. I was packed with emotions inside. I had never felt a love and connection with my father like I did this time. Tears still well up to my eyes when I remember the episode not because of the smiles but because of the pain despite the smiles. Dad had just began to succumb to prostate cancer and the more serious effects of hypertension, diabetes, heart enlargement, eodema, and a plethora of other opportunistic battles in his body. He needed unending medication and, as far as I can recall, this was the last month I saw him walking on his own without assistance and much struggle. Whatever ill feelings I had bottled up completely disappeared. I knew I loved my father and he had done the best he could do with the knowledge he had and the upbringing he had received. Had he not seen to it that all of us got an education? Had he not allowed us all the freedom to be our own man or woman without hindrance? Had he not provided warm shelter, clothes and food and all the protection we needed till we were all fully grown citizens in our own right? A man can never be perfect. That would be all for mercy to enter our relationship and heal everything. Dad had lived his life with flaws of his own just like I had mine. He needed love just like I did. I could only hope for enough time left on his clock to complete the turn-around and cultivate a relationship with all his children and grandchildren. The goings on in our hearts notwithstanding, the new boy needed an identity, and as his father, I had to facilitate. This time, though, I had to ask my dad in-law for the little guy’s name. I didn’t know at the time but found out that that decision hurt my father a little. And he seemed to confirm it later when he said, “hey you know what, they (our inlaws) shouldn’t even have to supply any names because these children are Simwabas;” why should we outsource the naming of their first names? “True,” I thought, “these children are Simwabas.” But then I also had to let the honour flow both ways because our in-laws, just as much as we, were full parents to this little guy. Why not invite them in, even offer them a seat with a good view? Afterall, hadn’t we already robbed them of a daughter and changed her surname to ours? They were just as much contributors to this little guy’s existence as we were. We are one with them now, aren’t we? And had they not shown us all the respect due to us at every turn? With dad’s name-giving privilege as collateral damage, we needed to show some love to the other side. He and I would just have to find a different point of connection than baby names. “Too bad, big man, too bad,” I thought. Robust Wealth

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Naming Names My father’s fellow parents, however, seemed to have missed the middle parts of the movie because they gave our son the neatly loaded name Wongani, which literally means “give thanks”. One could be misled. Until they realised that the contextual meaning of that name is more like “show your appreciation, fellas!” Ha ha! My father-in-law was a sneaky one, too! We had left him out in the cold too long and he was registering his complaint loud and clear. The little boy’s mother added a middle name (with absolutely no input from me, I must add). And so, like his sister before him, little man Wongani Joy Simwaba obtained his cross-generational identity. This manner of naming our children is typical of African cultures. It has absolutely no problem with – in fact, it encourages – stretching the blessing of the fathers to their children’s children. As we shall see later in this book, this system is not restricted to names alone. It also operates on wealth, wisdom, customs, economic activities, even choice of life partner among many areas. The naming of names is not considered as a fun exercise for the expectant couple but the first cross-generational duty of a father. It is up to the father to know how to embrace his wife’s input and to know how to absorb all calls made upon him, but the endowment of a cross-generational identity for the child is the father’s duty. In some culture’s the mother will carry that responsibility. Whoever has it does not matter as much as the fact that naming names is the first crossgenerational duty that parents owe their children. Because names are more than just “ID” or stickers on foreheads. Back to my household. Around this time, I was no longer on anyone’s payroll. I was now self employed and the home economy was beginning to push in tight. Little did I know that this would be my epiphany – my manifestation to the world and to myself, born out of hardship – played out over a seven year period of increasingly squeezed circumstances.

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2 The Biblical Code “Fathers, do not embitter your children”5 “Children, obey your parents in everything” 6 “A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.” 7

Provision of wealth and practical wisdom for life are a responsibility of parents to their children, with two warnings: firstly not to give in to the emotional blackmail of tears and, secondly, not to drive the children to bitterness. Obedience and happiness are a responsibility of the children to their parents. The fact that children are to play a role in the happiness of their parents can bring nasty complications. It has been much abused and has brought many families to their knees. But applied correctly, it can bring joy and proper fulfilment.

5

Colossians 3:21 (NIV) Colossians 3:20 (NIV) 7 Proverbs 10:1 (KJV) 6

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I

The Biblical Code Used to have an administrative reporting line into the highest office in the Csuite at headquarters. And a functional reporting line overseas. Well serviced motor vehicles were the lowest type of tool put at my disposal for the execution of my work. All company directors knew my name and had my number. But here I was now running after minibuses on dusty roads and arguing with bus conductors over fifty ngwee change! I was several months behind on my rentals and couldn’t take my children to any private hospital without producing for myself a raft of if-then cash computations first! My past salary level made me an expensive hire for other companies while the consultancy business I was doing on the side, like any consultancy business, only had income once every so many quiet months. The other business which had more regular activity had sufficient cash flow through it - bordering ZMW150,000 (US$15,000) every month – but no profit yet, and that was causing us to dip into cash we hadn’t yet made to pay our administrative costs. This was recipe for a huge financial disaster. I had never been this troubled in all my life – continual stress for three straight years before everything had to be totally rebooted as our cash flows, never mind any profit at all, tumbled to less than ZMW10,000 per month, employees turning up at the office only when they felt like. By this time, my family was beginning to ration its food. My climbdown happened so fast I barely noticed what was beginning to unfold before I had already slapped the ground and cracked. At the companies, I lost nearly 70% of my employees and just about 100% of my credibility as a manager and a leader. I brushed with the ugly side of the law on a few ocassions for unmanaged client expectations. And then a prophet declares, “you are meant to be rich; you are in fact, a farmer! Dangote doesn’t have money compared to you.” I too would have shrugged my shoulders and moved on to more serious problems. Alicko Dangote was one of the 100 wealthiest persons on earth, did this man know? Except this man had declared things over many people who I had come to know closely and which things were already happening. Further, he usually didn’t ask for people’s details but instead told them in a similar manner in which Jesus Christ told the Samaritan woman at the well all about her life. One couldn’t simply dismiss this type of man. A few days earlier in church the visiting Reverand Mumba from Kitwe says, after his preaching, “There is a man here for who all was very ok a while back; you had a good job and could afford all you needed. But things took a drastic turn.” He went on to list some important things that had been lost and then continued, “but The Lord says he has seen your pain. There will shortly be a very strong turn. There Robust Wealth

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The Biblical Code will be money and influence. It will happen so dramatically that you will even need counselling to cope with it all.” I knew inside my deepest knower that this was me being addressed. Back in Difficult Lane, I was overheating. I was now facing daily barrages of people calling to complain and threaten about that regular business and to demand refunds. The little cash which my consultancy managed to eke out, this other business swept up like specs of dust in a tornado. I was spending sleepless night after restless day only to have any money I received for it wafted away, with insults and name-calling for a bonus! I was well and truly dumped! Even admiring my own employees because they could at least point to me for their troubles; but who could I name for my legion of daily torments? Yes, I was a Master of Science degree holder from a respected British university, but this trouble was a valley of the shaddow of death and it was having me for lunch faster than I could bring any organised thinking to it to make sense of it. Not once, my wife suggested that we go to our parents and apologise to get freed from spiritual hindrances. My question was always: apologise for what exactly? “No, because, you know, sometimes when things like this happen its important to consider all angles…” was how the response would generally go but nothing that one could really take away and work with. I related to her how I had taken everything literally after that shocking day before our wedding even to the extent of quickly giving my father a new suit and a brand new phone (in place of the demanded shoes) and never arriving at his house empty-handed (which I had never done before, but had now intensified the practice down to a ritual). But hints pointing like that at parental bitterness got me thinking. Did dad indeed die with grudges which had caused his spirit grief and as a result of which we were meeting misfortune after misfortune? Was it mom in Isoka? Or anyone else elderly we had offended and were being too stubborn against to seek forgiveness from? Then one day my young brother, the Copperbelt University graduate, calls me and alerts me to some files he had found on dad’s laptop. He called me totally out of the blues, without knowing anything about what I was presently going through. He says one of the files related to me and some faults dad had found against me; the other related to one of our four younger brothers. But a few lines into the detail of the dossier showed that it was either the source file for the pre-wedding complaints dad had presented to the Reverand at Chongwe or a closely related iteration.

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The Biblical Code This conversation with my brother set me thinking again. But luckily it came on a day I had randomly chosen to fast and pray through some pressing personal issues – the fact that I was fasting I kept hidden even from my wife because I wanted this one to be deeply personal. As such, I received the dossier alert in a radically different manner from the way I had received earlier ones. This time I was not afraid to throw off the opression, pick up the scapel and take a nice, long look at this matter from all angles. Some elderly advice even came saying the two of us who had been dossiered should take some white handkerchiefs and go to dad’s grave, apologise for any misdeeds and leave the handkerchiefs there for the ancestral spirits to do their work of setting us free from any grudges. This rather extreme spiritist suggestion was perhaps the pain I needed to confront the opression that was happening here. “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children,” I recalled. That was a Biblical line at Proverbs 13:22. Suddenly, everything became clear to me in that instant. I found that my dad actually owed me! Well, not quite me – because I was already in charge of my own life now – but he owed my children some sort of inheritance, afterall. People who didn’t appreciate my economic situation and how I had survived for years without a job or a stable business would continue playing the lines of dad maybe having bottled up grudges against me but those who were alive to realities would actually be saying to me “your dad worked hard to educate all of you; that took a lot from him so now you can try and help him take care of what he owes to his grandchildren.” Ok, I strectch it somewhat there when I say “he owes” something to his grand-children but I hope you see my point: that actually, if anyone owed anything to anyone else here, it was my dad to his children and his grandchildren. As every good man should. While the Biblical code required me to obey my father, to show him respect and never bring him shame,8 nowhere in all the Bible was it expressely required of me to take care of his financial wants, only the things that were real basic needs.9 This meant that as long as I did my best to support him, nothing could be brought against me to put me under any sort of “supernatural bondage to poverty”. If anything, I found that the Bible actually required of my father that he not only have a portion of inheritance left to me but also to Wongani and Tontela and all their cousins! And the Bible is explicitly talking about wealth. It was required of 8 9

Colossinas 3:20 and Proverbs 10:1 1 Timothy 5:4,6

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The Biblical Code my father to leave some form of tangible value down to my children and those of my brothers and sisters! Yet, why did we not hear anything of this in the pulpits? It seems pious and proper to ask children to take good care of their parents in old age, which is indeed a correct thing to do, but that is not the entire message! Another sobering fact I saw – and which affected me as a father too – was the statement at 1 Timothy 5:8 basically saying that it was a sin to fail to provide for one’s family! What? What if I didn’t have work? How about all the many poor people I meet in the compounds who genuinely have no means and their children go home on less than one meal a day? How about the child-led families? But if people would bash Bibles over our heads using overstretched meanings of the phrase honour your parents, then they should be ready to overstretch this one too: “If anyone does not provide for their household, they have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever!” It was as if the Bible were taking it for granted that absolutely anyone, for as long as they were men of faith, should be able to put food on their families’ tables every single day. So… there is no unemployment? No hunger and thirst for the kids as long as their dad is a man of faith? This Biblical instruction was on the one hand, multiplying my present pains at failing to provide the old level of comforts and supplies to my family, but on the other hand, it was freeing me of any stretch obligations back to my father and his own nuclear family. And then somewhere else I saw a different approach: “I was young and now I am old,” it said, “yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread. They are always generous and lend freely;” (Psalm 37:25, 26). This was an even stronger message. Adding generosity and free-lending to the picture. Not only was it required of parents to provide a future cushion for their children down to the third generation, it was also required that they daily provide the food, clothing and shelter needs of their children in particular, and their relatives in general. These parents are further expected to give example to their children on how to be generous and to lend freely (without charging interest or pressuring for quick repayment). These are the big matters of livelihood and inheritance which parents of faith are to wrestle with. Children have duties, yes, but not of providing retirement benefits to their parents. If they provide these things, they shall do them not under compulsion or fear of curses but as a joy. Even if they have to sweat and sacrifice to participate in Robust Wealth

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The Biblical Code bread-winning for the family, children must be encouraged to do so out of love and with positive messages, never out of fearsome obligation. If there were any promise of curses in this equation, the curses would fall on the parents first before they fell on the children. That is the correct order of obligation. Parents had the obligation to provide. Then they failed to – for whatever reasons – and became poor widdows. Obligation switched to the children. Who failed second. The responsibility to provide is the parents’ before it shifts to anyone else. Isn’t that what 1 Timothy 5:8 said? If anyone does not provide for their household, they… are worse than an unbeliever. Granted, that passage refers more to willful neglect than circumstancial failure, but what is undebatable is that it goes against our usual tradition of laying almighty obligations on the shoulders of children – even calling them stingy or careless when, in fact, the problem may be totally different. But for the artificial fear that we might give license to …we are creating a society where children to neglect their parents children inherit only burdens that in old age, we overstretch the bind them, instead of liberating truth. And, turning tables wealth to help them achieve their around, we saddle the young ones with life-long burdens and fuller potential. guilt. For the parents who failed to provide (otherwise we wouldn’t now be here requiring their children to step in), we have all manner of ready-made excuses. “He struggled to raise you…,” “unemployment...,” “the economy…,” “health…,” etc. It might look like a wise route to take but, in reality, the only thing that we manage to achieve with all that guilt-bashing on the children is to keep families in the same place of poverty, generation after generation. In Jewish customary practice, children are actually entitled to a portion of inheritance when they reach a certain age. That is what makes the proverb at Luke 15:12 work. The father there was obligated to divide his estate out to his two sons when the younger of them asked for his share. It makes verse 31 work as well when the father says to the older son “all that I have is yours,” because indeed all of the two thirds of property that had remained officially belonged to his older son since the younger had already subtracted his one-third and carted it away to be enjoyed as he wished, in another country. Robust Wealth

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The Biblical Code

The child is the father to the man

When we speak of parents, the images evoked in our minds are of frail and old looking folk, so it seems logical to direct our talk at the stronger and fitter looking children, calling them irresponsible or unappreciative. This yoking of children with their parents’ failings might seem like no big deal until you realise that the children will soon become parents themselves. The children will soon inherit their fathers’ old excuses, encumber their own children with backward-facing obligations as well and the vicious cycle of poverty carries on. As an old Roman saying goes “the child is the father to the man.” So we shift our talk to the next generation of children, copying and pasting the very same complaints we had levelled against their fathers before them! In so doing, we are creating a society where children inherit, from their parents, only burdens that limit them, instead of liberating wealth to help them achieve their fuller potential. Our readiness to burden children with their fathers’ failings is the main cause of our combined failure to achieve proper social mobility. Children grow up to become just as poor as their parents before them, they attain only as much education as their parents before them and suffer from the same inhibitions which plagued their parents before them. As soon as a child achieves their first baby steps into independence, we are there to quickly saddle them with things they should never have to fight with. Ultimately, the family fails to move up the economic ladder, as the generations advance from one to the next. Children cannot take the first step to break bad habits. Parents – fathers, however frail and weak we might imagine them to be – must do so! Even from their sickbeds, they are able to take leadership and direct the family affairs. Woe to thee, o land, when thy king is a child! (Eccl. 10:16). As long as fathers continue to abdicate on their responsibilities as quickly as they do now, we shall never have the chance to train enough strong fighters to fight our “demons of poverty” as a society. The Bible is unequivocal about the matter. Let fathers provide for their households. Let them also provide so much reserve that their grandchildren are covered, too. The said fathers are to teach these codes of behaviour to their children after them so that the cycle continues. When one becomes a father, they must immediately begin to think about how they shall provide inheritance. Inheritance all the way down to the children of this child they now hold in their hands. So, if my father had done these things and then found me wasting any part of any inheritance he had left me then he would be totally justified to begrudge me. “The ancestral spirits”, as it were, would then have power to affect my affairs. But if, instead, my dad applied his life’s earnings in ways only he knew about and I, for my part, did

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The Biblical Code my very best to help in big and small ways, then there was no issue here. It is for parents to provide an inheritance to the children, not the other way round. If those who were speaking about my present difficulties were right that dad had only burried his money-grudges deeper instead of letting them go, during those postwedding days, then that (keeping of grudges) would be a matter between dad and his Maker, and dad’s Maker would never seek my input on it. The two would relate to each other as Father and son, and the Father would ask the re-youthed version of my father, “son, how did you take care of your grand-children’s needs?” Dad’s Maker would be seriously looking for details; He would not take any excuses, and would certainly not share the answer with me. When my part arrived later, I would be asked along the lines of “son, how did you share your father’s burdens in his old age?” I know what my answer will be, even if my Maker will not be looking for great detail in that open-ended question. My own detail section will come concerning Tontela, Wongani and any other souls after them. By this point, the interview will be intense. I hope that my answer to that part will be detailed enough to reach my Maker’s satisfaction. And as for my father before me, my own responses will not be shared with my children. Then it will be Wongani and Tontela’s turn, with anyone else after them. In same fashion, their own detail sections will concern their own children; they will not be penalised for having failed to provide for my needs per se. Maybe for neglecting me in old age but not for failing to buy me luxurious shoes or suits or cars or any items of ostentatious value. That would be twisted!… And so on to my children’s children. Because The Maker cares more about what we each do with what we have received than who to blame for what. For us as a society, it’s a choice: will our chief accountability be to the future generations or the old ones? Currently, our society forces us to be more backward looking than forward. Little wonder that few among us are able to move up our social ladders. So back here, I would continue to provide the support that I could manage to dad’s surviving family. But that support would be without any superstitious underpinnings. “Devil, you are a liar,” I said. And put an end to the oppression. From here on, …it’s a choice: will our chief success or failure would only depend accountability be to the future on three factors: my character, what I generations or to the old ones? put into my work and how seriously I did so.

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The Biblical Code

Ready help to leave an inheritance

There was once an under-prophet of Elisha who died a holy but seriously indebted man. When the widdow announced herself to Elisha, Elisha asked her some interesting things: first, he asked for what she already had in her house then he asked her to do some footwork which would immediately free her and her children of all their debts. They secretly “manufactured” as much oil as they could borrow containers from their neighbours to put the oil in. When the woman returned to the Prophet to explain the miracle that had just happened, the Prophet simply told her, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts. You and your sons can live on what is left.” (2Kings 4:1-7). All these events happened on the same day, meaning that there was urgency to this matter! Also worth noting is the fact that when the products of her footwork ran out, the miracle was also switched off. Then afterwards, she still needed to do the selling to convert her product into cash. This proves the connection between faith and hard work. It is an open rebuke on mordern fads of “miracle money” and similar magic tricks. Because the under-prophet was a devout man who had just missed this side of his responsibilities – to cover his children in the event of his death, God made a direct intervention in his affairs, post mortem. (Had this miracle not been performed, his two sons would have ended up being taken away as slaves to pay the family’s debts). We are told nothing about how the prophet came to be indebted, or even what had led to the prophet’s death, only the events which led to his debts being covered and his widdow and sons having something to live on. I believe that the silence and the words are no coincidence where they occur. They are intended to show what was important in this matter – the writing off of debts and the continued wellfare of the family after the prophet’s death. The widdow could have been put on social support from the Ministry of Prophet Elisha or been assisted in some other way to negotiate with the creditor. But none of those things happened. I believe the reason is simple: they were not going to be good enough as solutions to the imminent threat of slavery. In this case, the debt had to be quickly disposed of so that the family could live their lives autonomous and free – not dependent upon daily handouts from “the ministry” or living at the mercy of their father’s creditor. This story demonstrates why it is actually a sin for a man to fail to provide for his family or to fail to leave an inheritance for his descedants. It is because there is constant and ready help for this type of need – if only men everywhere knew how to pray their matters through, and, having prayed, how to energetically apply themselves in faith to get what they needed. Prayer and work go hand in hand to allow men everywhere to be able to feed their families and to leave an inheritance for their children’s children. The alternative is Robust Wealth

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The Biblical Code laziness, and laziness looks like this: excuses are made about the difficulty of finding work, the tough economy, disabilities, etc., all seemingly valid reasons. But when we let off those who make such excuses, they breed poverty and then their children after them only have their fathers’ excuses to inherit. The vicious cycle continues. We then sponsor long reports proving that “poverty is real” as if poverty had a personality and just happened upon an innocent soul every here and there. We then begin to campaign for handouts to be donated and for governments to scale up poverty alleviation programmes, etc. But all these things are founded upon excuses, laziness and a profound lack of faith. Am I accusing all poor people of being lazy? No. Am I saying that men everywhere have no excuse for not being able to work to sustain their families? Yes! In fact, I am saying that men everywhere ought to get tired of giving excuses and start looking – searching real hard – for solutions. Men everywhere are required to walk in faith and, mixed with that faith, they are required to be hard workers, earning a proper wage and providing well for their families. They must ensure that from whetever they make, they provide enough cover for the future needs of the family, down to the third generation (the children of their children). Then the children – who can only do what they see their fathers do – will inherit this culture of work and long-term responsibility. That is the Biblical way of doing things. Anything else is empty religion if we are lucky, or else it is demonic deception. Cross-generational inheritance is not even “a good idea”; it has been the practice of truly religious people for millennia. It might seem, at first sight, that what I am talking about is a luxury for a select few who can afford. Far from it! It is for completely everyone! It is a critical necessity if our society is to Cross-generational inheritance concern itself with right living that is not “a good idea”; it has been matters of basic economic survival be the practice of truly religious already settled. And it is the task of the people for millennia. fathers to take care of that one. They must see to it – without fail – that their households are covered and their children do not cry over food and drink. Am I saying that poverty everywhere is a result of laziness? A qualified ‘Yes’. Qualified only because poverty is a relative term. A person may own only a bicycle and believe themselves to be rich. They are ok, because giving someone a lift on their bicycle or being able to reach the next village before dark may be all the community contribution they ever dreamed of. An outsider looking in might Robust Wealth

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The Biblical Code consider this bicycle rider to be poor. Would they be justified to also call him lazy? Of course not! But another person may drive a car everywhere they need to go and count themselves poor. For such a person, continued stay in that condition would be a result of laziness. My personal view is that if you are living a life of dignity, good neighbourliness and the utmost contribution to your community then you are weathy. It has nothing to do with the amount of money written against your name, because money is simply a tool for making positive contributions. We chase wealth; money happens as a transient by-product, coming and going every now and then to keep our activities alive. Those who seek to hold onto it simply fall into greed and discover quickly how the love of it truly is the root of all evil.

Whats ‘Rich’ got to do with it? You have no doubt heard charismatic Christians cry out “God wants you to be rich!” The unspoken second part of course being, “Go get rich then bring a chunk of your riches to this Ministry!” Often, one or both parts of that message are plain wrong and motivated by the love of money more than the love of one’s neighbour. The problem is not the riches or the sacrificial giving; the problem is the duplicitous self interest. But the message which is always right is that God wants you to take good care of your family, your relatives and your descendants down to the third generation. We did not need many academic explanations of scripture to appreciate that. But saying that He wants you to take good care of your family is not the same thing as saying that He wants you to be rich. Please read that again. The manner in which God goes about helping you to take care of your descendants may or may not involve you hoarding tones of currency to your name. It could also be a day-by-day affair, but what it will be without doubt is a sure and stress-free effort. There might be stress over other matters but not this one. That is because the writer, peering down both sides of history – the past and the future – prophesied at Psalm 37:25 that he had ‘never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.’ Once you do the getting up and the starting, the matter is on God’s table, whether or not you have stashes of cash to your name. I am saying that poverty is first of all a mindset (the boundaries which people set for themselves in their own minds), then a behaviour (their work ethic), before we see it squeeze people up like a python consuming its prey. But for our stubborn excuses, we would quickly make the right connections and be freed. Overall, I am saying that the time has come for the fathers to step up to the plate and do the full providing that they are supposed to do and starting out rich or poor has nothing to do with it.

A wise son maketh a glad father The usual sense in which this part of Biblical code is taken is where the son and the father are two different persons. This is the only sense, in fact, which the New International Version communicates because it separates the verb and subject much Robust Wealth

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The Biblical Code more clearly when it reads “brings joy to his father”. This would have been the exact same meaning if the older version had also said “maketh a father glad” or even better if it had said “maketh his father glad”. But it says “maketh a glad father”. This carries a second and very important meaning. It is the same double meaning in the phrase “a good student makes a good teacher.” The one meaning is that a good student makes his teacher look good; the other is that a good student eventually develops into a good teacher. While the New International Version makes an admirable attempt to put the message of that verse on a silver spoon for newcomers to such texts, I believe that the older King James Version has done well to capture and retain the fuller meaning. If a person discharges his duties of sonship wisely, in addition to making his father happy, he will himself grow up to become a glad father, a content parent to his own children. Thus, not only do children owe obedience to their parents, they also owe it to their own future selves to gain wisdom in their youthful years, their years of sonship. If during their sonship they are wise, during their fatherhood they shall be glad. And wisdom does not mean blind following of every whim and wish of other people. Rather, it means thinking things through; letting matters make sense and being cautious instead of plunging headlong into every new thing. Sometimes wisdom can require a respectful refusal to obey oppressive instructions. If a son were to see a father abusing his sister, what would wisdom require? What if a son were to be asked by his father to go and steal some money from a neighbour’s house and with that stolen money buy food for the day? What if a son were being unfairly condemned for tasks which his father failed to carry out (if the father were simply blame-shifting)? What would wisdom dictate in this case? Wisdom does not take a political “us-and-them” approach to life; it embraces all and then seeks that everyone take their responsibilities seriously. There is no presumption on race, gender or age or any other characteristic except the responsibilities that are required of each person. In the case of the son witnessing abuse, the son will do well to seek outside help as there is no way he can discipline his own father, although the information that he now has gives him the responsibility to act. In the case of the son being asked to steal to provide for the family, he will be acting wisely if he refused to obey that instruction and simply asked the father what they could do together to earn their own money instead – let us stay hungry for today if need be. In the case of unfair accusation, the son will do well to throw off all such accusation and remind the father of his own responsibilities; if the son took on a false humility stance of trying to quietly shoulder that burden, he would be cheating on everyone involved and would only breed hatred in the end. Every person must take care of their own responsibilities, and the more seriously they do that, the more joy and fulfilment they will discover. That is the Biblical code. My freedom came when I realised that as long as I worried about other people’s responsibilities I would not be able to attend to my own.

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Protecting the Strong and Fighting the Weak

3 Customary Codes There is no shortage of good inheritance models. But useful experience is in much shorter supply. In this chapter I draw from recent history and contemporary practice to show the same cross-generational stretch which underpins all progress in all societies surveyed.

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A

Protecting the Strong and Fighting the Weak t no point is the responsibility of parents to their children more evident than at marriage. In all cultures surveyed, parents pay for the marriage of their children. In Western cultures, the girl’s father pays for the wedding. In the most populous of Eastern cultures, the bride’s parents pay the dowry for their daughter’s marriage. In many Zambian customs, including ours in Mafinga, the groom’s father pays value measured in cattle to the bride’s family. In so doing, he asserts his right to give his surname to this new family. The groom, in showing respect, allows his father to also give the first name to the first born child. Thus, good men go beyond their children and directly impart not only wealth but also names and all other forms of heritage upon their children’s children.

African Practices When my father married, he did so with remote arrangements. My grandfather, Mr Gomezyani Simwaba, transferred 9 heads of cattle to his fellow parents for the marriage of his son to their daughter. That was the bride price. He had done the same in my dad’s first marriage. This is a common practice in Africa. Parents exchange value for the marriages of their children, even if their children make independent choices of marriage partner. In East Africa, the elders discuss the bride price and pay a part of it, leaving the rest to be paid off later by the groom. In West Africa (Nigeria), the elders discuss the bride price and pay it off family to family (i,e., the groom may be involved and even sponsor everything, but it will come as family-Groom to family-Bride with data lost on who bought what exactly). The common strand through all these customs is what I refer to as the Three Generational Overlap – the fact that the father’s generation are instrumental to the value exchanges that happen to facilitate for the children of their children (the third generation) to arrive. And when the third generation arrives, the first generation is involved again, first in the pre- and early post-natal care, through the naming of baby names to final inheritance. But why are the fathers even interested in the affairs of the third generation? It is the response to this question which unlocks the power of this practice for African societies. It is about giving full incubation to the next generation complete with real life example of how to give a proper inheritance (see The Seven Dimensions of Inheritance in Chapter 7). The student is not ready to be weaned until he sees his own teacher begin to teach another. Just because our children leave our homes to create their own nests somewhere else does not mean that they are ready to be the best citizens that they could be, standing alone. They now need to see their parents give, teach, love and Robust Wealth

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Protecting the Strong and Fighting the Weak protect beyond them (the children) in order to truly appreciate the value of these traditions. If parents are able to demonstrate this level of provision, they have succeeded in setting firm example, and it will be the standard of practice which their direct children (the middle generation) will inherit for their own grandchildren as well. That is four generations impacted by the actions of one. This straddling of generations in the inheritance of behaviour is a far more powerful chain than if codes of practice were simply written down and buttressed in a serial queue from one generation to the next. Although I have used the African model to demonstrate cross generational (1st to 3rd) reach, it actually applies in all cultures the same way. That is because what we are discussing here is a fundamental human trait – like the need for food, love, sleep, water, etc., all activities that are fully universal.

Western Practices Here, parents are fully responsible for at least the K-to-12 (Kindergarten to Grade 12) part of the education of their children. However, without need for coercion, parents know that even tertiary education is theirs to pay for. Further, they also pay for the weddings/marriage of their daughters. African societies mostly shudder at that! The contrast is huge since in Africa, the flow of value is in the opposite direction where the groom pays for not only the wedding but also a lump sum to the girl’s parents as lobola (bride price). The common strand – if you notice – is that value flows from the parents on account of and to support their childrens activities.

Eastern Practices All the practices of the West apply. Further, the parents will even be involved in the choice of spouse for their children. Although this tradition is fast giving way to the Western model where the inexperienced child chooses their partner unaided, there is no scientific evidence to support the one model over the other, except for anecdotal inferences. Any number of generations of the family (parents, children, grandchildren and more) may live together under one roof. This serves for much greater common time between the generations and family members, leading to much more entrenched family traditions when compared to other cultures. It comes as no surprise that the longevity of entreprenuerial activity is highest in these cultures as well. A Kauffman synthesis paper, published in December 2016 [Research on Race & Entreprenuership] found significant differences in entreprenuership and success rates of that entreprenuership, based on ethnicity. The Kauffman researchers Robust Wealth

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Protecting the Strong and Fighting the Weak attributed the differences to the 3 m’s – management, money, markets. I agree. In fact I strongly believe that they should have included another factor in a standalone capacity, and that factor would be family integration. They appeared to skirt the matter at its fringes when they considered the common sources of startup capital, where they stated (emphasis added) that: “with large racial gaps related to the ability of an entreprenuer to rely on personal savings or family to supplement startup funding, potential entreprenuers of [colour] are at a disadvantage in being able to fund their ventures´ Earlier, researchers at MIT putting together the report Black, Asian and White Owned Businesses in the US (Farlies and Robb, 2000) stated on page 10 that “Asian firms clearly have the strongest performance of all major racial and ethnic groups after removing small scale businesses” These reports indicate that there indeed is a correlation between ethinicity and success of entrepreneurial activity and the differences can be directly linked to family/cultural practices. Those family practices are all about inheritance – some cultures are more effective at doing inheritance than others. It is like in some cultures the genrations are interlinked like a chain whereas in others it is each generation attempting to stand alone and fend for itself from start to finish.

Common Practices Across all cultures, the grandparents interact with their grandchildren out of strong desire rather than duty or discipline. This enhances the potential for value exchange. It also increases the longevity of whatever lessons are learnt within that relationship. This is a good basis for progress.

A Call to Change This basis – where outgoing generations dedicate their energies fully to the growth of incoming ones (particularly the third generation, so that the economically active middle generation is left to be economically active) – is what we need to acknowledge microscopically and to deploy en masse, if we want to step-change our fortunes. We need to design our governance and social systems with this need in mind. That the grandparents need to spend lots of time training up their grandchildren. It is not to be a command or a constitutional prescription but it needs to be quietly provided for so that the takers can take advantage of it and leap ahead. For example, instead of gunning for later and later retirement, we simply provide for shorter and shorter work days for grandparents or people who have attained a certain age, we include much reference to grandparents in the books and school syllabuses, we encourage homework assistance by grandparents wherever possible, we provide for ocassional school outings with grandparents, etc., the key objective being to keep that Robust Wealth

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Protecting the Strong and Fighting the Weak cross-generational link relevant through regular contact and reference. Many studies have shown a strong link between pupils’ school performance and active parental involvement in these children’s school work. I wonder how much we stand to gain by extending that parental contact to the next generation back…? In many cultures particularly in the advanced West, a good proportion of granparents expect to end their lives in some old peoples’s care home somewhere, whereas in the less advanced cultures, the practice of care homes is even considered a taboo – one owes it to their parents to look after them in old age as they also looked after one in infancy. Which practice is best for development purposes? Without hesitation I would recommend a firm middle ground. While full time, professional care givers may be required often for a good fraction of our aged, that requirement should never take away from the need for the seniormost experienced of our citizens to interact strongly with our youth, the incoming and inexperienced. It is extremely crucial that the history, the experiences and the gathered wisdom be shared and imparted in a dedicated manner. Without this, we shall continue to reset each new generation to the same old starting points which their predecessors had faced before them. This would make any attempts at offering a rounded inheritance package that moves our society to higher ground pointless – it will lack cover at the back. The most endowed will simply turn prodigal – squandering what they do not really appreciate as having been procured and secured at extreme cost – while the least endowed will keep fighting to move up. Overall, our society will remain largely in the same place from one age to the next. What I am talking about, well, how does it differ from children simply visiting their grannies every now and then? It differs very much, actually! The teasing that goes on – I shall call it teasing – when children visit their grannies should simply indicate to us that we have the potential. What I am recommending is a situation where the children have an unwritten program of tutelage from their grannies on all manner of life matters. From accountability for decisions made to advising on love choices, from learning about how to work and save money to how to deal with the bullies at school, etc. In order for these things to become natural and consistent, all three parties involved – children, parents and grandparents – must be committed to a program of frequent social contact. It would be every parent’s responsibility to teach their children about the value that grannies hold and the importance to learn all that they can from there. The wise among the children would respond well and get with the program. And in order for the relationship to be meaningful, the children should be involved in the practical care-giving. Some might refer to it as child labour. Fine. Even where biological grannies are absent, some surrogate grandparents could be found. The point for parents is not to outsource the training of their children but to ensure that full contact with wisdom is available to the children, both from them as direct parents and from more experienced seniors who can be less aggressive and perhaps more patient with the children’s development needs. Robust Wealth

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4 Why the Third Generation? Why stretch to their children’s children? It is no mere coincidence. There are some strong hereditary benefits when fathers stretch their impact to the third generation, in addition to purely economic ones.

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Why the Third Generation? t is a lot easier to save for the children of your children than for your immediate ones. This is because you have a whole lot more time available to build up a sensible cushion of wealth – even starting with a very small seed – for your grandchildren than you have for your own. Secondly, saving for children you have not seen has what I like to refer to as the see-no-wrong-take-no-wrong bias. This is where all you see about someone is the good in them and nothing besides. Others call it a positivity bias. Children who have yet to arrive are regarded fondly. And the positive feelings are all that will be needed for now. Their task is to motivate our first actions and to keep us there. But the above are not the reasons for bringing up the third generation in this topic of inheritance. First, a survey in my own family. My grandfather placed emphasis on education for his male children. His girls did not have to go far on that route but his sons needed to excel at school. He bequeathed education to them. To his daughters, he bequeathed marriages. Today, many of us (the third generation) are also quite well educated. The men, that is. The women still have an uphill battle to fight. And that is it! What our grandfather wanted was granted. We, his descendants all still depend on others to employ us and give us our points of contribution to society. If those employers of ours decide they have had enough, we are put out and forgotten about. Even the land which our grandfather had to himself when he was alive is now parcelled out and we have to go back and pay strangers to get a little bit of it back. Only a handful of us still hold on to a small piece of ground each. So some among us (“some” because the girls among us have a different story to tell) got education. But how about the other six aspects of heritage, such as relationships, cross-generational goals, long assets, etc? Consequently, what is happening now is that we, as his children’s children are starting from scratch to establish our small patches of family legacy, land, professions, business, cross-generational goals, etc. To some, this might seems ok. Some schools of thought even oppose inheritance altogether, saying that it develops children who are lazier or less appreciative than their parents. But those sort of arguments only apply in the micro sense (when the lens is fixed on inheritance from one generation to the next only). When we lift our eyes to the bigger picture, zooming out to maybe five, six or seven generations (100+years of human progress) it becomes abundantly clear why inheritance is an inescapable requirement for continued human existence. Should the generation that built the railways unbuild the railways because their descendants might turn out to be lazier? Should the generation that invented the aeroplane, uninvent air travel? Should Faraday and his colleagues take away knowledge on electricity for us to invent it for ourselves as well? When we look at the larger scheme of things which guarantee human progress, we see that the developments that are achieved in one generation become necessary for the next

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Why the Third Generation? to build upon to advance the entire human race from station two to station three. The question now becomes how effectively one generation hands over its culture of hard work to the next so that the next generation can face their own set of challenges with the same hard determination of the last. Regarding progress across the generations, none can argue against incrementalism10. The BBC reported in July 2018 that about one third of the world’s wealthiest people actually inherited their wealth.11 The fraction grows to 50% when Europe only is considered. One could argue that even those who are recorded as being “self-made” can never truly claim that. How does one even make himself/herself in our heavily interconnected world? Did such people start from inventing their own fire, their own wheel, their own telephones and printers and internet… and then come up with the wealth they now have? It is not possible to truly make oneself; we all have to “stand on the shoulders of giants” to get from here to there. One of the reasons the majority of black families are poor is that they are not good at handing over the seven dimesions of inheritance from one generation to the next (see Chapter 7 for the seven dimensions of inheritance). Studies conducted in the USA (chosen simply because it is by far the most multi-racial country on earth today) show that in decreasing order of amount of inherited wealth, the races line up as follows: white, asian, hispanic, black. In a study covering 5,000 families titled “Do Financial Support and Inheritance Contribute to the Racial Wealth Gap?” the Urban Institute12 reported: “…we find that black families and Hispanic families are five times less likely to receive large gifts and inheritances than white families. As measured over a two-year period, Hispanic immigrants receive $2,123 less in large gifts and inheritances than white families. Non-Hispanic immigrants receive $1,772 less. Black families receive an astounding $5,013 less in large gifts and inheritances than white families. These average differences add up to substantial amounts over time. …We found that large gifts and inheritances received over the past 10 years account for 12 percent of the difference in wealth between whites and blacks.”

Although the Urban Institute’s study was limited to monetisable aspects of inheritance, its findings speak volumes about inheritance of non-monetisable aspects as well. What are the chances that a person who leaves totally nothing of 10

A method of working by adding many small incremental changes as opposed to few large jumps. This method as applied to public policy making was formalised by the American political scientist, Charles Lindblom in the 1950s based on powerful argument showing that rational decision making in public policy was a non-attainable ideal. Lindblom argued that due to the plurality of actors in the public decision making domain, there would be unending debate on objectives coupled with limited knowledge restricting the accuracy of any predictions, so how could anyone know whether or not the course adopted was the optimal one? Lindblom argued that policy makers focus instead on making incremental changes based on past policies, rather than the seeking of wholesale leaps. This thinking still guides constitutional development and other law making today. 11 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c342kgq7lmqt/billionaires&link_location=live-reporting-story 12 http://www.urban.org

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Why the Third Generation? financial value to his children will go ahead and leave strong cross-generational goals to them? Or professional skills? They may inherit his genetics, but in terms of wealth, the family will have to start all over, just as their father had done before them in fact. I call this the generational reset – the practice where each next generation restarts everything about how they make their living, relative to the global average. The Urban Instutite study found that 12% of the wealth disparity between whites and blacks living in the USA were directly attributable to large [monetizable] gifts and inheritances. I wonder how the numbers would shift if the study were broadened to include the remaining six dimensions of inheritance other than just the monetizable aspects. These dimensions would be familial values, education, people skills and relationships, professional skills, cross-generational goals, business processes and assets thereof. I wonder how much these aspects of inheritance, in addition to land, would account for the wealth disparities across the races. In fact, I would like to propose to you a much stronger point. That interconnectedness of the generations is the single biggest determinant to the relative wealth of the races. The world’s wealthiest people also follow the order of the races as they appeared in the study by the Urban Institute. Of the world’s richest one hundred people by the end of 2019, …interconnectedness of the 68 are white, 26 are asian, 4 are hispanics and 1, Alicko Dangote, is generations is the single black. The picture remains almost biggest reason for differences identical, in percentage terms, when in the wealth of the races. spread to the five hundred wealthiest people on the planet, with 66% being white, 28% Asians and 1% black. That picture of how the races line up in wealth terms hides some very troubling facts – facts which prove the importance of cross-generational handovers of wealth. There could be no firmer proof of being self made than if we had a story of former slaves who had been “freed” to nothing in particular and who managed to take that nothingness and create billions of dollars in real, measurable wealth. I would like to refer to one catastrophic event in the United States of America (for reasons already stated about the racial mix of this nation, but also for its clear demonstration of the two most critical messages of this entire book, inheritance and the value cycle). This event demonstrates most clearly the need for generational handover as well as the two arms of the value cycle (See Chapter 6). Wealth will always be vulnerable if it cannot be defended physically (the other arm Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? of course is that military might will be destructive if it cannot be supported by economic progress, but for now the interest is in preserving and growing economic wealth). The place is Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1900s. A thriving black district grows to levels which could only be envied by their former slave-owners. It is referred to as the Black Wall Street because of its economic heights of affluence and professionalism. At the time, the larger city is white controlled and the KKK (a hate group whose sole purpose is to entrench white supremacy) are active across the USA. Many in white government are still sympathetic to racial prejudices and, underground, actively take sides. The white community feel threatened by a former slave community that has so developed and surpassed every equivalently sized people group in the area that all developmental sociologists in the nation are buffled. That self contained black community, living side by side with a much poorer white community, have their own eateries, cinemas, banks, civic organisations, and are, by every description, a self-governing economic unit worth hundreds of millions of dollars, goodwill accounted for. It is only a matter of time before their uncomfortable white neighbours have a scapegoat behind which to hide their open onslaught on Black Wall Street. In 1921, a rain of terror falls on the black side of Tulsa city. Reliable accounts state that TNT bombs were falling from the sky (clearly, high powers were supporting this massacre). The erstwhile peaceful blacks are outnumbered and outgunned for self defense. Up to ten thousand black people are left bereaved and homeless but all compensation is denied all the way up to the US Supreme Court, although after a report comes out some eighty years later (in 2001), white leadership slowly begin to acknowledge that Tulsa was not a “race riot” but an actual massacre intended to wipe out a successful black experiment of a community, and that some sort of compensation was necessary. When you search for Black Wall Street for online accounts, some closely related phrases in the tag cloud will be “Little Africa” as that affluent side of Tulsa was called then for obvious reasons, “massacre” and “Oklahoma race riots”. What I am fully convinced of is that in its genesis, the Tulsa Massacre (for that is what its true name ought to be) did start out as a race riot, but when the police and other public protection units failed to turn up to protect a key part of their citizenry, it totally morphed into a full blown python, squeezing the black lives of Tulsa out of their breath: mother, daughter, son and father all together. It became a racial massacre intended to reset what the bad side of the white community at that time thought the slave race did not deserve to have.13

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Of all online sources, I found the following to be a very informative account complete with engaging artwork of what that massacre was about and what it looked like: www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/hbo2019/the-massacre-of-black-wall-street/3217/

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Why the Third Generation?

A history of frustration and reset Of all races in the world, the black race has known generational reset far more than any other. Generational reset is where the wealth and cultural gains of one generation is damaged and cut off so much that the next one has to totally start over. We do not need to discuss for long the shipping of millions upon millions of slaves from the African continent to North America via Europe. The cultural and developmental reset is much better recorded in other books. One of the most poignant and intriguing (more because of the silence rather than what is said about it), is the holocaust of what was then the Belgian Congo (present day Democratic Republic of Congo). King Leopold III of Belgium had claimed, with the key support of the USA, personal rulership over the Congo region. He was The Law in Congo and butchered around 5 – 10 million black natives of the Congo, not counting the ones he amputated for “laziness”. This holocaust-scale wipe out went uncondemned. While many, including mself, question why the German holocaust involving about the same number of Jews seems to be the only holocaust the world speaks about (in fact we even capitalise that one to The Holocaust as though there only ever was one holocaust), my response is the value cycle and inheritance. The Jews have preserved their cross-generational gains, struggles and goals far better than the black community does. It is not outsiders who thrust the matter of their holocaust to the headlines but the Jews themselves. And they should. And so should the Congolese and the wider black community. No one will hand down to our children our experiences and struggles if we do not ourselves make those experiences and struggles matters of existential importance. Secondly, as the value cycle suggests, a militarily weak community can never celebrate its wins and fails to educate and forearm its successor generations without needing the permission of its overloads first. Even after falling victim without protection from state or federal government, the black community that had just been decimated in Tulsa could not speak openly of that massacre for many years after, for fear that another tensions would escalate. In fact, it was the villains – the bad part of white America then, which was calling the shots and dictating what language to use to describe what had just happened. “They were race riots folks; racial conflict coming to a head; a force majeure to the insurers!” And so the decimated black community couldn’t even get an insurance payout to start rebuilding their lives from somewhere. This was going to be total generational reset. Writ large. In the same manner, the people of Congo have never had a voice to let the world know how King Leopold and the Belgian people totally dismembered them, forcing natives into labour camps, tearing families apart and murdering at will millions of them, in the early twentieth century. This was a total reset of Congolese life. But, inevitably, voices of dissent were found and a strong leader of the independence movement arose in Patrice Lumumba. It is widely believed that with US support, Belgium schemed the assassination of Lumumba because Belgium Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? wanted Congo free in name only. Belgian troops stationed in Congo (with neither Congolese government approval nor United Nations sanction) working together with some disaffected local operatives, hijacked Lumumba and two of his close compatriots and swiftly executed them, mutilating their bodies beyond recognition. Mobutu Seseseko ascended to puppet leadership of the Congo (and rechristened it Zaire), remaining there for about three decades. This period saw the Congo totally ransacked of its resources. Some reliably believe that the uranium with dropped on Hiroshima in 1944, resetting the Japanese empire to the point they curled their military philosophy inward for decades to come, had come out of Belgian Congo. And, in classic snake around style, the same powers (Belgium and USA) that had shawled and sponsored him to continue the suppression of an entire people, once their purposes were met and the time ripe for change, turned and labelled Mobutu a despot, a cruel African dictator.

Tailstarting On account of the above selected and many other episodes of generational reset, the black race has had a tailstart at almost every race it runs in terms of wealth. But the interesting thing here is that the effects of the resets are starting to show and some of the shows are tearsome stories with unexpected turns. As a result of constant reset, the black community has had to dig deep into its humanness and has come out with the beatiful side of humanity. I once saw a video of a brother to a murdered young black man going over to the white woman who had shot his brother dead and hugging the woman to tell her he had forgiven her. Although many questions arose from this event which stirred global talking points, I believe the biggest winner from all this was that young man. With that one action he had managed to put permanently beneath him tones and tones of baggage and to free himself to go on and conquer the world in ways his aggressors would only dream of. An African native, plying his trade on the continent has propelled himself into the top 99 wealthiest people in the world. And behind him are many following. A countryman, Mike Adenuga, followed at position 496, according to CEOWorld of the USA. In between there are plenty of other Africans or people of African descent. These people are starting from total reset positions – overwhelmingly disadvantaged against their better regarded non-black peers. For the very first time in the history of paid education in the USA, a billionaire went and paid off the student loans of all 396 graduating students at a university, running into a hundred or two million dollars. And that person was black engineer and venture capitalist, Robert F. Smith. Amazingly, Robert Smith had been present as a toddler during the famous I Have A Dream address by Martin Luther King. Robert Smiths’ parents – both black – were school teachers, both PhD holders who inspired a knack for learning and excellence in their sons. Although his doctorate is honourary, Robert Smith has hit his own accomplishments in patents to his Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? name both in the USA and in Europe, as well as the award-winning, multi-billion dollar venture capital firm he founded and still runs. It is not difficult to see that natural progression across the generations from reset slaves given a tailstart, to middle class but well educated parents, to accomplished and impactful citizens managing wealth across dozens of countries. With the determination of the general black community in America, it was anyone’s guess which race would join white in being named President of the United States of America and becoming, in our era, the most powerful person on earth. Born from a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, Barak Obama, an astute lawyer cum senator became the 44 th President of the United States, serving two full terms and leaving a legacy as one of the best and certainly one of the most admired presidents of the United States ever, his race notwithstanding. Obama single-handely changed a lot of minds in how they regard the black race. It came smart, articulate, funny, sexy and certainly not a loser race. Obama, his black wife Michelle and their two daughters Malia and Natasha put black firmly in the spotlight by being the most powerful and best protected first family on earth and all of them were black. In a country that had once enslaved people like them and certainly would at that time have thought the worst of them as human beings. These examples go to prove one thing: that tailstarting does not mean one is bad, just that externalities are disadvantaging them. As we say in Zambia, ukutangila tekufika (having a headstart doesn’t translate to arriving first). What I have said above (and will say in thinner quantity below) speaks much to the black race but it is applicable to any race at all. The take home lessons would be helpful to all regardless of the grouping they identify with. Especially now when the old guard with their us-and-them attitudes to race are phasing out and a new age that thinks little of skin colour, is more accepting of personal preferences and cares more how one behaves than what race one is, the lessons I am about to share are applicable across the board

Three things you must be in order to hand over wealth Visionary One key reason the black race has suffered undending reset is that they have been good at “making lemonade out of the lemons they have been delt.” While that might be commendable and earn top marks for resilience, it still begs the question “why always you?” How could a race be so defeatable and enslavable without a fightback? Many iterations of answers are possible but in the end, they all point at a lack of anticipation of potential dangers. Unfortunately, those who are highly adaptible are also quite poor at surveilling for threats to their continued enjoyment of the status quo. While their white counterparts were busy fighting over small patches of land in Europe and learning vital negotiation and other skills of war, the black Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? race was carefree in enjoying vast wealthy lands measuring many thousands of square miles, wildlife and mineral resources per Characteristics of the provider of inheritance inhabitant. So when a ruthless people from far off 1. Visionary – anticipates dangers and lands arrived, they smiled existential risks; mitigates sufficiently and welcomed them, not knowing that they were 2. Reacher – using what they have to service admitting their future their connection to the younger generations tormentors. The picture is much the 3. Protector – deploy vision, discipline and same for the key examples consistency to structure wealth in systems that given of the Oklahoma can be defended Massacre of 1921 as well as King Leopold’s holocaust in the Congo. In order to be a giver of inheritance to your children’s children, you need to be so visionary that you can accurately anticipate trouble or at least critically survey for existential risks and mitigate them as far as possible. Focusing intently on the Tulsa Massacre, I couldn’t stop myself from asking why the black population of Tulsa had placed all their eggs so much in one basket, knowing they were a sitting duck for the emboldening KKK and the deranged of the white leadership at the time. Did they count their ownership of rifles and bullets as being protection enough and their policies with white corporations as insurance enough? Unfortunately, when one lacks vision, the impacts can be totally unforgiving. This is why the first requirement for one to be a bequeather of wealth is to have vision, anticipating needs, dangers, threats as well as opportunities with almost paranoid intensity. Reacher I like to call this the evangelistic work of fatherhood. It is one thing to think good thoughts for your children but a whole different fieldgame to create an environment that takes care of all the pluses and minuses to ensure your children are able to make the best of the inheritance you prepare for them. The only sure way around this one is to extend your reach to third parties. Think not only about your next of kin but the next after them also. And act on those thoughts. You need to be able to reach those people and that generation with something tangible now. If you find you are not able to leave much, then let it all go down to the third generation. When it comes to inheritance, it pays to start with the end from the beginning. That way you create enough working space to build up something useful. Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? In case you have yet to notice, there is no option of leaving nothing. Why? Because you need to be a cross-generational thinker. Do not be the one who turns out to be the weakest link in the chain. Pass the value on. Even if I have unruly offspring, I must never deprive the good ones who will certainly come after them. They will all be my bloodline and they will not accept any amount of protestation when they start asking why they are having to struggle while their neighbours are relaxing courtesy of the foresight of their ancestors, your peers today. Imagine it this way: after you are long gone, that untameable son or daughter of yours finally sees the light and settles into the sensible lane. He/she has children and is able to get them to walk the straight path. They even name their children after you. Those children grow to adore you from the stories mom or dad shares with them often and they wish they could just connect with you somehow. Unfortunately, you didn’t think to leave anything of value that would be passed to them because of your unending troubles with your child. Now these grandchildren of yours have to tailstart. Just like you had done before them too. Must they go through life barely surviving? Just as you had done before them? Would that make you proud as progenitor of this clan? And, well, since we as a species must advance with the times, would your contribution to that advancement be one to be proud of? Even if you failed to make your own life count for much, you can at least reach out to your bloodline after you to take up the button and, building on the solid foundation you lay today, make their lives count. I call this type of thinking, reach thinking – intended phonetic pun on rich thinking. The activity, I call reaching. For example, if you had K2 (12 cents) in your pocket, it might not be able to do much for you for lunch but you could use it to reach your little children by buying their favourite candy with it and delivering to them in evening; the joy on their faces being a good enough repayment for the hours of hunger you had just endured. Protector This is closely related to vision, only differing at the end result. The output of vision are plans of action, whereas the output of protection are physical and smart systems safeguarding premises, assets, people and ways of life. Returning to the Tulsa Massacre, how could the black community have been better protectors of their wealth? How easy was it for them to foresee the scale of calamity that their better protected white friends were able to mete out on them? At this stage it pays absolutely nothing to take sides, to be angry, sympathetic, defensive or even evasive. Apologetic maybe, but even that will not take us as a human race far until we deal with the overall question of how to protect effectively. It could have been any race against any other. Or any group against any other. All that was needed was some unifying common thread and, in this case, race worked as fine a job as any other factor could have. Tribal wars have been waged the world over by people within the same race. As Slobadan Milosevic did. As Hitler did. As Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? Chaka Zulu did. And the Vikings. And the Chinese kings. All it takes is any common thread that unifies one group enough against another. And then human nature takes over as Biblical Cain against Abel. So in the end, what’s race got to do with it? If we continue looking at the challenge of protection through lenses of race, we shall surely lose. In this project, race is a diversion; a highly deceptive diversion. He who will not learn shall be found grumbling alone. About everything. While some are still trying to master ground combat, others are announcing the formation of Space Forces, never mind an Air Force. Why? Because they have learnt how to be protectors. Since early 20th Century, China has been on the ascendacy. The Soviet Union tussled with the USA but lost because their second arm of the Value Cycle (economic advantage) was weak. Japan, having absorbed an atomic bomb, had curled in their military side and were limping on one leg (a highly successful limp we must add), and were nowhere near presenting a threat to the USA or any of its allies in terms of global influence and transferrable wealth. Only the USA was able to shift its weight this way and that, at will, without having to enter heavy calculations first. But China was rising. By the first decade of the 21st Century (2000 – 2010), it had become clear that the US’s dominance in the skies was under threat, this time not just from Russia but more from China. China was not only seriously advancing in military technology and hardware but they had also already overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy. This meant that, unlike other contenders before them, China was growing its influence on both legs of the Value Cycle. Their economic goals and their military ones were speaking to each other. China could not be ignored. And when the world had had its fill of western cultural exportation and were now far more open to Eastern delights coming out of China, Tailand, Vietnam, Korea and Malaysia, it became clear to the USA that time had come to raise the bar. In January 2020, the President of the United States signed into law Bills authorising the United States Department of Defense to set up a Space Force. While some saw brinkmanship, others knew that the USA was serious and that any technological and knowledge advances that would result from the work of the Space Force would directly benefit the US in other fronts of their overall wealth machinery (what they like to refer to as “US interests”). At the same time, they were also busy renegotiating every major trade deal, most notably, with China. In a move only ever seen during the Cold War years when the US’s key challenger was the Soviet Union, The US government stepped into the economic arena and overtly banned a rising technological giant from China, called Huawei, from doing business with any American company or any national ally of Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? the US. This, for fear that the Chinese government would gain access to tonnes and tonnes of data which would fall into the hands of Hauwei if Huawei’s advancement as a giant of global Information and Communications Technology was not checked. At the same time again, the USA were stirring disquiet in all the key oil suppliers of the world including Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya and others. The sum total of all these activities is a defense – successful or not – of US economic and military leadership of the world, allowing no one try and eat away from that leadership. While the success of these maneuvers is likely to be low at best (the quality of America’s leaders for winning hearts and minds around the world is falling, causing many to seek alternatives as happened in the case of Huawei who went on to develop technology platforms to directly rival those of Western – read US – companies, when Huawei could simply have continued riding and depending on those US companies and perhaps being better watched and spied upon that way), they demonstrate the interconnectedness of military strength and economic advantage in determining the wealth that a nation is able to create and to protect and, ultimately, what influence that nation will be able to achieve over others as a result (in what I call the Value Cycle – see Chapter 6). Now, when I speak about the West “being able to watch and to spy on” Huawei, many people wince as though I were speaking about murder. However, the reality of the world we live in is that economic espionage is an activity that is as old as civilisation itself. Those at the leading edge do it all the time. Even in Biblical times they did it on both ends (the good guys and the bad) as at Numbers 13:27-28. One look at the depth of facts contained in the CIA World Factbook which is openely available on the internet (www.cia.gov) should …wealth is nothing if you convice the doubters. That is the cannot defend it. declassified part of the information. Far more than that remains completely unavailable even to many high ranking Defense Department officials unless they satisfy some need-to-know conditions first. It remains anyone’s guess what information that would be as well as the methods used to acquire it. Now what does all this have to do with inheritance? Well, a huge lot actually. We all need to think like the USA (anticipating threats far into the future). We all need to realise what China had already realised by the time the 1800s were closing: that whatever you do, gain knowledge and understanding; if it takes you to copycat Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? others to learn, then do so unashamedly, but by all means develop your economic wealth in tandem with your ability to protect that wealth using both physical and smart means. This is something that Africa has yet to learn how to do. No one is exempt just because, “well, I come from Africa and in Africa we don’t fight with anyone…” Even with its limited firepower, Africa cannot escape the power of the Value Cycle: wealth is nothing if you cannot defend it. At each level of wealth, the most important aspect of protection is not military might or physical force but the strategic thinking (that leads to that military might or physical force). As such, even Africans can protect their wealth because no one stops them from holding brainstorm sessions to analyse all risks to their economic growth deep into the future, say some 50 years forward and coming up with smart strategies to sidestep the need for missiles, jets, drones and warheads but still maintain sovereignty. With or without appearances. In other words, Africa needs to respect more what happens behind the scenes and underground than all the showmanship that occurs in front of the cameras. It can be a strategic decision. For now. To get to a known economic point first, like the Chinese did, and then to build up smart capacity to defend their wealth based on that economic progress. In that space of strategic actions, there are absolutely no restrictions. Unless of course our worries are about what the cameras see. This is the exact same thing that must happen at personal level. If you are weak economically or physically, then you need to go into stealth mode. Let us say you live in a house in the “compounds”, no fence to offer the first pysical protection, and you only net K60 ($5) per day on average. You can still build up wealth by flying low (keep no signs of wealth with you that would invite attack; dress simplly; speak modestly). Take as many jobs Learning fighting technics and as you can without complaining, learning how to be a fighter are arguing or comparing yourself to two different things. your peers (i.e., not worrying about the cameras). When you take on this twin mindset (flying low and caring nothing about appearances), you will begin to see an entire world of opportunities opening up before you. What you see will motivate action and certain behaviours from you. By the time you have enough wealth to absolutely need physical protections and some limelight, your mentality would have shifted so much that it will become the most important of your arsenal of protections. Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? When a fight Master trains students to fight, he does not actually want them to master from him his fighting technics. That wouldn’t set them apart from any common fighter. What he wants from his best students is to grow into original fighters. In their attitudes and behaviours first. Learning fighting technics and learning how to be a fighter are two different things. One can be over-run and made obsolete but the other will always rise above adversity – with new technics of his own if needed. That is the difference between knowing the current methods of protecting wealth versus knowing the mindset of a wealth protector. It is far more beneficial that I share about the mindset of wealth protection as the current technics of wealth protection can be taught far better by accountants, lawyers and anthropologists. In order to be a protector, you need to cast your vision far and fend off now all the risks you see along the way. Assuming that people love you and will not do you harm will be the most naïve thing you could do – like failing to learn from Tulsa, Leopold’s Congo, Hiltler and other great human tragedies. In a section coming below, I will highlight the characteristics of protected wealth. I will count on you to translate those characteristics into templates for your action. Now the work of protection is, if you pull back and think about it from a little higher perspective, the greatest work ever that anyone can do for another. It is an attempt to play God. In a serious way it is. In almost every other way, people of faith and non-believers are hard to tell apart. However, at this point they come free of each other; they separate and can be seen for who they are at the core. While the faithless man ends at the risk assessments and mitigating actions arising, the person of faith actually considers the risk analysis as a mere starting point. The person of faith is acutely aware of the limited applicability of the risk assessment exercise that they actually consider it one of the highest dangers to depend too strongly on their own risk assessment. They are to “lean not on their own understanding” if they are to receive divine direction in what they are doing. “Now this I know: The Lord gives victory to his anointed. … Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm.”14 “Woe to those who …trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen, but do not …seek help from the Lord… [T]he Egyptians are mere mortals and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit. When the Lord stretches out his hand, those who help will stumble, those who are helped will fall; all will perish together.”15

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Proverbs 20: 6-8 Isaiah 31:1-3

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Why the Third Generation? Further, if the faith is rooted in practices or traditions, this is the point at which it comes unhinged. From this point forward, only faith that is living and interactive will be able to operate. That is simply because from here there are no formulaic methods or systems that will achieve the same results. From here, people of faith pray and dynamically listen out for their answer. The actions to take may even go against the grain of all logical assessments just carried out. That is why I said only faith that is alive will be able to work here. One has to be able to interact in real time with real Deity (not emblazoned works of art) or they will burn out for the constant friction against reality. Everyone else, but people of a faith which does not need humans to prop it up, will have to stop off at disciplined and consistent assessment of risks. The person of faith on the other hand may even jump the assessment altogether! They will be able to know when it is ok to jump or ignore said assessments. Now, even among the faithless, no risk manager worth their salt will ever place full confidence in their own risk assessments for moving forward (they acknowledge limited vision and power of analysis, and so they tread Characteristics of inheritable wealth with caution, as in fact they should). But the person of 1. Protectable – is declared; has legal power; is faith does not end there. The committed to by many interested parties; goes person of faith says that it is beyond the second generation; empowers for possible to know far more leadership than can be achieved by risk assessments, and to act with 2. Distributable – value bag of easily divisible confidence based on that units of real wealth additional knowledge. The common behaviour to note 3. Purposed – targeted at cross-generational is that to both groups of causes which are known, committed to and people, consistent hard loved by beneficiaries of the wealth work and discipline are required.

Three characteristics of the wealth that you must hand over Protectable Wealth is nothing if it is not protectable. In fact, part of the value of wealth comes from the ease with which it can be defended. The safer and more secure, the higher its value. Like happens for gold. But how does wealth get protected? How does protectable wealth look like? Firstly, the primary way to protect wealth is to declare it. Do not assume that because you have hidden it, people’s prying eyes will not find it. If you could get Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? there, rest assured that someone else can too. And they will. By following your smell around like the canine unit. The only way to make dead sure that no one will be able to get to hidden wealth is to actually forget about it yourself! And of what use will any wealth be which you cannot recall? It is far more useful that the wealth be declared then be protected in other ways. The declaration of wealth could be in a Will or similar utterance. Some people – especially politicians – like to hold their “interests” through proxies or secretive fronts. What should be understood is that this sort of wealth is quite well protected from prying eyes. But it cannot be handed over in any protectable way without coming out and being sanitised. Otherwise the beneficiaries will face tough battles justifying it or else they too will have to enjoy it only through secretive fronts and proxies. Now returning to the matter of Wills and similar utterances that bequeath, most people are found to not have prepared them because, well, they did not expect to be next in line for death. It is recommended that a person have a will as soon as they begin to make any money at all. Then at the close of each year – say in the days between Christmass and New Year’s, the Will can be updated to eflect the new economic position. We could even call this week, the Willing Week or something along those lines. The next aspect of a protectable wealth is that it have legal power. If land, then at the very least it must have written record of entitlement by the traditional leadership concerned, but preferably, official state title. If other property then a certificate of lease or title deed, certificate of ownership (the “whitebook”) for movable assets, etc. Then these certificates should, preferably, be help in a name which would continue existing even after one’s death. Such an entity would be a legally registered company or similar. This is so that beneficiaries do not have the need to re-register everything after one’s death but only change the holders of equity in the registered entity. Due to their laws, most wealthy Americans have family Foundations which run as not-for-profit “charities” to which most, if not all, their wealth is “donated”. From these Foundations can flow philanthropic giving (of course with one eye on the taxman, avoiding giving the taxman too much, since all these charitable givings are allowed by US law to be deducted from the wealthy person’s tax bill) and many endowments to other causes of interest to the family. Further, once a registered entity (commercial business or charitable) settles into its normal operating mode, it should have lots of people working for it, carrying on the vision and adding their own innovations, effectively becoming the expanded brains of the family. This ensures that one’s vision when they were alive is carried forward on the highest number of fronts, and the departed person’s life work can continue even stronger after their departure due to multi-point leadership. The above benefits will be in addition to one sitting down with one’s children and talking plainly about their work in order to ensure that those among their children who decide to pick up the button can start off on a much firmer footing than they Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? might otherwise have done, or just solving succession troubles before they happen. Succession wrangles have ransacked many a wealthy family in Africa, depriving Africa of all the positive impacts that such powerful families would have had otherwise. Preparing your successors with clear understanding of their responsibilities is part of the process of making your wealth protectable. Team members who are clear about their contribution to the whole are team members who are empowered to protect what is theirs together. You do not have to tell them how if they already understand why. Putting their minds together, they will more than likely have far better ideas and methods than yours, anyway. If the protectability of your wealth depends on direct input from you, it is still highly vulnerable. This is what would have helped the black population of Tulsa back in 1921. In short, all their eggs were sitting in one large basket called the Black Wall Street, which was itself a sitting duck in a field full of predators. The only way to protect that wealth was for the ten thousand residents of that place to punch out hard. If their lonely firepower failed, they would be totally over-run, and that is exactly what happened. In order for wealth to be truly protectable, it has to be able to count on many different people acting with total commitment and from different approaches. And no nation on earth deploys this thinking better than, or to nearly the same extent as, the USA. The USA has allowed practically every nation on earth to send immigrants to them. That makes almost every nation on earth in one way or the other a supplier of some of their best brainpower to the USA. Further, the USA has deployed their military and intelligence assets (read spies and kit) in various locations all over the face of the globe; if a war were to erupt in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean or anywhere else on earth, chances are extremely high that the first arsenal and people reaching the critical locations will be those of the USA. From space, they have a huge array of hardware scanning every square inch of earth’s ground – wherever their generals would want to look. The USA also has leading presence in practically every industry on earth, whether agriculture, fintech, mining or anything else. And they donate generously into strategically chosen trouble spots. These donations are not entirely out of human compassion but significantly also out of the USA looking out for the USA’s own interests. This nicelygo-kindly type of approach is even given a name. It is called soft diplomacy and is deployed where the “interests” can be wrapped together with benevolence and driven that way to buy hearts and minds. In all these activities, it is the USA which gains incomparable influence on the people of the earth. Wealth protected. The enemy’s own people will fight for America’s interests to the bitter death. That is protection! If you are the wrong kind of selfish, you can forget about protecting your wealth. There is a small-hearted, us-vs-them kind of selfish and a big-hearted, let’s-all-livebetter-lives-starting-with-me kind of selfish. The first kind of selfish is the wrong kind of selfish. The second may be defective also but at least it acknowledges the Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? right of others to seek good things for themselves too. If you think like that about other people’s rights to seek what is best for them as well, you will give your children and their children after them the best chance to be able to protect whatever wealth (and responsibilities) you leave to them. The next aspect of protectability is that much wealth also be given directly to the third generation. This gives the room for the second generation to get a headstart in preparing for their own children. It will allow the second generation the opportunity to think and plan for the far long term as well, doing some robust saving and preparing of their own. If you have taught them well, they will be able to do this regardless of their income level, and they will teach it to their children too. In fact, if you are fortunate, you will be able to sit with your children and help them put together plans for their own grandchildren. That will send your impact down to the fourth generation in fact! When wealth stretches to the third generation, it is received without the casual sense of entitlement typical of children who have not known hardship. This avoidance of entitlement maximises the chances that all components of the bequeathed wealth will be looked after carefully with the same sense of seriousness that it took to create it in the first place. The fourth and final component of protectable wealth is that it empowers its beneficiaries to not be afraid to lead. The duty you owe to your country and your community is to create leaders. Thought leaders if you can; action leaders; knowledge leaders; technology leaders; social change leaders; sports leaders… there is need for leaders/champions everywhere. And the only way to create them is to bring them up in our homes. Your beneficiaries must be so prepared emotionally and intellectually (because all these are components of wealth) that they are able, based on economic independence handed over to them, to afford a minute or two of pure dedication to one thing without the pressure to go out and “make ends meet now!”, splitting their time and attention and ending up as Masters of nothing in particular. Distributable One key method people use to store their wealth is to invest in immovable assets such as houses, farmlands and similar. Our words even give away our thinking on these matters: we call these “real” estate as though all other aspects of estate were unreal. Or, to sound a little less technical, we call them “properties” as though everything else was improper. If you are going to hand over “real estate” or “property” and these indivisible items are just about all that you are leaving behind, then you can rest assured they will not remain in the family for long. Your beneficiaries will someday seek to divide and distribute and they will end up selling. You need to look at your overall picture of wealth and ensure that you leave a sufficiently mixed value bag from which your beneficiaries can distribute without having to break single units down. For example, it is far better to leave a tree Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? plantation than a house. While the tree plantation can have parts of it (even down to individual trees cut down and) sold off to parcel out smaller bits of the “property”, the house will only have to be sold whole if your beneficiaries cannot wait for rental income to come in. So if you are going to leave “property” or “real estate”, you need to ensure that there are other components which are comparable in value to the said properties in the overall value bag. Such comparable components might be cash, company shares, registered movable assets like motor vehicles, gold or similar. Exclusions could be culturally valuable items such as rare paintings which might hold value in one location but not another. Items of sentimental value are important but only for sentimental or motivational purposes, so they too must be viewed as exceptions to the “Distributable-ness” test. If your value bag is distributable like this, chances are highest that it will actually last in the hands of your beneficiaries – unless, of course they are mentally unprepared to manage wealth. Purposed Some argue that this is actually the most important aspect of wealth handed over from one generation to the other. And there is compelling evidence for that. I agree that this indeed should be the most important aspect of wealth that is handed over. It must have a direction and purpose. Or it will erode to a level matching the purpose to which it is presented. A medical doctor who had a vision of building and running a mental health hospital had amassed a good amount of assets and documents to support his plans: he had bought a large piece of land some one hour off-road driving from the nearest paved road, he had secured a bankable launch plan and had started building up cash demanded as downpayment toward the overall financing plan. When he passed away, he had saved some US$145,000, put 10 hectares of land on 99-year leasehold (title deed) and three well-maintained vehicles. The house he lived in, though, was rented. He left his estate to his three children, his wife having passed away some three years before him. When his children – one a teacher, one a nurse and the third an engineer – inherited, they attempted to continue their father’s work but eventually found they couldn’t quite sustain the various bits-andpieces required to keep the mental hospital plan going, without leaking away all their father’s money. In the end, they gave the land to the engineer who wanted to put a demonstration farm there; they gave the three vehicles to the teacher and the nurse took the cash (now reduced to $87,000) to try and establish a pharmacy and a care home for the aged. Unfortunately, after she had paid off her personal loans and tried unsuccefully to champion the cause of her care home, the nurse ended up with a small, one-room pharmacy running on paper-based records only and so unsustainable that she had to go back into full time employment back in the nursing environment to make ends meet. Their father’s dream had ended. Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? In the above example, the wealth met all the characteristics of being protectable and distributable. But it failed on purpose. The children just couldn’t carry on any part of their father’s vision or motivations. As such, the children did get helped, each with a shot in the arm to assist them improve the starting points for their own dreams but in every other way they all had to start from scratch just like their father before them. The nurse had to suffer her own loss of cash and failure at business. We are not told anything about the cars or the ten hectares of land but we can guess that nothing much came out (or we would have heard the headlines). The sadder fact is that the father looked like he was quite hard-working and committed to a nobble cause, only to have everything melt off like water from an ice block placed on hot sand. The one thing which that man failed to do while he was alive was to enlist his children as partners in his vision, especially that the vision still needed tending before it could stand on its own feet, coming, as it did, so late in the man’s life. The wealth was handed over but it lacked strong purpose, so it naturally got repurposed by those who received it. Now, one might ask how on earth that man could possibly have calculated the time of his own death so that he prepares his children sufficiently for his departure. And the answer is, of course, that he could not. That is why he needed to have started handing his vision over to his children the moment they were born. Training up a child is not just about giving tham an academic education but also about instilling in them paradigms through which they can intepret life and their purpose in it. It is about giving them the best chance to ride off our very best thoughts as parents and allowing them to go farther and build faster than us. It will not hurt our children to see us fail at anything; if anything, they will only learn how to cope with failure themselves, without losing life’s bigger battles. By the time we are lost to death, our children should find it effortless to keep travelling on the rails that we had laid, and to build to even farther points. If your children do not know the causes to which you are committed – even the cross-generational commitments that your family knows are theirs alone to uphold – you can rest assured that they will do a reset and start over when you are gone. It will be highly retarding for them; it will not be good for your name, but – worst of all – it will be a disaster for the nation to which you belong. That is another way of saying if you love your country, leaving a clear and full inheritance for your children is not an option; in fact, you should teach your children to love their nation and have causes to which they are committed as a demonstration of that love. Otherwise, any inheritance you leave will be largely purposeless and will diminish in value to the level of smaller causes which your children will sponge around for. A country’s economic and social progress can be no better than the sum total of what is happening within its nuclear families. If our families learn to build up on the efforts of the out-going generations to give a boost to the in-coming ones, there shall be no way for GDP to go down. I have studied multiple cases of wealth – especially the so-called “self-made” billionaires – and have come to the conclusion Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? that all people who build wealth build it based on firm foundations laid by earlier generations. Of the “self made” wealthy people, Jeff bezos is currently the leading. He started Amazon and grew it to one of the world’s most respected business brands. But I had particular interest in Bezos’ early life and his progression up to the point of creation of Amazon. It turns out Bezos’ grandfather – at whose expansive private farm young Jeff spent many summers – was a director at the US Atomic Energy Commission. Jeff had science and engineering all around him. His adoptive father, Cuban immigrant Miguel Bezos (Bezos was not Jeff’s surname at birth), was an engineer at Exxon. More engineering inspiration for Jeff. It came as no surprise that the young man went on to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at university. His parents and grandparents gave him firm support both financial and otherwise. After graduation, he landed jobs at respected blue chip companies. He worked up the corporate ladder, switching from technical roles to banking and mathematical modelling, finishing up as a Senior Vice President. He had laid a firm background to succeed in the industry into which he launched Amazon in 1994. But, wait for this one, he received an investment of US$300,000 (K4.2million) from his parents to use on Amazon while it was just an idea, with no guarantee he was ever going to repay (it is reported that Bezos used to caution his investors that there was 70% chance Amazon would fail or go bankrupt). How many of you have put aside that much for your own needs – never mind giving to your child? How many have access to over 10,000 hectares of farmland on which to let their grandchild’s imagination run wild? Yet we are told that Jeff Bezos is a “self made” billionaire! It gets more interesting, actually: Jeff used to spend many summers at his maternal grandfather’s farm. When he had acquired the means, he went back and purchased the farm and grew it from some 10,000 hectares to over 120,000 hectares. The children’s children were well prepared with their grandfathers’ aims in life. His grandfather’s influence must have been very strong because a local newspaper in Florida quoted young Bezos as having said in his graduation speech that he dreamed of some day getting all people off the earth and converting it into a giant natural park. It is not hard to see how in extremis every large-farm owner and dweller thereon would love to do such a thing. Instill purpose in your future beneficiaries; educate them; loan them that $300,000 (if you can) without demanding it back with interest; let them interact with their grandparents and chances are they will turn out to be centi-billionaires like Jeff!

Why the third generation? Although I joked about the $300,000, it is highly possible for every middle-class parent to prepare a cash boost of that magnitude for their children and their children’s children after that. Even lower class, blue collar workers can manage something similar by starting early to put away a small saving each month. As small an amount as K50 – Robust Wealth

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Why the Third Generation? 75 ($3.5 – 5) per month would grow to much larger than K100,000 ($7,200) after two or three decades. If the cash endowment were allowed to wait for the grandchildren instead, it would have exceeded K800,000 ($57,000) by the time it was released to its recipients. But if you can manage to put aside $10 or more per month for your granchildren, I hope you can already see that you will be able to help them out with well over $120,000 (K1.7m), taking account of interest the cash could earn over all those years. Year 0 1 2 3 4 5 10 15 20 30 40 47

Cash Added 675 900 900 900 900 900

Interest Earned 35 151 284 434 603 794 1,412 2,488 4,384 13,617 42,291 93,492

Balance 710 1,760 2,944 4,278 5,782 7,476 13,175 23,218 40,919 127,088 394,715 872,590

A technical note

The above numbers are guides only. Depending on the type of account opened, the money available at any point in time may be much more or much less than shown. However, all investment advisors agree16 on this one fact: that on average and especially over a long time (‘long’ measured in decades), the projections on paper do tend to tie closely with actual results. This is the reason I picked 30 years and 47 years he re. You could save for yourself that long as well but chances are that you would probably not have the strength and agility to make good use of the results at maturity, anyway. It is therefore wise that your children and grandchildren take the button over. Two competing dynamics are sure: (1) Inflation – tends to decrease real value of the money even if the figures look big. (2) Interest – grows the money over time independent of inflation. Over the long term, and especially if a wealth management account (which e mpowers account manager with flexibility to invest the money as they professionally determine over the life of your investment with them), as opposed to a norm al savings account at a bank were opened, the second dynamic (interest) will exceed the first (inflation) and the real valu e of the money will grow. The longer you keep the account locked away, the stronger the interest can grow relative to inflation. This is just one way in which saving for your grandchildren (Gen3) is much easier than saving for your immediate children (Gen2) or even for yourself! That saving for the third generation is easier than for the second, however, is not to be over-relied on. Immediate needs and emergencies will present constant 16

Perhaps if they failed to agree on this, their entire profession would wrap up, having lost meaning.

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Why the Third Generation? pressure to liquidate the savings and start afresh later. Of course, you quickly discover that whether or not you liquidated the savings, your financial pressures do not change! Your queue of needs never stops growing. We all quickly discover that the only thing that changes is the selectivity of our vision – we must become blind to some apparent needs so that we service the needs that we have deliberately chosen. You need to grow your stamina to say ‘no’ much more often than you say ‘yes’ to competing needs. I am not asking you to become a tight fisted miser, I am asking you to stop giving yourself excuses for not starting now to save and for breaking into your children’s endownments without fair cause.

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5 Corruption of the Customs

From the Bibical code, fathers are said to be worse than unbelievers if they are not able to provide for their households. That sounds quite harsh! Especially in our parts of the world where we face double digit unemployment, how do we fault a man who simply cannot find a job no matter the effort he puts in? Yet, when we come to the children, our attitude changes and we expect them to find “whatsoever their hands can find to do” to earn something to take good care of their parents! What’s going on here? At no point do customary codes require that a man prepare a retirement plan for his parents. Yet we twist the customary call on children to be respectful and stretch it to mean that children be held responsible for their parents welfare in chief. This and similar things we do only work to keep us as a society imprisoned to poverty. Good heritage demands that value flow foreward.

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Corruption of the Customs

Protecting the Strong, Fighting the Weak Children loaded with many yorks before their economic lives even begin is how many African communities deny themselves the chance to build enough capital for anything other than short social causes. Every society develops only by passing the progress made in one generation to the next one. In this manner, each new generation does not have to reset its battles and have to fight the very same ones which their parents before them had fought and won. Societies that are efficient at letting the next generation stand on the shoulders of the last in the most efficient manner are the ones that get ahead of the rest. In order for this to happen, the younger generation must be protected just as much as the older. The means of protection will differ but both the young and the old need protection: the older generation need protection from wrong mental attitudes, greed, selfishness and similar vices which worm their way into people’s mentalities making them irrelevant to the next generation even if they were high achievers; the younger generation from abuse, excessive expectations, laziness and similar vices which militate against active participation of children in crossgenerational matters. Unfortunately, we have not been doing well here. We tend to physically shield the older generations (who least need that type of protection) and to let the children bare impossible burdens. Sadly, the children grow up only to fit neatly into the old “parent” moulds and the cycle repeats. In amazing twists of custom, we get children to feel guilty for simply trying to get ahead. In calling what I am talking about here the “black tax” someone was drumming close to the truth. Children who fair just a little better than their siblings are saddled with backward-facing responsibilities for entire families of siblings and parents, effectively becoming inter-house breadwinners. This far, the practice is not yet a problem. It becomes a problem at the point when we begin to demand this help as if it were owed to us by the person supplying it. Instead of criticising the parents for their missed roles of providing for all their children and their own needs in old age, we begin to push the generous helper to do even more than she is currently doing. If she missed a month, the missed help becomes a debt! So the young lady fails to place her own children on stable footing to go further in life because she has to honour her back-facing duties first. She cannot cut herself off from her own flesh and blood – that would be a bullet shot in her own foot – so the reality happens that this family falls behind other families economically and socially as the generations increase. What should the parents have done instead? Well, that they failed to set the family Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs on more solid footing is “water under the bridge”. However, that the help they need is demanded in ever increasing quantity is something they still have a choice about. They have to take some late sacrifices and ensure their child is not saddled with chains that are too heavy. If they could do that, they would have managed to liberate the weak (child), instead of imprisoning them for the sins or misfortunes of the strong (parents). Twist and Dice Once impossible demands are laid on the children and the let-offs offered to the older adults, the two generations are then separated by blame culture. The first step is called “twist” (turning normal codes the wrong way round, ignoring the ‘spirit’ of the law, so that the meaning of the codes becomes something totally unrelated to original purpose) and the second step is called “dice” (cutting relationships off just enough to create unending friction but not far enough to make the pain cause the people to realise what is going on). Twist and dice is the tactic we use here in Africa to keep ourselves imprisoned to poverty. We take rules and traditions that were well intended and then we twist them to the point where they actually begin to work against us. Then we take the sufferings we are suffering and use them as wedges to separate each one among us from every one else. Weakened like this, our community then fails to structure itself around any purpose whatsoever; we find that we always need outsiders to get us organised enough to achieve anything together. In order for us to reverse this reality, we need to return to the basics where we got things wrong – the family – and re-integrate ourselves with each other. Properly this time. We all need each other far more than we acknowledge. The Twisting of Customary Codes There is a powerful interdependence saying in Bemba that reads “mayo mpaapa naine nka kupaapa.” (Mother, bare me on your back and I will bare you too [in your old age]). This customary code is powerful because it points both the parents and the children to offer to each other what they each need at each stage of their lives. No one can argue with this. However, problems arise when parents begin to overdepend on sayings like this to the point where they view children as some sort of insurance policy for care and provision in old age. There is nothing wrong with caring for our parents in old age (in fact, such behaviour is commendable) and for our parents to expect us to care for them as they did for us when we too were feeble and helpless. However, it is even better that parents look at this back-facing care as icing on the cake of what they will have prepared alone for themselves. It will make time spent together a joy rather than a chore. Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs Parents should never burry their heads in the sand regarding planning and preparing for old age (expecting to be carried on the backs of their children). While children never have time to prepare for their toddler years before they arrive – they just find themselves being Let us make our old ages a joy to born – parents have all the time be experienced and cherished, to prepare for their old age before it arrives. Let us make our rather than a chore to be endured, old ages a joy to be experienced by our children. and cherished, rather than a chore to be endured, by our children. This – joy of life – is part of the inheritance we must hand over to our descendants. The Twisting of Biblical Codes I am about to delve into a sensitive area where I will necessarily contradict myself. But it should be fine in the end because I trust that you will not oversimplify what I say. Other people have already been down the road of twisting Biblical codes – even attaching their own greed and appetite for money – to prey on the gullible and have them falling in ditches all over the place just to avoid doing the right thing. So, firstly, the right thing is to “honour” your father and mother. That is the Fifth Commandment (applying to Christians and Jews) appearing at Exodus 20:12 and Dueteronomy 5:16. It is the only one with conditions: that (1) one may see long days, and (2) that things may go well with them. In simple and practical terms, to honour someone is to respect them highly. If you pull back from this book a little and read speedily through it, you will notice that there is a theme to it where I deal a lot with my relationship with my own father. I discovered, near the end of its writing something deep which I added as separate dimension number eight to the dimensions of inheritance appearing in Chapter 7. I would urge you to read the subsection “The Eightth Dimension: A Differentiator” if you read nothing else. For Christians who believe in a “personal relationship” with God, it is not possible to have that relationship healthy if one has an unhealthy relationship with one’s earthly father or mother. The physical, earthly relationship is supposed to be a model of the spiritual, heavenly one. That is my practical summary of Exodus 20:12 and Dueteronomy 5:16. We are to honour our parents as if we were honouring God. Of course there are differences Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs in that one set is human, physically relatable and not subject to worship and the other is spirit, invisible and to be worshipped. But syllabus starts from the physical relationship. If one knows well how to respect one’s parents highly, they will not struggle to relate to a God who they cannot see and to exercise faith in that God. So the relationship with father and mother is extremely crucial. So crucial in fact that we already have an example of its distortion in later parts of the Bible. At Mark 7:9-13, that commandment appears but in a craftily corrupted state. The Teachers of Jewish Law had managed to twist that commandment so that people were freed of their obligations to their parents. This passage helps us to see the practical definition of “honour” as including material support (see verses 12 and 13 which say “…you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God…”)

The Teachers of the Law had said that if a person does something for God directly and then declares that whatever help they would have otherwise rendered to their parents out of that high respect had now gone directly to God, then that person would be freed from any further material obligations to their parents. Clever twist. But, as we have seen at verses 12 and 13, it was not correct and was, in fact, invalidating the entire word of God! At 1 Timothy 5:4, we see this: “…if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God”

That is how serious the issue of honouring parents is. Now, here is where we too have twisted the word in our own way. We have said via much tradition that because children have the commandment to honour, they are to be saddled with all economic responsibility to parents to the point that they become the only retirement plan that the huge majority of our people have. What we forget is that children have their commandments just as much as parents have theirs. For parents, the following is one of the most powerful instructions at 1 Timothy 5:7-8 “Give the people these instructions, so that no one may be open to blame. Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

Parents are not to take advantage of the command to honour to throw limiting chains on their children; they must work to ensure that their families are fully provided for. It is an instruction that secures families “so that no one may be open to blame”. Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs Parents are not to lord it over children but to be forces that protect and liberate. They must inspire and instruct children with firmness, providing all needs so that children grow up to become useful citizens, mature in the fear of God. Unfortunately, most cross-generational pictures in our time look like this: Couple got married, rented house, bought car, bought plot of land on partial bank loan, painstakingly constructed house, increased income beyond basic needs, owned few properties, became financially independent to the point of not needing jobs, retired, travelled around, died, were mourned, were burried, children shared assets, children also began on their own journeys to financial freedom, and the cycle repeated, edging upwards just enough to keep the family content but not enough to create a large enough impact on others who are living in poverty or facing difficult situations. The Biblical code is not given to just achieve comfort inside nuclear families. It is given so that the community advances toward better, interacts more and care about each other in real ways.

Moral Escapes: Sustaining Cross-Generational Poverty Poverty has great sticking power! If one generation of any family are poor, chances are huge that the next generation of that family will be poor too. Sociologists even have a term for when one generation inches upwards in terms of overall quality of life (and affluence). The terms is “social mobility”. Practically every person wants to achieve positive social mobility – they want to be better off, more affluent and have an easier run through life – than their parents before them. That is a universal human trait. Proverbs 15:24 says “the way of life winds upwards for the wise.” It may go round and round but it always spirals up. Unfortunately, for the non-wise, the opposite is true also. “the way of life winds upwards for the wise, that he may turn away from hell below.” If we are not careful, poverty can cross our generations like an elephant on a slippery slope. We tend to be the ones who provide our own moral chains to remain bound to the slippery slope. How? By some very dangerous beliefs about family roles and inheritance. Maggie at Chibolya Maggie had arrived at our house barefoot several weeks before. Ever smiling and full of natural cheek, her unending giggles and her loud voice made her a risky package. In the tense moments when dad was trying to command discipline in the house, Maggie just never knew how to shut up. Even as dad was booming out his instructions to total cold silence from all, Maggie would giggle like she was laughing at a boyfriend! Amazingly, instead of totally exploding and bringing down Hiroshima on the silly girl, dad would stop, smile and just walk away shaking his head. Maggie was raw, uncut fun! She would visit us often because her parents Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs could not afford to feed, clothe and educate all their children. When she came to our house, she had food, a warm bed, friends, TV and a chance to go to school. We loved her. On this particular Monday morning I was to escort her back to her parents’ house because an aunt of ours had ordered that Maggie go home to help her sickly father. Maggie had protested the night before, even with tears, but powers that were had already taken their decisions. So today she was dressed in clean clothes – including one of the pairs of shoes I knew mom had kept reserved for my immediate young sister to “grow into”. Maggie also carried one or two pieces of clothing and her school books in a plastic bag. We chatted all the way from Madras Kamwala to Chibolya, crossing Chilumbulu and then Kafue Roads along the way. We found nobody home but the house was unlocked – not much to lock in, I supposed. Maggie greeted the neighbours, enquired on the whereabouts of her dad and her brothers, getting back empty replies: “this one left not too long ago, the other one was here not too long ago...” Maggie did her best to fit herself back in at home. She invited me in but I had left our house unoccupied so I had to get back early. African tradition would dictate that at this point she offer me something – anything at all – to eat and implore me again to stay a little longer. But I knew there was nothing for the little girl to invite me to. I was struggling to suppress my sadness too. As we said bye I couldn’t tell for sure whether she was smiling or crying but I really thought she was doing both, as she wondered what she was going to do next alone in this lonely place. I had to start off. But just a few steps out, I remembered I had not been permitted to give Maggie the shoes she’d worn and that I would get into serious trouble if I allowed something to be taken from the house “without authorisation”. The anger against me would never end. I reasoned quickly that all I had to do was return to our house with the shoes and then if they had actually been given to Maggie, they would be returned to her the next day. I asked for them back and took them with me. But that quick reasoning of mine had been off. When everyone got home that evening, I discovered Maggie had actually been given the shoes and there was general disappointment with my actions of that afternoon. But about their return to her, my reasoning had been way off centre – there was no one to champion the cause (I left for boarding school early the next morning). I returned from school later that year straight into funeral proceedings. I helped to physically dig the grave at Leopards Hill Cemetery. I had never felt such a finality of loss before. Alone, perhaps neglected and hungry too, Maggie had caught malaria, her situation deteriorated faster than her father’s and she passed away quietly. Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs In Maggie’s short life, what could the adults have done differently? Most times the response I get runs along the lines of “even if the adults had done all they could to give Maggie a better life, if that was her appointed time on earth, that would have been her only appointed time on earth. There are thousands of ways to die and in this case illness was the way that applied.” It sounds pragmatic but does not settle the pain; I always feel like “ok, you have won the logic debate, but the emotional and human ones remain untouched.” We must not lose sight of the fact that what we call appointed times are usually just the boundaries set by where we have managed to push our general community thinking to. If we say no to something, it will not happen. The life expectancy in Southern Europe has not always been as high as it is now. The same applies to Japan. But by steady progress from one generation to the other, they have managed to defeat great devourers like cholera, typhoid, kingdom wars, etc., which had dictated their life expectancies to less than 40 years old just less than 300 years ago. Such diseases and events had even killed presidents and emporers. Can you imagine a President of the United States in our times dying from cholera while living in the white house? It happened once. Or any monarch in the many kingdoms we now have in Europe being killed at war? It happened a few times. Yet now, people’s life expectancy in these areas is above 80 years old. The problem has shifted from people dying too early to them dying later and later in their lives. They have shifted retirement ages upwards to 65 years old and above (otherwise the majority of the population would not be eligible to work and their pension and healthcare systems would totally collapse). The nature of their troubles has changed so now they take in refugees, students and other young immigrants and quickly integrate them into their societies, especially if such entrants come in at younger ages. These problems are better to have than to have young girls like Maggie dying at her age as she did. We must never lose sight of the fact that our own acceptance of appalling support systems is the reason we have cases like Maggie. And Maggie’s case is not unusual in countries like Zambia. It is so commonplace in fact that our life expectancy at birth is still firmly under 40 years old. Writing as I am at over 40 years old, I am one of the “senior members” of society in Zambia when I would only be in the prime of youth in a place like Japan or Greece. The point is not about life expectancy; the point is about leaving only poverty to our children. Allowing poverty to have impact across the generations instead of each generation winning some battles once for all and handing over a world that is better for our children than it had been for us. The solution starts with us changing our beliefs from looking at children as insurance policies for our own old age to looking at them as weaker versions of us that need our protection, careful guidance, resourcing and productive handover. Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs

Silver Spoons: Debunking Myths and Reconnecting the Generations One of the strongest voices of resistance to inheritance thinking is the current belief that equates inheritance with excessive provision and then blames excessive provision for spoilt millenials. It says that many millenials brought up in middle and upper class homes do not even know how to take care of themselves in normal daily life, never mind the tough times. The belief says that these children are the ones whose parents do everything for them: dropping them off in cars at schools, getting maids to do their clotheswashing, cooking and dish-washing. It says that these children sit and play games on the couch while house-helps do all the dusting, garden watering and other chores for them. Apparently, these children do not even spend much time with their parents learning the important life lessons which got their parents into comfortable spaces in life in the first place because, well, the parents are too busy making money for the family! Apparently, such children either end up losing all the wealth when their parents have passed on or else they end up becoming heartless Machiavellians. It is a compelling argument. Until one looks at the evidence. The evidence says something else! Of the world’s wealthiest people, according to Forbes Magazine, no less than one third of them actually inherited their wealth and have passed it along through several generations. And the number is that low simply because the world’s total wealth increased exponentially during the final quarter of the Twentieth Century into the first decade and half of the Twenty-First (1975 - 2015) driven by increase in innovation in the Americas and the Far Eastern countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, etc. When the wealth acquired in this generation passes over, the proportion of world wealth gained through inheritance will go back to above 70% where it had been all along. Also, when only Europe is surveyed, over 50% of the richest people there acquired their riches through inheritance. And those people have neither squandered the wealth nor become heartless Machiavellians with it. Children born with silver spoons in their mouths can still make strong and progressive world citizens. So the questions remain: 

How do children nesting inside inherited wealth learn responsibility?

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How do they learn to stand up for themselves as strong men or women when they no longer have anyone to shield them from pain and trouble?

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Had we ourselves received the sort of hand-offs I am proposing here, would we have turned out any better than we are now? Would we still have turned out to be as hardy as we think we are?

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Corruption of the Customs My answer is always that inheritance deals with far more than just money. Did you know that absolutely everyone hands over something to their children and other descedants after that? Conciously or unconsciously, we all do. The blood that runs through their veins is ours to begin with. The genes they inherit biologically, their bodily structures physiologically, their temparaments, etc., are all items that we hand over without decision. What I am simply advising is that we become much more deliberate about that inheritance so that, as communities, we develop across the generations. No later generation should ever reset to the same level where past generations had already been. That would be like, having passed all your exams and graduated with honours even to your Masters and Doctorates, you are then shunted all the way back to First Grade in primary school to relearn some things you had missed! That would be a mad thing to do. So why do we accept it when it happens across the generations? Why should our children have to restart from where we had already been? If parents handed over the progress of their fights with cross-generational challenges like famine, world poverty, charitable giving, research limitations, technology constraints, disease, lack of education, gender based discrimination, child abuse, climate change and an inexhaustible host of other ills in the world, it should not even occur to a person to ask why inheritance is necessary. I mean, how else are we going to win these difficult wars except that we fight together as a human species across our generations? And to never lose the knowledge that we gain in each generation but, instead, allow each successive team to build up from where the last one left off? Only people who are so little-minded that they only ever care about the micro affairs happening within their nuclear families will even begin to criticise inheritance. There are many aspects to inheritance – such as family identity, education, land and other assets, skills, relationships, cross-generational goals, business processes, and love (the eight dimensions of inheritance) – which every family needs to hand over from one generation to the next if that family is to survive life’s merciless turbulences. Those families that hand over these things more efficiently than the rest are the ones that speed ahead and become leaders, while the sluggards and cynics fall further and further behind as the years go by. I once saw a question on social media, where someone was lamenting Zambia’s lack of presence in the halls of global mining giants (companies) or even ability to run its own mines when it had such an abundance of mineral resources. Various answers had been tendered that all spoke to the lack of education, experience, economic and business executive training, etc. All of these responses had merit. However, none even attempted to address the question of why many Africans failed to accumulate sufficient capital in the billions of dollars, something which would have enabled the Zambians and others like them to not need any external investment into the running of their copper mines. Robust Wealth

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Corruption of the Customs The problem was that each of the first two generations in post independenceAfrica (for there have only been two generations since independence, with the last one still running its course now) attempted to run the full economic course in a self-contained manner. They attempted to learn the art as mining engineers, then to learn the economic arts and then to put large-scale projects together on paper, then to start by running small entities that would raise enough financial independence to allow these people enough space to explore their more radical ideas… until finally they are able to own mining and mineral trading giants of their own, which they can then pass to their children. But it has never worked that way! The economies that have grown enough muscle on earth, to become major influences in world affairs, have all done so across many generations. The earlier generations do all they can to hand over modest wealth and cross-generational targets to the next generations which do their part and hand over to the next and so on until there is critical mass of wealth with which to influence the entire world. That is how the West own the billions and Africa only hosts the mines. That is also the only sure way for families to achieve both their own and their nations’ economic independence and to make such independence last. We absolutely need to kill the selfishness that causes us to be interested only in our own immediate (“immediate” as in “in my own generation”) comforts, thinking little of the needs of all of us as a species. We need to destroy, without fail, the cynicism that causes us to want to see the entire picture of progression ourselves, instead of leaving some ground for our children and their own children after them to come and cover. Cultures that understand well that they in this together are the master cultures; the rest are slaves (“slaves” as in only ever being able to be good employees but never the owners or the ultimate controllers).

What ‘Correct’ Looks like Correct is centred on parents who understand inheritance as an extremely powerful and critical tool for the furtherance of the human race on earth. Correct has parents who understand that genetics is the non-voluntary part of inheritance, and that there is a voluntary part to inheritance that they must deliberately work on. It has parents who have taught children and their children’s children what honour means in practice. Correct has children who respect their parents highly and voluntarily take care of their parents needs at each stage of life. But correct also has parents who have not shied away from thinking about their retirement and their own needs in old age and have provided enough cover for that so that the efforts of children only come in as sweetening extra on what they already can do for themselves. Correct has old people who are even able to redirect some of the help they receive to others in greater need than themselves. Above all, correct has the generations advancing upwards strongly in all aspects that define and increase the honour of being a human being on earth. Robust Wealth

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6 The Mechanisms of Wealth Wealth and the making of wealth begins with mental fortitude – how long can your mind hold a thought and follow it through until it is fully realised? Bright ideas aren’t that scarce – in fact, pretty much everyone has a bright idea or two every now and then and which ideas, if followed through in a disciplined manner, would make them and their people extremely wealthy. However, very few have the tools to sustain their thoughts long enough and strongly enough to allow their ideas to ‘take their rightful place’. Some ideas are designed to settle in quickly, others not so fast, but just about all can find their place. However, very few idea owners stick around long enough. You need to stick around this chapter long enough. It’s not deep but talks about some stuff that can become pretty deep quite fast. Read it twice if you have to – once fast to get the idea and once slowly to get the message.

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THE HARD WORK OF BEING FREE Ownership Can I introduce you to a Zambianism? If you have yet to hear it, you can rest assured it won’t be long before you do. The phrase is about being made to do things. “…he made us fail to…” “The supplies took long to arrive and that made us fail to finish the project on time,” or “The rain was heavy this year; it made us fail to achieve our targets,” or “Sir, what made you fail to turn up for the meeting yesterday?” These statements may sound ok to some but they have a highly faulty common philosophy to them which keeps people imprisoned: that someone or something other than yourself can actively make you do something you don’t want to! Other words that mean the same thing as the word “make” are: “create”, “put together”, “manufacture”, “build”, “formulate”, “compose”, etc. They are all action words, i.e., someone does them deliberately. The reality is that when we proclaim “he made us fail,” we are handing our power over the job to whomever it is we are blaming for the failure. He – not we – has the real control over our work; that is the only way he can put together a failure on our behalf while we stand and look, doing nothing about it! When we blame someone or something other than ourselves for any failure, what we are also saying is that they – not we – are in control. I cannot think of a single situation in which such mentality is ok. Because it When we blame someone or is always the losing side which uses such something other than ourselves language. Ever heard a for any failure, what we are also world boxing champion saying is that they – not we – are saying “my opponent in control made me win this match? But I have heard phrases like, “General x, having surrounded his opponent, made General y surrender quickly before the unnecessary loss of too many lives when the war was so near to its end.” Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Only the loser is made to do things. If we continue this mindset, we are already losers before we begin. The first step to true freedom is admitting to yourself that you are responsible for your own actions and inactions. Putting the blame on other people, the weather or things other than your own actions demotes you to a passive onlooker and makes you really weak. In your plans to do what you need to get done, do not assume that other people or the weather will work in your favour. Factor in the fact that these things will work as much for you as against you. Factor that in, then plan accordingly. That way you will not be found pointing at any of these in the end. That is ownership.

Pretty good vs Brilliant There are some pretty good people who get paid to perform a duty and they perform a duty; but there are also some brilliant people who, when paid to perform a duty, actually realise that empowerment of the customer is what they really are being paid for. Such individuals go out of their way to add that little extra to the standard services as written down in the brochure or the contract. They make their clients want (actually need) to return for more help. And in order for this to happen, these brilliant individuals are constantly deepening their mastery of their trade.

MONEY, WEALTH, POWER & THE VALUE CYCLE Money is printed, wealth is created Have you ever wondered how currency exchange rates are set? Or how inflation rates calculate themselves? The textbook answers to those questions will run something like, the total value of goods and services produced in a country divided by the total quantity of its issued bank notes becomes the value of its lowest currency unit, then the demand for that country’s goods and services helps that country’s currency to hold up its value against other currencies. Such responses, though, are for the classroom and research dissertations only. Because such reasoning is what keeps us, as the middle class, imprisoned to labour forever for those who truly understand how wealth, currency and money interact to make some people rich (without doing much work) and others poor (yet labouring every hour of their lives). In reality, the answers to those questions are much rougher. They involve goods and services alright, but much more besides. They also involve military might, tactful intelligence and negotiation skills. Later in this chapter, I will introduce The Value Cycle, to clarify, but for now, we discuss in a little depth the part that would please the university professor. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth There are two main ways in which goods and services can be exchanged and these are: (1) Direct swap (like-for-unlike exchange or ‘barter’). Governments and authorities like to emphasize the disadvantages of this system. They dislike it simply because it is often impossible or else highly inconvenient to tax a barter transaction. It is also difficult to deploy inflation (inflation favours governments) or deflation upon an economy which depends on bartering. Thirdly, again for those who are charged with community leadership, it becomes a huge task to obtain some goods and services from outside their own economy if all they have to buy with are other tangible goods or services. Money is far more convenient. (2) Evaluated purchase (buying using money). Whatever item or service is required is first evaluated in terms of a standardised item like a Kwacha, Dollar, Pound, Euro, etc., and only this standardised item can be exchanged for the tangible item or service needed. The standardised item is called money. There are two types of money: a) Real money each unit of real money is actually an item in its own right. When gold bars, silver coins or copper crosses were used, their own value was measured in weight and so items where exchanged for the value of these metals by weight. This is why Biblical accounts of money speak in form of weights (shekels, minahs, etc.) and only in Jesus’ time (when Rome had already invaded and colonised Israel) do coins appear. However, even these coins are scarce because they are made out of silver and other rare minerals, so that if you accumulated enough of these coins, smelted them and formed a weight of the metal, it can be sold for the same amount as the number of coins you had melted in the first place. This is real money. It has value per se (in its own right, without reference to anything else). b) Fiat money this is “make-believe money”. A piece of low value paper is printed in special ways and assigned an arbitrary value. The authority that issues that paper promises to honour the value written on the paper with real value in some other way, if the holder of the paper should so wish. It is really a cheque written out by the Central Bank. It even carries the signature of the Chairperson/Governor General of the Central Bank with words declaring boldly “I [the bank chief] promise to pay the bearer [you and I] x units on demand [whenever you or I go to him and ask]”. Based on that promise, people now begin to exchange this paper knowing that Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth whoever should at any time want to go and cash the paper in they can do so. Of course the value is assigned in such a clever way that cashing it in becomes a highly academic exercise! If the value were written in weight of gold, silver or copper, it would be easy to understand. The so called “asset backed currencies” actually work that way! But the value is deliberately and very conveniently expressed in highly theoretical, hitherto unheard of entities like dollar, kwacha, peso, etc. What is a dollar, a kwacha or a peso? If you went to cash it in just what would they give you? This is fiat money – money which comes into existence simply because we want it to, not because of anything else that currently exists. With fiat money, suddenly all power over wealth shifts from the people who work to produce goods and services to the issuers of money. Further, some issuers of money become far more powerful than others simply by using overwhelming influence (of which military might is just one component) and negotiating tactics to cow or compel others into coorperation. This is how the US dollar became the money for use in international transactions. This was both a blessing and a curse to the USA. A blessing because the US Treasury became the de facto central banker for the world and so was in control of not only the military but also the financial policy of all countries in the world; a curse because on demand, they actually had to come up with gold to honour any cash-ins. The US dollar was initially asset backed (by gold and silver then later gold alone). But even after President Nixon’s decision to break that gold backing in August 1971, the US dollar has remained as the primary money for use in international transactions. Fiat money is the real definition of a currency. A currency is that item which allows transactions to be carried out in real (current) time without recourse to any other means of determining comparative value between the goods or services that are about to be exchanged. At time of writing, the Zimbabwean dollar is the planet’s weakest currency. The country’s inflation rate, in the billions of percents per annum, is in a league that might remain unmatched on the globe for centuries to come. In a space of just over three years (between 2006 and 2009), Zimbabwe’s currency had so depleted in value that four iterations of a “new currency” had to be issued by the Central Bank. The currency had fallen in value by a factor of 10 trillion trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)! How did that happen? Well, it was a textbook case. On the back of racial unrest, repression of political dissent and costly war participation in The D.R. Congo, the country’s economic output plummeted. Economic sanctions sought by the USA and the European Union only made Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth a bad horse worse. These factors set the environment for a situation where very few consumers outside Zimbabwe where buying Zimbabwean products or services. But then Zimbabwe, for its part, needed to buy things from outside. Now when Zimbabwe needed medicines from India and the Indians only respected the US dollar, the Euro or the Rupee, Zimbabwe’s treasury keepers could only scratch their heads. To exchange Zim-dollar for US dollar, Euro or any other currency in a world where nobody wanted the Zim-dollar was impossible. Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank could commission the printing of as much currency as the machines could spew out before they broke down, but if no one outside the country was interested in that paper, and no one within the country could absorb it fast enough into new economic activity then every note printed would in fact devalue the one printed just before it. The Reserve Bank may be compelled in the end to sell off their tangible asset holdings such as gold, or real estates held in foreign lands, to get that foreign currency. This sequence – including the printing of piles and piles of new notes is precisely what happened! Ultimately, this sent Zimbabwe’s inflation rate blasting through the roof (assets depleting, industry shrinking, paper money increasing). It is the underlying wealth (in economic activity) which fiat money is tied to which assigns that money its value. In more practical terms: (1) Money diminishes in value to the magnitude of work that you are

able to assign to it (if entrepreneurs were found who could soak up all the excess notes that the Reserve Bank was printing, before being taxed to give the government its fair share of new notes, inflation would have been contained). (2) Money diminishes or grows in real value depending on who is about

to put it to work (that locals in Zimbabwe had lost faith in the Zimdollar is what led to them taking mad rushes to the bank to exchange any of it they got for US dollars, South African Rands or Pula, which, in their minds, would hold their value much better). (3) Money is just pieces of artistic printwork with a volatile value

attached to them (the only way to reduce that volatility is to provide strong underlying wealth to evaluate these printworks). If a person’s non-financial wealth is low, so too will the resources he is able to command. In terms of money, the mathematical shorthand might look like this: Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Real value = face value * factor x Factor x will be greater than or less than unity (1) depending on the holder’s wealth of ideas, his work ethic, his character, his manner with employees and colleagues, his emotional fortitude, his creative ability, etc. None of these components of ‘factor x’ can be objectively assigned a value up front, yet they are indisputable value in its every sense – they are wealth. Mathematically speaking, if we do not know the value of factor x, then there is no way to tell the real value of the money we have. Without wealth to back it up money is useless. Between 2001 and 2008, during President Levy Mwanawasa’s reign, Zambia saw a lot of favour. Foreign investors were flocking in to ‘check out opportunities’, the G8 league of world economies were finalising their debt relief arrangements and many international institutions were endeared to Zambia because of heightened promise on many fronts. At the same time, base metals (among which copper – Zambia’s biggest income earner) were commanding record-high prices. At this time, one US dollar dropped from selling for over 6,000 Zambian Kwacha to about 3,300. Zambia’s currency was becoming more powerful on account of a certain wealth that the country was able to enjoy at the time. But by 2010, a lot of that wealth had evaporated. As a direct result, the currency was back to trading above 5,000 against the dollar. You lose wealth (percieved or real), you lose the value in your national paper. The OPEC countries tried to use price pressures, in the 1970s, to earn more income from their oil output by scaling up prices – in the style of a trade cartel. The strategy took down many small economies with it – Zambia’s included. It hurt the insignificant buyers (who couldn’t print more of their own currencies to buy with) but did not even attempt to shake the bigger economies from their comfortable perches. Each time they tried to press on this button, the only result was an “oil crisis” hitting tiny economies far more than it did the giant ones who were the main targets of the strategy. As long as the oil producing nations did not improve their underlying economic, intellectual and political activity faster than anyone else, they could put whatever number as a price tag on each barrel of oil they tapped from the ground, they could even deny whoever they wanted to deny access to their produce, but that would not help anything in terms of their overall objectives of political, military and economic influence on the world stage. The extra currency just turned out to be attractive pieces of paper looking for underlying wealth to evaluate them. Even though money, power and wealth are closely related, they should never be confused one with the other. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Now, there are some transferable components of wealth that can be measured in terms of money. Education falls in this category because it, too, can be paid for and receipted. However, there are other components of wealth that cannot be measured in monetary terms. Such components as character, personality, integrity, culture, morality, creative capacity, passion, emotional intelligence, patriotism, love, loyalty, beauty, form, work ethic, etc., cannot be evaluated in terms of money in a reproducible manner. Whereas one could teach another the technical skills of building a bridge, for example, no one could teach another how to have a “good” personality, how to enjoy an evening out with a project team from work or even how to work hard. Some important questions will arise: “what is a ‘good personality’?”, “what is ‘enjoyment’?”, “how much work is ‘hard work’?” etc. The rate at which we build up on these intangible components of wealth will determine how fast every dollar can work that lands into our hands. The wealthy and the non-wealthy are differentiated only by the rate at which they are able to put resources to work. A wealthy person will take a 50 dollar bill today and perhaps return with a 100 next month; the nonwealthy one might even return with 45! What then happens is that more money is willingly poured into the wealthy camp, for a healthier return, while the non-wealthy have even the little they had taken away from them. Thus, to the wealthy, the cost of capital is lower and the returns on capital employed are higher. To the wealthy, capital comes at a discount and its use yields a healthy premium. For the non-wealthy, capital comes at huge cost and its use by them only earns modest returns. This is how ‘factor x’ is greater than unity for the The wealthy and the non-wealthy are wealthy but less than differentiated only by the rate at which unity for the non-wealthy. they are able to put resources to work. A How then should we think wealthy person will take a 50 dollar bill about money in order to today and perhaps return with a 100 get a good factor x? next month; the non-wealthy one might even return with 45! (1) Money is only a “medium of exchange” of value. It is not a permanent store. It has no value of its own. Inflation reminds us of this. It is a very Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth temporal (i.e. a time-bound) store. So the faster you can put it to work, the faster you can build wealth with it. (2) Never need money. Use wealth (we shall talk about wealth soon) to

attract money when you need some, but never be in a position where you “will do anything” for the cash – or for anything else for that matter – because if you find you need something that much you are a slave to it already! When you become desperate for anything, it’s price-tag will bulge to a point just beyond your means to afford it.

(3) Money is a lever of influence; it can be ugly, rugged and rough or it

can be graceful and sweet, dependent on who is using it. Never look at money as an end in itself. It will, for example congregate a lot of labouring hands, intellect, raw materials, land, and other resources for a brief period of time to work for you. The way to make that influence last is by ensuring that you create systems, work processes, and lasting memories in people’s minds. These things even a money-less person can do (yes they can), but When you become desperate for they will put a good value anything, its price-tag to you will on the next dollar we earn bulge to a point just beyond your (more skilled people will means to afford it. want to work with us, for example). If we are going to attract money, we must get busy creating wealth in and around us. Get busy making what you do robust and graceful and beautifying everything around you and it will not matter how little someone appreciates you because very soon they will be begging you to stay just a little longer! Use money to influence the actions of others but never to evaluate anyone, not even yourself.

(4) Money is an accessory. Financial professionals are always attempting

to measure everything in monetary terms – they need a yardstick to measure value and money will do perfectly. That is ok for them since many of them work for companies and companies must measure all their activities in terms of how much financial value such activities are adding. But as with all good things there is a downside. You see, wealth is about a preferred standard of life and so it is more than just what can be measured with money. In fact, the moment we attach a monetary

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The Mechanisms of Wealth value to something, we tend to lose our experiential connection to it and stand ready to exchange it for that amount of currency. Real wealth is about the quality of our experiences. And money does not create those expriences; it only helps us to access them. (5) Never start a project to make money. No, please don’t burn this book

yet! Those who have read the book The Goal and who have consequently come to believe that “companies exist to make money” will be looking at me with crossed faces, wry smiles, folded hands and sitting back in their chairs staring questioningly. Let me try to explain this one a little. Actually, lasting companies exist to create wealth. Wealth and money might be related but they are certainly not the same thing. It has been said on the streets that “money makes money”, but what is left silent there is how money actually makes money. Money never makes more money directly. Money first leverages wealth and then it is that wealth which attracts money to itself. So, in fact, companies actually exist to create wealth (to which money will be attracted without fail). But what would happen if the central bank that issued the money caused such high inflation that the value of the money generated fell to, say, less than half of what it could have been? Wouldn’t the company move to protect its position? That alone would mean that the company has a goal that goes beyond mere currency. That thing is wealth. If you start your project to create wealth, you will make money in the process. With other highy desirable things alongside. This is not just a matter of changing your language. The person who starts a project to make money monitors that money and focusses all energies on that. The one who works to create wealth monitors the money but also the well-being of his people, the visual and physical appeal of his workplace, customer memories of their interactions with his staff, etc. In practice, what this means is that when you start a project, you need to work to establish intellectual capital, expertise, process systems, an inviting work environment, an attractive brand and vision, equipment and associated craftsmanship and a strong identity. When you spark this package into motion, money will be attracted to it like iron to a magnet. At this point what you have looks like this:  Good people working for you,  An efficient process system,  Customers wanting to align themselves with your name/brand,  Financiers wanting to align themselves with your name/brand,  A developing business model. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Have you noticed that these aspects that will drive your business forward can hardly be measured in money? Like a real lifeblood, money flows silently and constantly between them in the background. If you set out to get more blood in your system, a transfusion will do, but if you say you want to grow, more blood is just one of the many things you will get along the way. That is the difference between saying that an organisation exists to make money versus saying that it exists to create wealth. No, the two statements are not even slightly similar. While money speaks about control and power, wealth speaks about assurance and safety. If you set out to gain control and power, you must be prepared to meet a lot of militant opposition. However, if you set out to offer people assurance and safety, you will get plenty of willing takers who will even throw in control and power as a bonus! Have you seen corner stores that look dingy, smell like slaughterhouses, use grumpy employees and plod on like that year-on-year? Their owners only goal is to ‘make money’. This small business will remain small simply because of its owner’s “small” psychological attitudes to money. If the owner had set out to create wealth instead, he would have cared a lot about the type of employees he is able to attract. He would focus a lot of energy on the environmental image around his corner store, the working conditions he gives, the visual and sensual appeal of his store, etc. This state of affairs about his store would in turn attract and retain many happy customers. At this point the shop owner is presented with the freedom to choose between raising extra income through a premium on his pricing or through the better turnover he gets as a result of high traffic through his store. Overall, the business grows faster and is able to sponsor the ostentatious car without an eyelid lifted in surprise. All this is made possible not by more currency unlocked to the owner at the start but by a small psychological adjustment in the owner. What makes more money here is not more money thrown in but a wealth of ideas mixed with the energy and focus to bring those ideas to life. The money simply flows like water down a hill.

Have wealth, will sell The fewer the ‘goods’ you are able to take to market, the cheaper you will have to sell them for. If you want to profit from what you have to offer, you need an abundance of it. Put in a wealth of quality, put lots of distinct style to it, design it to handle twice the load it handles in normal operation, make it robust, produce a generous amount of it, then and only then go to market (and watch the market dance for you!). For example, I have seen that many people have job insecurities simply because they are still too dependent on said jobs. Your job will never be fulfilling until you no longer need it but just Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth want it. Many CEOs, for example, do not need to work. That is why they are able to attract such ‘immoral’ pay packages. It is about wealth: wealth attracts currency to it; it does an excellent job of selling without the person involved even lifting a finger.

Donating hippos A gentleman I will call Mr Soweto went out to Soweto market in downtown Lusaka “looking for money”. Mr Soweto stood watching as merchandisers arrived and marketeers spread their stalls. Courier men sped past with wheelbarrows loaded sky-high with all sorts of produce: bananas, tomatoes, crates of onions, etc. Call boys were busy doing what call boys do, verbally shoving passengers into the right buses, and so forth. Then a truck arrived, laden with 90kg sacks of beans. The merchandise owners appeared to be doing their selling directly. Then Soweto quickly recalled a woman across the block who had talked about wanting some beans for her shop… Calmly, Soweto enquired how much the merchandisers were selling the beans for, to which he got the feedback K60. He ran across and asked the lady if she still needed her beans. She did! And she could pay K120 per bag! I suppose you know what followed…? But, no, Mr Soweto did not need to borrow money; he calmly approached the merchandisers and asked for 3 bags and one of their men to accompany him to “the shop” to pick up cash. Luckily, the merchandisers could spare a lorry-mate for a few minutes… At the shop, the lady produced K360 for the three bags and handed that to Mr S. for sourcing the beans for her. As they walked back to the truck, Soweto then handed that lorrymate the K180 wholesale price for the three bags. In the end, Mr Soweto came out with a cool K180 profit on K0 investment! Soweto had no currency to start with, but he had a certain wealth. The mental connections needed were not phenomenal either. What he had in good measure was the confidence to trust his idea and the determination to work it through to its logical end. Even some streetwise grit to take on the risk and to manage said risk through to its happy closure. What had been a mundane market-place happening to other people was translated by an infinite factor (from K0 to K180) by Soweto’s psychological wealth. If all this sounds like textbook stuff, it is and you are reading one! Wealth must be present before money will happen. Wealth attracts money. Money without wealth can actually become a curse. Someone coined the phrase “resource curse” a while back to refer to the situation where some developing countries with huge reserves of natural resources such as oil, diamonds, etc., are the ones that suffer the highest levels of inhumane living conditions among its people. If you give people the means to make money when they are yet unready to manage money properly, you end up with the sort of chaos we see in many of the “resource Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth cursed” nations. What these nations require are not lots of dollars in FDI to exploit those resources, what they need first and foremost is lots of education (intellectual wealth) for their general populace. Imagine a war-torn zone where people are starving and scratching around in the ground for anything edible. We then jet in and rain bundles of Euros on the refugee camps… pointless, yes? The recipients would first need to get connected to the global wealth system before those Euros could mean anything to them. But never mind because by the time they got connected, they would already have starved to death. Money is useless to people who are not economically active. Their preexisting wealth is what assigns a real-world value to whatever financial help we extend to other people. Donating money to people who are not wealthy is like going to a ricegrowing village and donating hippos. Controlling the hefty creatures is a challenge enough for a start, but then there is also the making sense of them… the economic and social culture of the entire village must adjust quickly or the village, never mind the rice paddies, are lost! It is just not a good idea to go donating hippos to people who cannot make use of hippos straight away.

The relationship between money, value, influence and power Value is the sense of desirableness, usefulness and worth that we attach to things. Globally, there are many things that we value in similar ways, but individually, our value systems are very different. Thus, we are constantly exchanging ‘valuables’. Our heterogeneity keeps us interacting and needing to exchange things. Because we often find ourselves needing to exchange valuables, we usually attach a monetary figure on our valuables to facilitate their transfer. This is how money helps to measure value – it is a tool, a medium for exchanging of value, a means to effect trade. I like to think of money as “hot value in transit” – it cools down with time, so whoever holds on long to it had better be doing something hot with it or they are registering all the lost calories against their name for nothing. This probably goes against everything you have learnt about money up to this point in your life. You have more than likely been told that you need to save as much money as you can in order to have a better life later. I say that there is a consumerist mentality in that; if you want to have an emergency pot to dip into every now and then, then saving is brilliant. But if you are setting out to create wealth, you need to raise your thinking to the dimension where you ask how you can put money to work – not to eat some now and save some to be eaten later but how you can invest for a return. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Influence is about getting people to do our bidding. Now, seeing as many people attach a lot of value to money, money has become one of the strongest influencers of human behaviour known to man. Imagine a situation where we were still only able to barter and two parties wanted to exchange labour for a live cow… how would the government tax this transaction? Cut off the cow’s head and carry it away? Or command the labouring party to turn up at government offices and do some cleaning, maybe? But money makes every commercial transaction convenient. In fact, the need to tax is one of the main reasons governments want all their people to think in terms of money when thinking about trade, and, while on that subject, to think in terms of that government’s issued legal tender “for the settlement of all debts”. The government want their tax so they want you to use the tools issued and controlled by them so that they can tax you. On the other side we have wealthy people. Many of them build up their wealth by way of trade and so they have much of their wealth still held in currency. Also, wealthy people understand better than most that money can take on any value that people chose to give it, dependent on the amount of it printed and put into circulation. If the issuance of fresh currency were not tied to any real increase in the general wealth of an economy at any time, then the printing of new notes would immediately deplete the value of these wealthy people’s reserves, via inflation. Thus, wealthy people are strong advocates of removing money issuance from public (i.e., government) control. Because of this, in almost all countries, the printing, withdrawal and issuance of currency is controlled by some quasiautonomous body such as a central bank. If the wealthy had their way, even the central banks would lose that authority to some other entity safely tucked away from influence by politicians. This is what is driving the growth in digital currencies such as Bitcoin. To control the very rules by which value is allocated is to be powerful indeed, because that is to control people’s lives before those lives have even begun. For the average person, to stop thinking in terms of money and start thinking in terms of wealth is to move from an influenced to an influencer. To graduate again from thinking in terms of wealth to thinking in terms of how value itself is assigned is to enter the territory of power. Power is the ability to assign value, the freedom to transfer value from one form to another. Again, money enters the equation here. When a transaction occurs and a once valuable item is now to be exchanged for hard currency, the speed at which that currency is converted into some other form of value is an indicator of how powerful the trading party is. You could be very strong, you could be very wealthy, you could be very intelligent, but if you are not able to change anything for anyone, you Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth have no power. When we say that somebody is powerful, we mean that they are able to change a lot of things. We sometimes speak of “powerful nations” and “powerful people” as well. What these do differently from their non-powerful counterparts is that while their weaker counterparts are concerned with just money (begging for aid, dinner-dancing with “cooperating partners”, etc.) or wealth (culture, strategy, etc.), the powerful are busy creating new systems, trends, products, techniques, control strategies, etc. It is these elements which will influence how the world updates its value template in the next era. Powerful nations do not busy themselves trying to control wealth, they go at a more elementary level than that; they work to influence people’s very desires (the template which people use to assign value to everything around them and thus what they will gladly spend their time and energies on). Powerful organisations have the same nature: they help people to find a value system. Powerful people help others not only to find meaning but also to define new meanings to attach to their life experiences. In almost all situations of power, money is involved but money is just one component which, viewed in context, pales into a small corner. One of the main drivers of Coca-cola, for example, is crystallised in an early statement by one of its leaders to “ensure that everyone on earth drank coca-cola.” It is such pervasive attitudes and determination which also led the company to commission a competition to create a bottle which would be recognisable “even in the dark” and “even if broken”. We now have the ubiquitous ‘hobble’ shape (the contour bottle), and who doesn’t know that that drink over there is a Coke when they see one? (I have even heard some people using this bottle shape to verbalise their concepts on feminine beauty!) What we are witnessing here, ladies and gentlemen, is power! Mentalities like these and the results they deliver are not rooting to make money; they are actually working to create a standard of value, a standard on which other people will base their value systems. They want to form the backdrop of people’s dreams. “Hi, honey…” “Hi, you good?” “Yeah, you?” “Great, thanks. Wassup?” “I dreamt about you last night…” “Ooh! …aaand what was I doing to you?” “We were at some restaurant – Frankie & Bennies, I think it was – waiting for our order, having a coke as usual, and then you said the strangest of things…” Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Neither Frankie & Bennies nor Coca-cola ever need to pay for such product placements; the power of their identities has taken over and is now busy advertising even in people’s sleep. Wealth might attract money, but power is even more pervasive. In fact, it is a certain apparent lack of interest in money that makes the powerful so extremely attractive to money. The attitude is ‘let the money do what it will’ I am creating this anyway (but of course we all know what the money will do very shortly). Power does not go begging for money, money just flows to it and out again. While some are busy chasing and attempting to ‘make money’ and others are stressing about ‘protecting wealth’, the powerful are busy taking dominion of the earth and influencing the very standards via which we all come to interpret and judge ‘value’. Adrian Slywotzky writing on behalf of Mercer Management Consulting in his book, The Art of Profitability, uses the term ‘defacto standard’ to describe what I am talking about here. Those who make money and those who preserve wealth will both submit to the powerful because, sooner or later, it is the value system that the powerful create which will be used to evaluate whatever the rich and the wealthy have made. The present global financial order is driven largely by the IMF and the World Bank. These institutions were birthed at the close of the Second World War and their express purposes were to speedily reconstruct the world, and to help it trade freely. Of the forty-four nations that were represented at the fathering meetings for these institutions, the United States of America was the most intact economically and militarily. It was no surprise, therefore, that the nation towards who the bulk of the benefits weighed in the new system was the United States of America. The United States became home to the two world financial supervisors. The majority of the top officials at the IMF were American. These officials were professionally linked to the Federal Reserve System of the United States. IMF policy and practices were therefore no different from those that the United States Federal Reserve System wanted. The United States dollar is the predominant currency of international trade. As is discussed further down, this position alone causes the effort of every working person on earth to help shore up the value of the United States dollar, because that is the effort that creates the wealth (actual products and services) for the world to trade in and which thereby keeps all the United States paper busy. What this means, en extremis, is that the United States benefits indirectly from every effort that every worker on planet earth puts in to produce wealth even in their own countries! That, brothers and sisters, is power! Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth As long as the world uses American controlled tools to evaluate itself, America will always be powerful. Recent comments from notable figures have hinted at an imminent power shift eastwards. I beg to differ. The effect of the credit crunch 2008 should be compelling enough evidence. Yes, the Far East (particularly China) might dilute some of America’s hegemony – but only a dilution. As long as Chinese products are perceived as being, ahem, “Chinese”, for example, then Chinese competitiveness will remain capped. China has first to win the world over with “cultural advertisement”. Then and only then will a power shift of seismic proportions begin. As long as people’s value systems remain skewed Westwards, then any contenders have a steep mountain to climb. Throwing money at this one will not work, because it takes more than money to get power. On the other hand, mindful of the fact that the world is almost 20% What this means, in extremis, is that Chinese and only about the United States benefits indirectly 5% American, the East from every effort that every worker does have its chance in on planet earth puts in to produce sheer scale of what wealth wealth even in their own countries! they could put together to evaluate a competitor That, brothers and sisters, is power! currency of choice. If they were to couple that with serious cultural exportation and then leverage their stockpiles of American paper, they might manage to bite off a sizeable chunk. In his book, The Death of Money, James Rickards equates the possible demise of the US dollar as a global reserve currency to the total displacement of the very foundation of the global monetary system as we know it now (start of the 21st Century). Rickards projects a return to a gold standard or to a quasi-currency, subscribed to by sovereign states and multinationals, called special drawing rights (SDRs). Using some exceptional quality experience and research, Rickards lays out in good detail, the key scenarios that could play themselves out, down to the chaos of citizen unrest as currencies begin to witness irreversible evaporation of their value. My take is that although the US dollar is already on a phase-out path as global reserve currency of choice (that state of affairs no longer works in Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth favour of the USA monetary managers; it’s now only good for political oneupmanship), no government on earth will work against, let alone attack, the continuance of a global monetary system. Whoever is crying out against US financial hegemony is not wishing the cake away but just scheming their own approach to the party. They want the party to continue, just for the DJ’s role to rotate. And at individual level, when not everyone can access real estate or gold in small enough parcels, citizens themselves will become the defenders of fiat money. They will defend money and the monetary system so that it can continue to act as a store of value – in small enough parcels – for them. In other words, those who can purchase a few tons of gold bars will be able to, but those who can only manage a fraction of an ounce will not find it and their only way to store wealth will be to hold partial ownership of gold bars kept by a trusted neutral body which issues certificates of partial ownership – welcome back fiat money!

The Value Cycle Just like electricity does not exist until electrons flow in a circuit, so also money has no value until there is some effect somewhere that can potentially change hands. When little trade is able to happen, like in wartime, money devalues, because money depends on an underlying stability in (1) the authority structure that issues it, (2) trading systems, and (3) payment systems. If any of these systems are slow or under threat, money will devalue because it cannot be put to work quickly enough. Ultimately, without the possibility that value will change hands, money does not exist.

INFLUENCE

VALUE/ADVANTAGE

Economic Advantage WEALTH

Military Advantage FORCE

“Harder” = more tangible & more visible; “Softer” = more subtle

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The Mechanisms of Wealth The more exchanges of value that happen in an economy, the busier the money in that economy (i.e., the stronger the currency can be due to supply/demand balancing). It is exactly the same way that a stronger flow of electrons through an electric circuit will cause a light-bulb inserted in that circuit to glow brighter. There is no deeper truth about money than that the way to make room for more of it is to make more transferable value available and to make those transfers of value happen faster. The solid black arrows in the value cycle represent a quantity of value transforming from one form to another. When these flows happen, money happens, i.e., the arrows represent mostly cash but also intelligence, diplomacy, politicking and physical labour. The higher the pulse of this circulation, the higher the volume of money required to sustain it, i.e., the more money the issuing authority can safely print and put into circulation.

Value Cycle Derivative #1: SPEED The faster transactions can happen in an economy, the stronger that economy shall be Money will devalue when the force of this circulation decreases, and vice versa. The faster each cycle completes, the more value each labelled station is able to enjoy at any one time without bringing the entire system down. Thus, to trade with electronic commerce, for example, gives opportunity to create a lot more wealth than in a society where actual paper (cash or cheques) is the primary means for completing transactions. Add to that paper problem, slow verification and you have an economy working in slow motion. The faster transactions can proceed in an economy, the stronger that economy can be.

Value Cycle Derivative #2: MAKING MONEY After printing, money can never be “made”; only wealth nodes can be created for it The value cycle also helps us to see the lack of wisdom in venturing out “to make money” – what are you actually going to make? You cannot ever make money; the central bank has already done so by printing it and putting it into circulation. What you are probably trying to say when you say “you want to make money” is that you want to create an attractive enough station for some cash to stop by for you in its many passes through the economy of your area. You want to add wealth. Just like electricity only happens when electrons flow from one place to another in an electric circuit, so also money will only happen for you when you get busy facilitating for value to change hands. A Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth trader or shopkeeper is a good example here. By facilitating for the distribution of a desired product from manufacturer or wholesaler to enduser, he earns his profit. The higher the volumes he moves, the more cash he can hold onto, and direct into other ventures, without going out of business. But let us say you build a guest house, how would you be “facilitating for value to change hands” in this case? Well, every guest you receive will be coming to your area not primarily to experience your guest house but for something else in the area (work, tourism, rest, etc.) A guest house owner who sets up to “make money” may be content with providing clean rooms with fresh linen, good breakfast and adequate security. The owner who understands that they exist to facilitate for value to change hands, on the other hand, will ensure that they know very well the various reasons people come to the area, never mind staying at their guest house in particular. They then set to work ensuring that they provide as seamless a link from their guest house to these reasons as possible. They could provide a bus-station/airport shuttle and another to the key work areas where their visitors often go; they provide reliable internet link, packed lunch, several modes of settlement of bills, maps of the area and interesting places to visit. They may place targeted advertising far off in the places from which they estimate that their guests might come. They may even establish credit lines with institutions who may from time to time send employees to these areas. These additional tasks may seem like optional extras for those who have “big budgets” but, to someone who understands the value cycle, they are the flesh and bones sitting on a skeleton of the physical guest house which they have built. To those aware of the value cycle, these efforts are absolutely critical to assure success of the venture. When you do them, you will be facilitating for the movement of a huge amount of value (cash being just part of that value) from visitors to the various points of interest in that area. Of course, you will have designed information such that your guest house is right in the middle of the path. You have earned your keep and you determine, to a huge extent, how much that keep will be. Relating this back to the value cycle to see what is happening: you have created wealth in form of a nice guest house. This wealth directly gives you a level of influence over the visitors coming to that area. By doing the work above, you are trying to leverage that influence given you to maximise the value (paying visitors) who come to your area. If your guest house is well placed and well advertised, many of these visitors will pass through there as they visit and you will receive some of the payments involved. With some of the payments you receive, you are able to make certain key improvements to your guest house for even greater appeal. Then the cycle Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth repeats. The most important message to take home from here is that the cycle cannot drive itself; it needs to be driven by pro-active action.

Value Cycle Derivative #3: CURRENCY & WORK Money only has value when we give it work to do What the value cycle means for Africa, to step up the examples, is a way to stop begging. Firstly, the top component of the value cycle is influence. Africa must increase influence. Delegations of expired ministers dosing away at United Nations conventions will not count. More assertive negotiation in trade, industry, labour and financing deals will. Second, the value cycle evaluates the money that it is tied to. Which money do Africa’s present trading arrangements help to evaluate? If, for example, Zambia goes out and borrows US$500m from the IMF to fund a purchase of machinery from China or crude oil from Kuwait, what Zambia has inadvertently done as well is to depreciate her own currency against the US dollar. And, by creating more work for the US dollar relative to every other African currency (i.e., increasing demand for the US paper), Zambia has also helped to depress the values of every other African currency relative to the dollar. Compound that with the already negative financial value that the brand name ‘Africa’ carries – thanks to defective imaging – and realities begin to worsen. Overall, every African worker will have to labour harder for each incremental dollar, than they would have needed to had Zambia not borrowed in a non-African currency. Europe is a good case-in-point here. The Euro as a currency is not about European pride but it is a tool to ensure that the efforts of European residents are harnessed to the fullest to support Europe as an economic bloc and to seal off any unnecessary leakage of wealth from European control. Ugandan activist and former Director of the Southern and East African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute, SEATINI, Yash Tandon, says: “the leading nations of Europe are not taking chances on the future; they do not want to mortgage their future to the US dollar” On many ocassions in the past, nations have been known to win influence by simply undermining the currencies of their rivals. A nation at war with another can do this by ensuring that they induce a supply of excess paper in their rival nation. Inflation would be the next natural step. Trade embargoes or outright counterfeiting of the currency would achieve the same result. Without work to do, money slides heavily in value. In recent times, Iranian money has suffered this strategy on instigation of Western Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth powers determined to contain Iran’s ambitions on nuclear technology. In this way, money manipulation can be real warfare! The aim of this economic sabotage is to ensure there is as little use of the nation’s issued paper as possible.

Value Cycle Derivative #4: ISSUING CURRENCY IS BUSINESS We pay a ‘usage tax’ to whichever authority issues the money which we use There is a biblical story where one of Jesus’ disciples asks him whether he should be paying tax. Jesus asks the man to produce a coin. When the coin is produced, he asks the disciple to identify whose face is on the coin. “Caesar,” the disciple answers. “Give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” Jesus closes. There is advice for Africa as well in that statement. Whichever currency we are adamant about using, we ultimately render wealth to whichever Caesar is depicted on that currency. We pay a very real ‘usage tax’ to whichever authority issues that currency. At the moment, the entire world pays this tax to the United States of America. This is legitimate wealth creating business for the US Treasury and actual profit thereof shows up as a highly predictable stability in the value of the US dollar regardless of volume of paper printed and put into circulation without any additional sweat needed from US residents. It may be given educated sounding names like Quantitative Easing but it is no more complicated than the printing of extra bank notes to increase the total volume of them in circulation. These extra notes start their working lives in US banks making life a whole lot easier for US bank account holders, courtesy of the world’s citizens. But as with all good things, the extreme condition, deflation in this case, is not desirable. So the Federal Reserve system simply has to ensure that they work out a correct volume of paper to issue out to the world without hypnotizing their own working population into a slumber on productivity. That would be a serious own goal. This is exactly why banking, US dollar inflation and unemployment levels always feature within a few speech lines of each other in US presidential addresses to the nation. But for the fact that the entire world pays this usage tax to the US treasury, the USA would have been struggling just like Japan in recent years to control a very explicit deflation.

Value Cycle Derivative #5: BUSINESS IS WAR ‘Force’ side or ‘Wealth’ side, it is all warfare and is fought using the same kind of discipline Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Why does Zambia import crude oil all the way from The Middle East when just a stone’s throw away in Angola, thousands of barrels of the stuff is tapped out daily and goes seeking a market? Some already-comfortable engineers told me over social media that it would be too expensive to convert the equipment at Indeni Oil Refinery – Zambia’s only oil refinery – to enable it to handle Angolan crude (original design of the multi-million dollar plant was for a sort of remixed, partially refined “crude”). “How much would it cost to put an engineering team together to solve that problem,” I asked. There were no numbers in the response. But it was estimated to a very high degree of confidence that the figure would only be a fraction of a million. And so, on account of not being willing to spend a few thousand dollars on an engineering problem, we continue to need to purchase US dollars instead of needing to purchase Angolan Kwanza. To use investor language, we are content to keep throwing good money in after bad. Recall the Uapta? The currency which was supposed to be used commonly throughout the Preferential Trade Area, PTA, (now called COMESA, for Common Market for East and Southern Africa, headquartered at Lusaka). The idea of an African trading currency, free from the manipulative maneuvres of global powers, has been with us for a long time. Mr Yash Tandon, an experienced authority in intra-Africa trade even proposed the name Nilo, after the Nile River. For him, Africa having its own currency is not a nice idea but a matter of Africa’s survival in its long journey to true freedom. I couldn’t agree more. Further, African governments must begin to respect Africa’s human resource. They must quit trying to compete for FDI using the promise of tiny wage bills. What this will do is (1) reduce outflow of skills, (2) raise the living standards of Africans who choose to stay and apply their skills in Africa, and most importantly (3) avoid divided focus among its valuable workers, which robs them of professionalism and mastery. Eventually, Africa’s bargaining positions at international trading tables begin to strengthen. Outsiders are purchasing futures (hedging their risks from elsewehere) on African stock exchanges. Sensible capital can be raised internally. African commodity exchanges (for metals, oil, farm produce, etc) are bulging with activity. Africa is a trading bloc and an option in its own right for the management of wealthy people’s wealth. These become the new source of foreign currency. Could it happen…? Well, it is already! Africa’s wealthiest man by time of writing, Mr Aliko Dangote, built his empire from general trading then wholesaling then manufacturing, all done entirely inside Africa. And now Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth he is facilitating intra-Africa skills and technology transfer as he establishes factories and businesses outside his native country, Nigeria, using highly skilled teams of workers drawn from all over the world. He has singlehandedly forced the prices of essential commodities such as rice, sugar and cement down to much more manageable levels all over Africa, where European led operators had been busy extorting. Such changes are only possible when people look at business like the war of strategies and tactics that it is. It yields the same influence and value advantages that guns, fighter planes and warships will bring about. Perhaps even more pervasively and longer lasting because the conquered in this case are willing participants in being conquered. They simply give over their talents, services and time since they are not able to apply as sustained an effort in the task at hand as the other guy. When they buy his items, they feel like winners but actually, only he is! If we understood how that business is war, most of us would be worlds better than we are right now; we would be willing to forego many comforts and to do with as little as possible every day. We would be doing whatever it is we do with genuine hunger and thirst to win. We would be disciplined. In this war, all the losers lose willingly!

Value Cycle Derivative #6: TRADE To control trade is to control something more powerful than money Trade is what enabled the European Economic Community and Japan to catch up with the USA economically. Trade is the most important economic and political principle in the world. Those who seek to develop but are too gentlemanly around trade will never take off. If Africa fails to master and take charge of Africa’s own trade, Africa will continue to be a cushion in the economic and political manoeuvres of other world powers. More specifically: (1) Africa will continue to hold up the slack for other currencies. (2) Africa will continue to labour against itself: on the one hand increasing economic activity, on the other paying ‘usage taxes’ to foreign economies for the use of these economies’ currencies in trading amongst themselves. (3) Africa will continue to be the common pit that supplies the world’s minerals while the rest of the world continue to preserve their own deposits for a more desperate time in future. (4) Africa will continue to be an outsider in global financial matters. Just like during the Bretton Woods meetings that established our current financial system, Africa will remain an inconsequential outsider. At that time nearly all of Africa was a colony of other powers (hence the exclusion), Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth but now the absence will be because of having no interest in the matter. Either way, Africa will be absent On an individual level, we are told that education is an equaliser. On the international level, trade is the equaliser of countries. He who controls trade controls the destinies of nations.

Value Cycle Derivative #7: NEGOTIATION & DEAL MAKING Never bargain from a position of weakness Writing in their Christian Aid sponsored report ‘For Whom the Wind Falls? Winners and Losers in the Privatisation of Zambia’s Copper Mines’ Alistair Fraser of Oxford University, UK, and Professor John Lungu of Copperbelt University, Zambia, wrote concerning Zambia’s record-setting achievement in privatising all its sprawling mining sector in under 3 years: “Zambia has succeeded in keeping the new companies happy but in seeking to meet their every whim the state has been unable to collect a sensible share of revenue or to perform its own roles as an effective regulator, protecting the rights of workers and local communities, or as a provider of social services.” Zambia, “The Real Africa”, was taking the lead in demonstrating in living colour how Africa manages to rob herself of her own bargaining power even on home soil. Our desperation for money only managed to make us even more destitute than we had been before we sold our mines. Fraser and Lungu continue… “Companies took advantage of the fact that the Zambian state was desperate to secure new investment … under ‘Development Agreements’ that exempt them from covering most … liabilities, including pensions for its employees, from paying most taxes, and from many national laws, for example on … pollution. These agreements have a highly unusual legal status, only otherwise accorded the Zambian Constitution. They cannot be contradicted by future legislation as ‘Stability Periods’ ensure the policies in place when agreements were made cannot be changed for between 15 and 20 years. In some cases, by the end of these periods, all of the copper ore remaining in the [ground] will have been removed.” When the consequences of these “Development Agreements” began to unravel, there came such widespread disquiet that the government went begging again at the doors of the new investors (this in their own country) seeking to pull off another first – a renegotiation of the now infamous ‘Development Agreements’. It is strange how we manage to deliver the bargaining power to the other side on a silver plate in everything! Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth If you thought that Zambian leaders had learnt their lessons, you would be terribly wrong. Zambia still has a battery of deliciously succulent incentives to offer foreign companies and which incentives local companies can only salivate at. A foreign national bringing cash from outside will enjoy long tax breaks and be able to generate far more profit than a local entrepreneur trying to build capital from within. While the architects of such desperate measures usually attempt to justify them by referring to other nations competing for the same investor dollars, many studies reveal that such fiscal attractions account for less than 5% of the factors that convince genuine investors to choose one country over another to invest in. Some well publicised studies, in fact, reveal that Africa as a continent loses billions of Offering too much to attract dollars as the same investors is a sure sign that we foreign firms creatively slept off on our homework and now find ways of evading even have little to offer except our the few taxes they are legally required to pay, dignity. mainly through transfer pricing arrangements. Offering too much to attract investors is a sure sign that we slept off on our homework and now have little to offer except our dignity.

Value Cycle Derivative #8: CASH BITES BOTH WAYS Never worry about the money; watch the wealth instead Cash can confuse and cause trouble when you have it, just as much as it pains when you don’t have any. When you do not have cash, other people can easily take advantage of you. This is a problem. When you have cash, well, you can take advantage of you by making hasty decisions that tend to leak wealth away. This is a problem too. So do not let your cash position give you sleepless nights because you will never really get out of the problem of cash. The only thing you will learn is to cost your activities better and wheel your income in more efficiently. But no amount of cash will ever remove your worries from you. When we watch what happens to the money and obsess about it, we can easily get distracted from watching what we really need to be watching over – wealth. More on focusing on your wealth next page. Robust Wealth

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Aurotaxis: how the poor labour for the wealthy to get the poor to labour for the wealthy When poor nations borrow rich nation’s currencies from rich nation’s banks, under rich nation’s rules, those poor nations will certainly pay more than just the interest on the borrowings. Firstly, that currency will be back in rich nations very quickly because it is the rich nations who manufacture what the poor nations really want when they ask for loans. The currency will not even live a day in the poor nation’s banking system to work on anything else before it goes back out. Secondly, by using the rich nation’s currency the poor nation also pays a ‘usage tax’. Soon, the poor are buying not just the products but the culture of the rich, too. Their value systems begin to run after those of the wealthy. Whatever the wealthy think, want, do and make, the poor also think, want, do and buy from the rich. As the gap between the wealthy and the non-wealthy widens and becomes less and less crossable, so the passions of the poor intensify – if only they could do things like the wealthy, talk like the wealthy, look like the wealthy, eat what the wealthy eat, like what the wealthy like… Ultimately, the lifestyles and thought patterns of the wealthy become so desirable to the poor that they begin to seek and thirst after those displays of wealth like a man seeks after a religious god. When they could be sitting down to draft business plans, they can only sit to perfect their curriculum vitae for perusal by the wealthy. The wealthy never need to go looking for labourers; labourers fight each other hard – even bewitch each other – to be the first one in! All on their own, they gravitate to lay immense talent, skill and energy at the disposal of the wealthy. I call it aurotaxis. It is not the same as what is commonly referred to as gold digging but on the same frequency. ‘Aurotaxis’ is the act of gravitating to where the big mountain of gold is with your small bag of gold in tow, so that, Wealth attracts great human eventually, all the gold commitment to create even more will be found huddled wealth for the wealthy. together in one place owned by the rich. It is a virtuous cycle if you are wealthy! Wealth attracts great human commitment to create even more wealth for the wealthy. Robust Wealth

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Focus on your wealth When you set up a business operation, or if you are running one, you need to focus on your wealth. That probably flies directly against everything you have heard from the humility mongers. But in reality, a business person – well, at least a successful business person – exists only to increase total wealth on earth. So just how do you focus on your wealth? Clarify and deepen your value systems; have some things you really love and others you just cannot stand; beautify your image (let people desire to come alongside you and identify with you); earn respect by making it easy for others to count on your word. Don’t be the one who always volunteers your opinions on everything. But be the one to who they can turn when they are unable to think clearly about any matter, that is to say, be a great listener. These things will attract immense human capital to your side to win you the world. The secret is to think in terms of wealth then allow the money side to do what the money side is dead certain to do. Money is dead certain to follow the wealthy man like a tail follows its dog. The big problem, though, is that most of us only reach the point where these things make sense when we have already lost all our ground. When many have stopped trusting our word without something else to back it up; our business is associated with broken promises; people have to keep calling to remind us of impending deadlines or we definitely delay; we are struggling and it shows; no one with right qualifications or experience would think of pitching their CV to us, etc. So when someone advises to focus on “our wealth” what on earth would that mean; what are they actually asking us to focus on? Where do we even begin? Well, it’s a matter of choice. Accept that you will never impress everyone. And some of the people you disappoint will deserve the exact opposite from you. But live and let live. Select some customers who you will put on the good list. The others unfortunately drop to the bad list. Then ensure that you service your good list as much as possible with all the energy you can muster. If your effort on the good list is genuine and impactful, you will soon see some of that effort crossing over onto some people on your bad list. Before long, and if you are lucky, you may find yourself servicing close to 100% of both lists in the end! Right where you initially intended to be. The secret is to start somewhere and take some consistent hard shots at the problem. People will soon forget how they had complained against you and will just remember how you laboured hard to rescue the situation. If you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they may not credit you with much, but deep inside their hearts, they will know that they can rely on you whatever the Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth temporary mishaps. Exactly because you came through for them in the end. In order for this one to work, you need to embrace your mess then enjoy seeing yourself come up out of it. Everyone eventually does come out of it on consistent effort, only some people celebrate their breakthroughs while others continue to mourn the pains of yesteryear even after all the good rain has been rained upon them. It is a matter of decision.

The concept of profit – seven questions for wealth creators One of the best books I read recently is The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky. If I could summarise Slywotzky’s point in that book in one instructive phrase, it would be that in order to be profitable, you need to do five things well (1) leverage intellectual capacity, (2) invest some tangible resources, (3) measure what you invest, (4) execute with discipline, and (5) measure and evaluate your payback. Sound like nothing new here? Well, read on! 1.

Leverage intellectual capacity

i.e., profit comes from making careful observations, thinking intelligently about what you see and then taking disciplined steps to follow your conclusions through to their logical end. Profit comes from much mental application. Then you need to seed your market to buy from you. So: 2.

Invest a quantity of tangible resources, and

3.

Measure the resource you invest

What you now have is an outlay of three forms of wealth: intellectual capacity, some tangible assets, and the skills to measure and account for all resources flows. Now, to profit, actually means to increase wealth, i.e., we need to create an additional quantity of wealth on top of what we started with. But what does creating wealth actually mean? Is it even possible to create wealth? Well, as a matter of fact, we can and here is how: we first create something desirable that we could exchange with other people for a little more than the sum of the various inputs of wealth that went in. This might sound like common sense, but it actually isn’t! If we have a skill for making water basins, for example, and find, after measuring all inputs, that the total wealth gone into making one basin is x units, we need to be able to exchange that basin for perhaps x+1 units of wealth to register a profit. The 1 extra unit of wealth must be given to us willingly in a fair exchange, i.e., we Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth actually added that extra value to our whole package at some stage. How did we do it? It could be that we have created perceptions in the buyer’s mind that x+1 units is a fair price for our quality of basin, or we are taking advantage of the shortage of basin-making skills in our community, or perhaps buyers just like the sound of our name and are willing to pay 1 extra unit of wealth for the privilege of association! In other words, if we are to create wealth, we need to firmly believe in the value (the cost) of what we have added to existing wealth so that we can convince others to buy at that price and be happy about it! It is not possible to create new wealth from nothing at all! All that we can do is add form or function to existing wealth. We can only ever recombine materials and ideas to solve problems or make life easier but we can never actually conjure up something from nothing. When someone created an atmospheric condenser (not actual name) that “creates” drinking water from thin air, what they did was to think about how rain happens and how that air everywhere contains a certain amount of evaporated moisture (water). When they followed their idea through and trapped open air, cooled it down enough to create moisture droplets and did this over a very large scale, they were able to even save lives with their idea. They had “created wealth” in the sense of making something that was very useful to man and could make them lots of money. But they had only transformed water from vapour form to liquid and connected that to a public tap. Air conditioning had been doing the first part of this process for many decades prior, only they were throwing out the water like an unwanted by-product! The only difference would be how to effect the cooling of open air cheaply enough for this innovaton to benefit poor villagers who couldn’t pay, neither for electricity nor for regular regassing of the cooling mechanism. In short, spend lots of time thinking about why someone should willingly pay you as much money as you propose that they should pay you. 4.

Disciplined execution

Returning to the question of the water basin, if, having manufactured the water basin, the price we set for it (x+1 units of wealth) agreed well with the overall economics of our market then we would continue to receive the unexplained additional 1 unit of wealth and so we could safely say that we were “creating wealth” or “adding value”. But we are not creating anything in the real sense of the word creation. What we have managed to do is just to configure our resources into a desirable whole which we then use as a platform for selling our soft wealth Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth (ideas, plans and their careful implementation) for a total price of 1 unit of wealth. The principle in operation is augmentation: soft wealth cannot be sold as a standalone offering; it needs to augment a carrier which is then sold for a higher value than before. In our little boy years, my friends and I used to make what we called ubulimbo (a sticky paste which we would roll onto a stick and mount in a tree or an open place sprinkled around with bird food). Unsuspecting birds which happened to sit on our bulimbo would fail to flap themselves off our sticky stuff and where ours for the taking at a time of our choosing. Now, the process of producing bulimbo required the extraction of some rubbery juices from the sap of trees. But one cannot just start collecting sap on their open palms. A carrier medium was required especially in the early stages. We would take a small lump of nsima (thick maize pulp) and use that to soak up the sap. We would chew and masticate the mixture to “process” bulimbo then we would have to remove the entire nsima content by washing out with water. The nsima was just a means toward the intended end of collecting and processing bulimbo. In the arena of profitability, whatever tangible wealth we work with must be just a carrier for selling the soft wealth attributable to us in the value chain, in just the same manner that as kids we used nsima to carry bulimbo for us. Our ‘profit’ must come from “soft wealth” – our ideas and their disciplined roll-out – but they have to ride on something else which people currently need. Thus, to say that we are “creating wealth” is to say that we have found a good enough carrier to enable us to put a monetary value on our ideas. And the market shows its agreement by accepting to pay. The extra unit of wealth (our profit) is therefore a measure of: 

Our ideas and our labour



How efficiently we are adding those ideas and labour onto existing wealth.

So when we speak of “wealth creation”, we actually mean finding an efficient carrier to use to sell our ideas. It follows, therefore, that: 

Better and smarter ideas lead to more profit,



Firmer implementation of ideas leads to more profit,

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The Mechanisms of Wealth 

A stronger base of existing wealth will set one up to make more profit,



A market where a lot of people are economically active (higher existing wealth) will set one up to make more profit,



It is possible for an inherently inferior product to outsell a higher quality one and turn out to be more profitable. It only needs to be marketed and sold better, because it is the overall package which is purchased – not any single aspect such as higher quality (whatever “higher quality” means).



Softer wealth (intellectual property such as patents and trade secrets; character; ability to manage value; consistency in managing labour; emotional stability, etc.) is a more powerful driver of profitability than hard capital. This is because softer wealth actually originates from the one who is seeking to create wealth (so he keeps a bigger share from the selling price), whereas hard capital first goes into physical/tangible carriers which are then augmented by our wealth creation process.

The fifth factor in the concept of profit is insultingly obvious: we must be able to tell that the buyer is actually giving us 1 extra unit of wealth. We must be able to measure the wealth that other people give us in exchange for our efforts. Strangely, obvious as this factor might be, it is just as difficult to work with as all the other factors above. 5.

Measure and evaluate what we get in return for what we give

For a summary, we return to the issue of where the 1 extra unit of wealth comes from. The only source of the added wealth is human. If our accounting skills do not lie to us, there is no way we could amplify wealth; no matter how many different forms we transform it into, its value only obeys the laws of science, particularly that the total mass and energy in our universe is constant. The only difference in value between a kilogram of gold in the ground and a kilogram of gold sitting in a bank vault is the sum of the different business processes in between. The mine, the refineries, the metal exchange, the logistics companies, the security companies, the transporters as well as the self-invited taxmen are all entitled to have their value contribution “marked up”. Whether or not the mark-up at each ‘station’ in the process is positive and how big it is depends only on ‘soft’ issues. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth It is only when we bring intellectual capacity and disciplined execution to bear on a finite amount of resource that we are able to configure wealth in such a way that a free-minded and well informed person will pay a premium to get it. It is also the use of intellectual capacity and disciplined execution (or the lack of it) that could lead to the destruction of wealth. These two factors are the key to all profitability; they are the only means by which a unit of value, x, going in as an input, could be reconfigured to give an output of value x+1. I get fascinated by how bankers, insurers and similar financial people like to use the word “product”; they seem to be the only people who speak about selling a product when they come to us carrying nothing but pen and blank paper and the only thing they have to put on the shelf is some glossy brochure showing women’s smiling faces. But then somehow their “products” manage to carry some of the highest values on the planet. When a company speaks about their “margin”, they are trying to quantify what they think their contribution to the value chain is, in the same way that a bank designs “products” out of nothing but numbers, names and computer programs. We could say that while the majority of us are familiar enough with hard, tangible resources, these men in suits remind us of the reality and importance of the soft resources. We can classify the factors of profitability into two:  Hard resources to be invested and harvested, and  Soft resources to create room for a mark-up. The table below summarises. It presents 7 keys questions which every entreprenuer or business manager must frequently answer – with numbers – in order to ensure they remain profitable. By much pain we learnt these. Most people contemplating their first entrepreneurial venture, tend to place disproportionate emphasis on factor 1 (see table below). But when we visit potential suppliers of factor 1, we are tutored disproportionately on the components of factor 2(a)(1), i.e., the business plan, the work process design, and any other unique advantages that might guarantee a captive market. These two lines as you notice represent only 40% (by number at least) of the factors that make an economic venture profitable. I would like to suggest that it is on account of this one-legged approach that most projects end up destroying wealth. A business runs on seven legs. You have no doubt seen two legs on a man, four on a dog and a few hundred on a milliped. A successful business just needs seven. If any of the seven fail, that could become the entry point for problems to all the others that may be healthy. The job of leaders, therefore, is to ensure that all seven legs are fully functional. They must nurse the Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth weak legs back to life quickly if the business is to survive the storms that will no doubt come. Some employ people they call Internal Auditors in order to help them see clearer to the health of all things. Whatever you do, ensure that your seven are fit and continue to evolve with the times. Category/subcategory

1. Hard resource

Factor

Capital investment (1) Intellectual capacity

(a) Wealth drivers 2. Soft resource

(b) Monitoring tools

(2) Disciplined execution

(1) Accountability

(2) Measurement

Key components

Money invested

Business plan

Key questions (the seven legs) (1) Do we have enough cash? (2) Can we work with less?

Existing advantage

(3) How are we “creating” wealth today?

Utilisation of competences

(4) Are we selling enough?

Supervision

(5) Are we paying fair price?

Work process design

Physical labour Bookkeeping Financial Control Risk Management Performance tracking tools Accounting standards & rules

(6) Are we in control of what we are doing? (7) Are we creating the wealth we think we are creating?

Table 7.1 Factors of profitability Profitability is driven by those three factors and a lot more besides. Profitability is not about putting together resources that are worth 10 dollars and selling whatever the product for 11 dollars; rather, it is about putting together resources and factors that are worth 10 dollars, selling their product for a fair and justifiable amount above 10 dollars and still ending up with a customer who will happily return tomorrow. It is not “a walk in the park”; it is an iterative science. It is driven by intellectual capacity (IC) and disciplined execution (DE). Profitability is not about greed (maximising our margin); it is about the efficient utilisation of our entire arsenal of resources to increase wealth for everyone involved. The only connection between profitability and money is the need to measure how much wealth we are creating. When companies are teetering on the brink of collapse, they speak in terms of cash, but for the robust and Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth stable, issues of cash are a settled matter; such companies speak in terms of wealth, profit and growth. Cash is about survival but profitability is about creating wealth. Profitability is about creating an installed base that becomes a generator of value. In other words, just like a company could be profitable and still go out of business, so a company could appear to be generating cash but actually be destroying wealth overall. This is where the factor of measurement (accounting standards) comes in. Companies such as Worldcom, Parmalat, Enron, etc which used the imaginariness of derivative “products” so much that revenues from these “products”quickly overtook their conventional business activities are stinging reminders of the need to use proper measurement in determining the profitability of any operation. While measurement is not a driver of profitability (you could be profitable without knowing that you are), lack of proper measurement could render us so overly cautious that we pass up on legitimate opportunities. Thus, measurement is a motivator of increased profitability (where profits are positive), and a cautionary to prevent further loss (where profits are negative). Profit is a concept that goes further than the mere subtraction of expenses from earnings. Profit cannot be separated from the technicalities of planning, efficiency, effectiveness, discipline, marketing, accepted norms of behaviour, ethics, etc. Fortunately, while few can successfully navigate those technical topics, almost all can understand the concept of getting more at the end than the total of what you put in, by working smart (i.e., applying a good combination of brains and brawn to keep your train rolling). Putting these notes on common footing (see next page): using views 3-7, we see how regulatory authorities always claim a sizable fraction of our best efforts, in form of tax. From the regulator’s standpoint, it is important to ensure, especially for the case of multinational corporations, that profits are being declared where they are actually produced. It is easy for profits to be buried in one place and resurrected in another. Taxmen are therefore also extremely interested in how we measure our profitability. And from the standpoint of the business operator, there is a message: that new wealth does not spring out of merely searching for how much margin we could get away with. It is intellectual capacity and disciplined execution that create new wealth. The more we can deploy our resources to these two things, the higher our mark-up can be in all fairness.

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Adding value Making a positive return on every penny you invest is what is referred to technically as ‘adding value’. It implies more than just making a profit. The concept of “Economic Value Added” (EVA) is widely known and used in industry to help decide on which projects to invest in. The idea is that money always has to be working for its owners. By surrendering it to you, the owner is losing the opportunity to generate income from the same capital in the hands of someone else, or else he is paying interest on it from his own source of all that cash. So an EVA test first establishes what the money costs to the owner. A project will have zero EVA if it just manages to pay back the capital plus the cost of that capital. If EVA is positive then the project is not only able to pay back both the capital and the cost of borrowing that capital but is also making a profit on top. For example, if by keeping your money in the bank for a month, you are given an interest of K100 on your K2,000 balance, why would you take that K2,000 out of the bank and bother yourself with all manner sweat and tears unless you stand to make profit greater than K100? If someone, borrowing your K2000 for the same period of time only manages to bring back K2,100 then their EVA would be zero, since without lifting a finger, you would have made that amount virtually risk-free at the bank. But then value is a concept which goes beyond tangible things, like cash. Some of the most profitable activities are those that depend, for value addition, on human thought or talent. The factor which differentiates one commercial bank from another, one policeman from another, one software designer from another, one car manufacturer from another – in fact, any one business activity from any other – is in how human potential is leveraged to get results. While tangible things increase their value in proportion to the effort applied on them, human potential follows some very different mathematics. In order to get extra performance from it, the human mind takes close to zero incremental cost in monetary terms. In the wrong configuration, the mind may give you zero performance; sweeten the configuration and the mind suddenly springs to hundreds of times greater performance and is able to bring an overwhelming wealth of intelligent effort to bear upon your limited resources. The result: you get astronomical EVA against almost zero cost! Thus, the human mind can very quickly become the most efficient resource multiplier (value adder) in any business operation. This is why hard-brawn businesses such as timber-logging, brick-laying, and other laborious work are limited in the rates of return they can achieve – the scope for reaping from the ‘mind’ in these activities is minimal. Robust Wealth

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DIFFERENT WAYS OF WORKING WITH THE CONCEPT OF PROFIT

1. Cash flow

2. Cost components

‘Mark up’

3. Operations components

Gross profit

NOPAT

4. Growth components

Useful profit

Tax

5. Value components

6. Wealth components

Useful new wealth

Added value

Regulated new wlth

7. SOURCES of the value

IC & DE

Cost of capital

Maintenance & depreciation Premises & admin Professional fees

Production cost

Production cost

Operating costs

Underlying value

Underlying wealth

Utilities

Operating capital as determined by cost accounting/ projection

Materials Labour (a) BASIC COST ACCOUNTING

(b) TECHNICAL ASSESSMENTS OF PROFITABILITY

(c) WEALTH ASSESSMENTS OF PROFITABILITY

(d) DRIVERS OF PROFITABILITY

IC = Intellectual capacity; DE = Disciplined execution

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The Mechanisms of Wealth But why is it that mind-based activities can yield such huge profits? Well, it is nothing more than supply/demand economics playing out. Few people actually enjoy thinking. Some may enjoy being creative but only a handful will go further and put in all the disciplined effort to turn the creative ideas they have generated into sellable ‘products’. It takes active thought and ‘mental sweat’ to transform a creative idea into a value-adding business process. That is why many good people stop off at just coming up with great ideas. Fewer still are able to work on the ‘sweetening’ factors so that other minds may join It takes active thought and ‘mental them in the vision. Most of us will simply rush to doing sweat’ to transform a creative idea actual jobs ourselves. Few into a value-adding business think about facilitating for process. That is why many good others to enjoy doing said jobs. people stop off at just coming up It is these few who quickly with great ideas. become the VIPs among us because they are able to congregate entire armies around them who go on to add thousands of times more value in any given time period than they would have added had they acted alone.

The concept of poverty I wonder, if we stood side by side, who would feel poorer between our ancestors of the 1500s and ourselves. They never knew anything about – nor could they pronounce the word ‘chlorine’, but they had good, healthy water to drink. They roamed the bushes in total freedom. We, on the other hand, live under stress levels they could never wish upon their worst enemy tribes. It did not even occur to them to measure how many dollars they were living on per day but, boy, did they live! Poverty is, first and foremost, a mentality. A person who is convinced that they are rich will always find a way to be so. One who is convinced that they are the unfortunate of the planet and need everybody’s donations will never do a thing on their own. Poverty is firstly a mental attitude before it becomes an economic situation. I remember once feeling pity for myself when, having paid out K4.5m (US$900) on house rentals, I was left with nothing for anything else. I might have continued in my little pity party had a cousin of mine not phoned up needing help to keep a roof over his family of four. His rental requirement? K0.2m (US$40)! I could afford to live in no less than fifteen houses like his all at the same time and not feel a thing! That is just how ridiculous we can be when we accept to define ourselves as poor. We think we are poor so we take on a defeated attitude, totally blinding ourselves to the real wealth of possibilities open to us. Poverty is first and foremost, a Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth mentality! The truth is that you will never feel properly satisfied until the day you just get up and say to yourself “I have enough!” The biggest problem with thinking that you are poor is that you lose discipline; you lose the life skills you need for independent survival and, yes, you begin to show actual evidence of poverty. Sometime ago, floods used to happen, wars used to happen, droughts did come, too, but the tribes knew that they had only themselves to run to for help so somehow they survived and thrived and here we are, their offspring! Now somehow, with our much increased scientific knowledge, our internet links, our sterilised living environments and our smartphones, we sit back and enthusiastically agree with some 28-year old graduate, who does not even know how warm fresh milk is when you squeeze it out of a cow, that we are indeed living “below the poverty line.” Who ever decided to put that line where they decided to put it? But, don’t get me wrong – I know what suffering is and I am not talking about suffering; I am talking about poverty. Poverty is a mentality brought on and sustained by flawed theories. An able-bodied man, of full brain and brawn, living in a gigantic and vast land full of natural resources above and below his feet should never be – it is immoral for him to be – poor! Humanitarian aid comes to relieve short-term suffering but poverty can only be cured by a change of mental attitude. You see, the only reason Africa continues to look and feel poor is that somehow Africa has been hoodwinked into believing that Africa is poor. There is a subtle point here: the moment you believe that you are not (meant to be) poor, you actually get up and start doing the things that rule out poverty for you! You need to get up and say to yourself “I am not poor, I have never been poor, and I will never be poor.” Feed that message to your mind and your mind will do the rest of the work for you, saying no to some things and yes to others until you are right where you believe you should be.

The moment you believe that you are not (meant to be) poor, you actually get up and start doing the things that rule out poverty for you!

The scapegoat of corruption

Those who pull out pictures of famished little children scavenging for food or statistics of how many Africans are living on less than a dollar every day to prove that Africa is actually poor are the same ones who then point fingers at the corrupt of Africa’s leaders and say those are the reasons Africa is poor. They conveniently forget to mention that even in their own countries, there are leaders who are corrupt too. In fact, the corruption, measured in cash terms, Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth that occurs in these developed countries is greater than that which occurs in the poor of Africa’s 54 countries put together! But the citizens in the more developed countries understand that without benevolent donors to cry too also, they had better live within their means. And if their means become too small to live within, they get busy creating wealth out of the resources they can get from their immediate environment. That is how we get the Silicon Valleys and the Hollywood’s of the USA and the Square Mile’s of England and the Bavaria’s of Germany, etc. Corruption will never die – not in Africa, not in America, not in Britain or South Korea or anywhere else on the planet as long as men continue to have the motive of greed and the opportunity of power happening upon them. But entrepreneurial hard work is the activity that can always deliver a positive EVA even with a backdrop of corruption. Which one will come first, I ask: the defeat of corruption or people resolving to become economically independent? But those who have been more thoroughly brainwashed continue to doubt. Well, in 2008 alone, one man Bernie L. Maddoff had his Ponzi scheme, employing 52 people, implode after nearly 48 years of existence in the USA. It wiped out US$65,000,000,000 worth of supposed wealth and a few lives in suicides. That amount of corruption by one man alone eclipses all the sums of money ever embezzled by all corrupt politicians in Zambia since its independence from Britain in 1964. And this corruption scandal is just one of the hundreds recorded in the USA alone. If we totalled all the crises and crimes, the numbers are astronomical, eclipsing all of Africa’s GDPs put together. And yes, as a percentage of US GDP, the numbers are still considerable just like the corruption that occurs in Africa as a percentage of Africa’s various GDPs. So, no, corruption has nothing to do with the poverty situation in Africa. Which one came first, I ask again, the corruption or the sense of poverty? If you can beat the sense of responsibility out of people, make them constantly desire to live outside their own means, make them continually dependent on someone else’s pockets, then you can succeed in making a place perpetually poor. Corruption, I say, has been a scapegoat for too long in the crusade to convince Africans that they are poor and that they need the whole world’s financial help to make ends meet. Africa must fight – and win against – that mental conditioning by being extremely selective in the type of help that they accept from outside.

GLOBAL CRISES The evidence of crashability There is a certain value (more accurately, an ‘instrument’) in our present financial system, called a derivative. A derivative does not exist own its own. Its existence and value are derived from a movement in some other value. Returning to the value cycle of a few pages ago, imagine that circuit having electricity flowing Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth through it. We could insert a light bulb anywhere in that circuit and the more powerful the flow through circuit, the stronger the bulb would glow, right? Now we could measure the luminosity of the bulb, guarantee that and then charge people a fee to come and work in our brightly lit room at night. The opportunity to work in our brightly lit room becomes a derivative of the flows happening in our circuit. As long as we can keep those underlying value flows happening fast enough, the bulb will never lose its brightness and everything will be just fine. Now, someone might want to rent the room for night work for the next month, or even for the next 5 years! At this point, derivatives become ungentlemanly. Our confidence in renting out that room can be no better than our confidence that the underlying flows of value will continue undisturbed. So we decide that we shall accept the advance payment for 5 straight years of use of our room at night. We then go to an insurance company to cover the risk, for the next 5 years, that the underlying flows causing the light bulb to stay on might not happen on some days and we might need to compensate. The insurance company will compensate our tenants on our behalf for any poor-light days within the next 5 years. The insurance company (we shall call it Company A) goes to insurance Company B and insures any risk of payouts beyond 30 consecutive days because they have enough cash cushion for only up to 30 days. Insurer B, rating their chances at predicting both the actual demand for brightly lit rooms as well as the underlying flows of value, decide to speculate – essentially to gamble against chances of 30 continuous days of darkness – and they create a ‘security’ called “The Nightwork Fund”. Contributions into this fund from hundreds of subscribers help to guarantee payouts to Insurer A should need arise. Insurer A’s premiums to insurer B become the profit to insurer B and all the investors in The Nightwork Fund. Thus, based on just one underlying real commodity (that circuit and the light bulb), a complex spaghetti of financial commitments arise. These commitments are the derivatives, and they bring the largest profits into some of the world’s largest banks. Far more often than not, derivatives become lots of times higher valued than the underlying activity upon which they are constructed. So when derivative business goes wrong, it necessarily crashes something big. In the words of Warren Buffet: “…derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”17 In recent times there have been a spate of failures, collapses, and scandals of mega billions in US dollar terms. We manage to find one or two people to vilify and then we move on without changing our ways.

17

Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 2002 Annual Report, pp 17 Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth But could it not be that the very philosophy that drives such ‘fantasy business’ is what is failing us? Could it be that our present financial order is altogether too crashable? Before Amaranth Advisors (personality: Brian Hunter) had lost US$6.5bn in natural gas futures in 2006, HSBC, ‘the world’s local bank’, had already written off US$500m in interest rate derivative losses in 2005. Table 7.2 shows some more cases. Year

Organisation

Amount*

OOJ*

Problem area

Organisation Survived?

Region*

1991

Bank of Credit and Commerce Int. (BCCI)

?

30,000

fraudulent international activities

NO (1972-1991)

UK, Iran, others

1994

Orange County, California

$1.6bn

?

interest rate derivatives

yes

USA

1995

Barrings Bank

$1.3bn

?

Currency arbitrage

NO (1762-1995)

UK, Japan

1995

Meridian BIAO Bank

$50m

?

Currency dealing

NO (1992-1995)

Zambia

1998

Sumitomo Corporation

$2.6bn

?

Copper futures

yes

Japan

2006

Arthur Andersen

?

27,800*

See “Enron”; obstruction of justice

(1913-2006) Accenture (2000- )

USA

2006

Enron

?

22,000

Accounting fraud

NO (1985-2006)

USA

2008

American Insurance Group (AIG)

$180bn

?

Credit default swaps

yes

USA

2008

Société Générale

$7.2bn

?

European index futures

yes

France

2008

Lehman Brothers

$100bn

28,600

Mortgage backed securities

NO (1850-2008)

USA

2008

Bernard L. Madoff

$65bn

52+

Ponzi scheme

NO (1960-2008)

USA, Others

Partial

Amount*: Minimum recorded loss directly affecting organisation, not considering ‘collateral damage’ at other institutions. OOJ*: “out of jobs”, number of jobs lost directly at institution concerned. Region*: Country/countries where the largest portion of the cost was footed. 27,800*: Many of these taken on directly by various different companies.

Table 7.2: A random sampling of recent value creation disasters at global scale Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth My thought is that our present system is inadequately engineered to face the challenge of today’s world. Having been birthed at the end of two great wars happening less than half a century apart, the current system was too overshadowed by men of the gun with their ‘us-and-them’ thinking. The old financial system was engineered for the express purposes of: (1) reconstructing Europe, Japan and the other allies of the USA (2) short-term help with balance-of-payment positions for those allies (3) keeping the markets open to, particularly, American goods. Now all these objectives have been met somewhat. A new system to deal with the crashabilities of the old is long overdue. And to think that the problems are domestic (as opposed to global) would be ill-advised, as the last column in Table 7.2 shows. Central bank chiefs gave speeches and analysed their domestic economies in the wake of various disasters, but the global nature of these disasters clearly demonstrates that the problem might lie at a more foundational level than can be addressed by a single central bank alone. The specialists would say that this problem is systemic at global level. Derivatives (the clever man’s money) are as pervasive as they are because they present seductively appetising enticements to even pure novices to act recklessly with free-flowing money. The only other activity in which people are able to make similar “kills” is in gambling. In gambling, the word used is “betting”, in derivatives, the word used is “speculation” but they mean the same thing, actually! People just should not be able to run into as much money as derivatives promise, based on the creation of almost zero tangible wealth on the ground. It is possible for us as a society to become so confident in a flawed system that we end up biting off our own backsides thinking we have discovered a succulent new kill. Speaking before the Mayor of London at a banquet for bankers and merchants of the City of London on 17th June 2009, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England advised: “… change to the structure…of our banking system is necessary. Blaming individuals is no substitute for acknowledging the failure of a system… We have a real opportunity now to put that right…” In other words, it just shouldn’t be possible for someone to run into so much cash, having produced nothing of tradeable value. But why should Africa be concerned with these problems – seeing as Africa has negligible contribution? Why should individual Africans bother? Isn’t this a selfcreated Western problem? Well, as a matter of fact, Africa has a lot to gain from paying attention to these happenings. When it comes to Africa, the relationship between the financial big boys and Africa are always those of sneaky big brother and gullible little brother. As long as Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Africa does not go to the bargaining table as co-equal, Africa will never benefit from any world economic architecture. Africa, more than anyone and for Africa’s own good, must fully and thoroughly understand this architecture, its merits and demerits, its fairnesses and unfairnesses, and then engineer her systems to be resilient if they cannot be a step ahead. Ultimately, if Africa puts anyone other than Africa’s own people to drive Africa’s progress, Africa will remain the goldmine that never quite came to know what gold looked like, let alone what it was worth. We need to grow our strategic wealth really fast. We need to improve our negotiating positions everywhere: regarding trade, regarding finance, regarding social perceptions, and on every other front of human interaction. And we cannot do this if we are not well aware of how the world around us operates. That was the mistake our comfortable ancestors made. We are the ones to put that right this time around.

Where partners speak and work, results show After the 2nd Great War, Europe and Japan were severely damaged. They needed to grow and build back capacity. The USA, for its part, needed markets for its stable economic machine. The needs of the world’s powerful and the world’s poor at the time lined up almost perfectly. So a meeting of equals was called. Forty-four nations that had been allies in the just-ending war began a round of negotiations opened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA. Even though these nations were allies and had a lot of shared interests, they still needed lengthy negotiations in order to arrive at next steps. Some of the outcomes of the deliberations were:  A lot of US aid for Europe (well over US$5bn between Britain and France alone, for example).  Provisions for trade and currency regulation.  From 1945 right up till the 1960s, the United States deliberately makes moves to encourage European and Japanese economic competitiveness – even adjusting its own economic levers to help these blocs improve their balances of payment. And the results are clear to all now. This system where countries were negotiating with roughly equal bargaining power, and where aid money was not given as ‘loose money’ but seriously contested over and ultimately followed up with non-financial strategies is what set up that aid money to achieve its intended aims. …Fast forward some 30 years to the 1970s… The world has just gone through a commodities boom. Many African countries have committed themselves to huge loans for infrastructure building. Then the world faces an unprecedented oil crisis; world financial systems are shaken. The borrowers find it difficult to service their loans and run up serious defaults. They come under heavy IMF supervision but, very conspicuously, no concerted commitment outside the IMF arises. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth The wealtheir team had no reason to sit with Africa to work out a way forward because this time there was nothing strategic to gain from doing so. Africa just did not have anything (other than the now ubiquitous pictures of famished children staring emptily into the cameras) to bargain with. Or did they not? Where were the bulk of the minerals coming from? More paper begins to fly into Africa. The paper is never instrumentised for accountability or effectiveness. Pilferage and pocketings begin to happen at an unprecedented scale. Some of the foreign dollars are even sustaining domestic wars and ensuring governments are well distracted from their main objectives. The result: wealth is leaving Africa, but Africa does not even know how to evaluate how much it is losing daily! Whether coming in as aid or loan, Africa fails to make any of the dollars work. Because both teacher and student skipped their homework. But Africa is irredeemable, the world concludes. And the good guys Bono and Bob hold a few concerts to help the world try again. Their efforts get usurped by impresarios. An entire economic sector – Aid – worth billions of dollars a year and thousands in employment, is born. But those sympathy dollars fail to bring about change. Yet again. Why do the aid dollars fail? Well, because the aid dollars were never directed at development! At best they were a massage for the conscience. At worst, they were intended to ruin entrepreneurship. But mostly they were a critical component of what is referred to in political circles as soft diplomacy – instruments of political influence without any threats attached, just tender benefits if you keep your part in the war of ideologies. It is the Value Cycle playing itself out for the benefit of the giver. How do we know that these recent aid dollars were never directed at development? Well, compare the first case (Europe and Japan) to the second and you have it. In the first, two equals are negotiating. In the second, the disparity in bargaining power is so huge that the donor even prefers to outsource representation to some straightjacket institutions run by legions of PhDs. Whereas The Allies were talking directly in the first case, Africa and the Bretton Woods institutions are trying to make some awkward tutor-student relationship work, in the second. In the new effort there is only unspoken hope, not directed intent. In fact, people are moved to tears when they see their aid work! Were you expecting something else, one wonders. The entire financial system of Argentina collapsed in 2002 under Bretton-Woods tutelage. Had that scenario occurred to any of the allies immediately post WorldWar-II, it would have been taken as a communal failure and drastic measures of seismic proportions would have followed. Not this time! This time everything had been outsourced to a non-sovereign (read that as “immune from consequences”) body called the IMF. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth The fallacy is to point at anything but the problem; the reality is that commitment is the problem. What Africans need to do is make up their minds that whether or not any outsiders join in, they are getting up, changing the rules and taking themselves somewhere different. Lasting wealth can only be generated by its owner.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR PEOPLEWEALTH When a person begins to lose respect for himself, he is in serious trouble. Every person with a sound mind has a set of internal values that lead him to say no to one thing and yes to another. Living up to those values enhances self-respect. The more consistently one lives up to his values, the more positive and productive his self esteem becomes. Failing to live up to one’s own values raises internal contradictions which kill self-esteem. Low self esteem is actually a serious corruption of good morals. Military men understand this truth well. They understand better than most how closely linked self-esteem is to personal discipline. A reliable person understands not just the authority above him but his own authority and capabilities too. The word some prefer to use is honour. It is not when a man does good things that he becomes honourable; on the contrary, it is the fact that a man already regards himself with honour that causes him to do honourable things. Make believe How do you win a war? You get your opponent to surrender How do you get your opponent to surrender? - You break his will to fight How do you break your opponent’s will to fight? Well, you get him to believe there is no hope for him any more, that there is no point in fighting. How do you get a man of war to believe there is no hope for him? You identify his strong points then make him believe that he is cut off from them. Oh, so you just make him believe? Yes, even if it’s not true, you just make him believe, because it is what he believes in that gives a man the hope to keep going; it is what causes him to do what he does.

Good men being good Think about and imagine good things: In order to do good things, we must first of all be thinking about good things, and in order to think good things, we must have a good sense of self-worth. Life and living must have a happy meaning for us or we have already begun to lose. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Never entertain a low regard for yourself. Laughing off your failings is allowed, crying them out is allowed also, but being dominated by them is the first step to lasting defeat. Start the sparks: Have you noticed how just one instance of something interesting is able to lift the mood at the office? All of a sudden you feel like you are all one big happy family! But when the bad news is doing its rounds, doing favours for each other becomes a grind; the language is wooden, the mood tense and generally, a day at the office feels like something you ought to get paid lots of money to do. The difference is a small spark, an injection of something nice at the start of day. But then someone has to create that little something nice from nothing at all! Someone has to provide the spark. I call this the do-feel-do spiral. There is a point at which you must deliberately do something good out of nothing at all. When enough of this has been done, eventually the good feelings catch up and you then find it easier to do more good things, and so on. But at the beginning, there will be nothing but your own will to motivate you; you will need to make a very conscious and deliberate decision to change your thinking and focus on good things. Lose the bad traffic: It is the holding on to and reprocessing of bad episodes that keeps many of us locked in continual anxiety. The day all that mental traffic is replaced – when the imagination is allowed to sour free again – will be the day freedom is won and joy rises once again. Most people choke their mental and emotional systems like a computer whose processor is overwhelmed with big data sets. They have too much negative traffic. But you know what, your situations will never turn around; it is you who must turn. Decide – out of nothing at all – that you are no longer willing to rent out your brain for free for the processing of negative feelings. Decide that you will dump all that traffic and free yourself up for constructive and positive things. The fresh air will be great! But the results of your new behaviours will be even better! Give it away: There is another thing I know about joy – it is practically impossible to have it and to keep it in isolation. Be nice to somebody, be kind to somebody, go out of your way for someone and see what begins to happen in your world…! It is like a seed – you can never get more of it until you sow what you now have as broadly as possible and then allow it the time to work its work at its own pace.

Peoplework One time, our cement factory at Ndola started experiencing an intriguing mix of problems. There was low production; whatever little was produced was of inconsistent quality; accusations were being levelled at practically everyone by everyone else; ideas and distractions were flying all over; those who managed to leave the company were admired. Generally, we were one disjointed bundle trying desperately to look like we were in control of what we were doing. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Then one day, a two-and-half hour meeting is called by the head of the production department to try to address the difficulties. Having gone through the usual troubleshooting/problem-solving/brainstorming technicalities, we stumbled upon a gem. One of the employees spoke up and narrated his personal ordeal. Some of his colleagues had told the manager malicious lies about him. The manager had taken that as indisputable truth and accused that employee of working against him. The employee was emotional as he spoke. The meeting then went down the line of people issues and, all in all, found that we were having more of people problems than lack of mastery of the skills to operate our machines. Managers were spending more time with machines and numbers than with their people, and what little time was spent with their people was spent screaming out instructions and warnings. As a result, work had become a grinding source of consternation for everyone. Communication had become chaotic; emails were flying to and fro with a million ‘carbon copies’ in tow; meetings were nothing other than forums to hear – once again – that we had problems! It had become a pain to get up and go to work every day. At the end of the day, technical skills, motivational talks and all the organisational know-how in the world was not going to improve our performance until we had got the people question right. In order to keep our machines working smoothly, we had to service the people. Many times, beaten by the pressure to perform, we forget the fundamentals of why we must perform in the first place. We must perform because we care about people. We must go to work to meet people, share experiences with people, develop people, laugh with people, then and only then can we resolve issues with people when issues arise. We need to empathise with people, we need to support people as they put their mistakes behind them and grow. Our skills, job titles, talents and experience are there to put us in positions that allow us to influence the people assigned to us in progressive ways. They look up to us for guidance, so we must be effective at providing that. People need personal contact with you. People are the essence, so you need to love and appreciate them. Loving people is a powerful insurance policy against the tough times – yes, the tough times will come without fail, sooner and later! Economists, Historians and men of religion all agree on this one: that recessions and booms will come and go in their various sizes and that this is a fact of life that we have no control over, just like the waves of the sea that come and go without human permission. For organisations and nations, the people question is an extremely potent differentiator. The leaders are those who care about their people and resource them; the laggards are those who turn and bite their own folk when things get tough. When all other things are equal, organisations that are congregations of people interacting positively and supporting each other will outdo, outsell, outrun and outlive those that just focus on delivering the numbers. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth Viewed in a rigorous sense, religious groupings are the very epitome of how businesses ought to run. By focussing on serving and equipping people, these organisations are able to defy economics the world over. Every objective that they set their minds to succeeds no matter the economic cycle even though almost all of them render their services voluntarily! People want to know you care in real ways and then they will work miracles for you! When you are able to harness people’s free will, their voluntary support and their energy, just about everything becomes possible for you. When people become the main issue in a company and the biggest preoccupation of its managers, miracles happen daily. In these organizations, it is not necessary to be a hard-driving technocrat, but it is absolutely essential that you are a people person. That does not mean that you have to convert yourself into some gregarious socialite. It means simply that you have to be that individual in whom others can place a high level of trust. You have to be able to give them hope, direction and peace of mind by If you give yourself diligently to showing them how to resolving other people’s problems overcome their obstacles. A prominent economist once with your skills, you inevitably train said that the group needs are yourself in how to solve your own best met when everybody in problems as well. the group does what is best for them as an individual. That paradigm has been established for many years now. The customary rules of global trade even take that as a given. After all, you are the only person in the word who understands your own needs best. So am I now aiming to turn all that thinking on its head? To a very large extent, yes. You do not know how to meet your own needs until you have helped enough other people to meet theirs. You do not know how to make your business profitable until you have helped enough other businesses to become profitable. If you give yourself diligently to resolving other people’s problems with your skills, you inevitably train yourself in how to solve your own problems as well.

How to love thy neighbour It is as straightforward as hard work, great thought and right people treatment. We, here in Africa – especially, but not just in “The Real Africa” – do not treat each other well at all. We tend to bend over backwards for foreigners and their ideas, being excessively hospitable, but our own people, those who look like us and contend in the same battles as we do, the ones God has asked us to do life with – Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth we trample upon without a second thought. And, true to our expectations, they end up being quite bad to us in return. We need to have genuine and active love for the ones we are with, the families we have been born into and the country we have been placed in. The way to change our attitude toward other people is not difficult at all: simply change what you think about them. Try, for example, to imagine the troubles they too are struggling with then, perhaps, instead of slapping their face in your fantasies, you might find yourself holding their hand, embracing them and treasuring them as a partner in your common struggles. Many people fail to change what they think about others “just like that” (with no logical reasons) because, “well, how do I just turn a blind eye to what I know about this guy…?” To which I say “how perfect is your knowledge about this person?” Listen, even your most stringently audited perceptions about someone will never be true forever. So it comes down to a simple decision. Just decide that you will embrace this other person just as they are simply because they are human. Even the ones you feel you love right now could flip on you in a flash and deal you the greatest of blows in your life. Simply because they are human, embrace them, and leave the rest to be closed by the Power that knows all things perfectly. When you make a habit out of deliberately thinking well of people it will become like second nature to love thy neighbour. Yes, you might get bitten every now and then but when the rewards begin to roll in, you will not even have time to remember any of the pain of betrayal! If, for a change, you reserve your negative comment for another day later and instead, for today, just ‘count the small blessing’ which that person has been to you, you will have done enough. All of us have that one person (or three) from who we cannot seem to see any good. Even what little adavances they make toward us, we know without a shaddow of doubt that they are political manouvres designed to gain one step over us. Now, I ask you, for just one minute to stop reading and list three things over which that person needs your human understanding or forgiveness or gratitude. Please write down one area where they need your gratitude, one where they need your forgiveness and one where they just need your understanding of their unique circumstances. Can you add another thing under each theme again? The burden of embracing them becomes that much lighter. That is all you need for today. At some point in time, we just need to set our complaints aside and start working on our attitudes toward other people. When attitudes are healthy, nothing is impossible! It is an amazing principle but wealth that is sweet to the soul is that which other people – our own people – willingly build for us.

The new differentiator It is often better to be wrong than to be undecided. Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth True leaders differentiate themselves in this way – they are strong enough to choose between two good things, and stick to their choice long enough for the consequences to show. A person of average intelligence who makes a quick decision and takes accompanying action, will usually get much farther ahead of a meticulous genius who dilly-dallies forever over every little hurdle. Make decisions and take action – this one aspect is becoming ever more important as a differentiator between achievers and also-rans. Good education and training will count for nothing if you cannot take timely and firm action. This is another way of saying that you have to be willing to take a risk. It is also another way of saying that without the sort of faith that calls things that are yet to be as though they already were, the sort of decisiveness that puts your entire personal credibility on the line for the sake of progress, you cannot lead. And decisiveness is actually one of those people traits that tend to rub off onto others really quickly. When onlookers see a confident and decisive person in action, they do some very interesting things. They will usually:  Want to identify with him, to join him or to work with him  Want to learn from him  Want to consult him often  Want to copy him Overall, decisiveness raises not just the decider’s own self esteem, it permeates to the nearest neighbours and can quickly become part of the group culture. It boosts the group morale and can cure some otherwise incurable problems fast. If in too much doubt, just make some decision and then be courageous enough to face the feedback with total honesty. It is the lack of full honesty and courage at the deepest levels that makes many of our decisions difficult to make.

Just doing their job The vulture is a scavenger. Man has yet to build a sewage processing factory as chemically powerful, biologically efficient and well laid out as the vulture’s digestive system. Where mutilated carcasses await the local rot squad (or indeed, weakened bodies go limping along like walking corpses), the vulture will faithfully move in and eat up, leaving the place clean and dry, ready for the next wave of activity. Thus, vultures perform the important function of garbage collection in nature. The economic world does not run any differently. Vultures are plenty whose only job is to uncover wealth from inefficient locations. Where there is: (1) Potential for profit (2) Ineffective management The vulture’s strategy is to move in, clean up and get out. The clean-up process: (1) Establish ownership, under existing ineffective management, (2) Tap and track as much of the potential as can be converted to actual value when more effective management takes over, Robust Wealth

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The Mechanisms of Wealth (3) Install more effective management loyal to the needs of the vulture, (4) Suck out the hitherto dormand value as quickly as possible, (5) Exit quietly when nearly all the dormant value has been sucked out. All profits will accrue to the vulture, while the vulturised will feel exploited. But it will only be business. The vultures will only be doing their job.

Lessons from Donegal When Donegal declared their desire to have the government of Zambia repay recalculated debt of US$55.6m on original debt that had only been worth US$3.3m nine years before, there was going to be no escaping for Zambia. The country had to pay something. Even though the judge in the case alluded to some “less than candid” behaviour by Donegal’s representatives during the case Donegal International ltd v Republic of Zambia in London, some form of settlement still had to be made. The actual repayment amount came to US$15.5m. It had to be settled. The irony was that this development came at a time when Zambia was just receiving news of debt relief under Jubilee 2000 arrangements. Zambians were shocked at their government’s lack of foresight that landed the country into such embarrassment. It became clear quickly that, in fact, the original debt had been unenforceable but for Zambia’s nonresponsiveness to every overture by Donegal, going back several years. Thus, it was Zambia’s own laxity that brought on the vulture action. Donegal had been left with litigation as the only workable option. The judge in the case, Justice Smith, mentioned that Zambia had “sought to evade their responsibilities” over the years. It was damning on Zambia’s leaders! They had been hoping that the problem would just go away when they had so many professionals at their disposal whom they could have referred the matter to. With their own deadline.

Before it announces itself You will find that many things do not depend on exceptional intelligence in order to work, just the simple habit of proactive action – attack the problem before it announces itself. Don’t be fond of reacting to things. No matter how brilliant your reaction, you always start from below full when negotiating because you are not the one in control of the conversation. In order to win some speaking power, ensure that as often as you can, you are the one who takes the first step.

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children

7 How to Leave an Inheritance The Seven Plus One aspects of inheritance which we all need to consider for handing over to the next generations. There are many things, such as our genetic make-up, which we hand over involuntarily and without thought. But here are the eight matters that need your careful attention, and which you must be deliberate about, if your descendants are to benefit in the best way possible from your labours.

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children he problem we run into as people consider the issue of what they will leave for their children’s children, is that many tend to think too much in terms of money. Thankfully, the generation gap helps to militate against this overrespect for money somewhat. Money should be the very last thing that we think about when we consider what legacy the generation after our children’s will inherit from us. This is because, as we have already seen, money is always flowing and money can quickly evaporate from anybody’s grasp. How do we proceed then? Well, always think in terms of wealth. I have drawn up a list of seven components of wealth which make a great start. I look at them as different dimensions of the same thing. You may call them the seven dimensions of inheritance. But don’t miss the very last one; so important it cannot be counted together with the other seven.

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The Seven Dimensions of Inheritance 1. Values and family identity. This might sound quite tame but is actually the most important aspect. When a person faces crisis points, it is their identity which should give them the strength to go on. Parents (or in this case, grandparents) must think about what their family stands for. A deep self searching coupled with opening of eyes to family members and other families outside for a contrast would help. Grand parents must ensure that they speak about these values to both their children and their children’s children. They must provide living examples of what their family represents. Without this, every other aspect of inheritance pales into insignificance because it will have no inner throneroom to go and occupy. 2. Land. Unless you are a Levite, every family must have a piece of ground to hand down to the newer generations. There are very few things more foolish than the selling of land to meet short term needs. Land must only be sold in order for the proceeds of such sale to solve long term matters. A family that has no land has no dignity and has no identity. In Biblical accounts people are even known for the places where their families are rooted, like Mary of Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus of Nazareth, etc. Land is a highly spiritual matter too. Upon their land, a family builds alters to their God (or gods?) and via those alters are able to connect to forces far beyond human traction and which forces help them to achieve great feets. 3. Education. Next down the legacy line is education. It has been said by some that the function of the body is to carry the head and supply it with all necessary cognitive data for decision making. Indeed when we look at the human body we see that all roads indeed lead to the head. The spine is especially designed to sheath around a central nervous system which carries Gigabytes of electric traffic from all parts of the body to the brain for processing. When you knock a person hard on the head, they will lose balance and fall not because of the physical shove but Robust Wealth

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children because in that moment, the brain momentarily stops controlling and commanding the body. That is what a stroke is. The body simply cannot function for even a minute without the brain. Now the brain uses data it collects every millisecond and compares it to systems and paradigms it has built up over the years in order to give commands. The building up of those systems and paradigms is what we call education. In order for our children to carry themselves well and to lead others when called upon, they need the best education we can give them. This, however, is not the same this as advising that we send our children to the most expensive schools, no. It means being involved in the development of our children’s thought processes. How they interpret the facts of life that they see around them; how they take care of their own and other people’s safety; how they seek missing data; how they analyse and avoid blindspots; how they prioritise the various competing factors, and eventually how they communicate and articulate their thoughts to others. That is education. It is great wealth and we must help our children’s children to build it up and use it well. 4. People skills and Relationships. It is possible to be an educated fool. But it is never possible to be a fool who is good with people! That would be an oxymoron. Because foolishness is judged in relation to custom; in this case, people’s customs. For example, if one arrives at his office, to meet his manager, in nothing but a bamba (underwear), the test for foolishness would already have been crossed to the point his boss might call for psychiatric help. However, if this event happened at a beachside party in front of a game of volleball, can you see how things totally change? In fact, to arrive here in suit and tie and sparkly shoes would make one the suspect for psychaitric review! Children must be brougt up to appreciate culture and understand people management. This shall be the first part of the fourth dimension of wealth to be left to our children’s children. Now, other than managing others who happen to come under their care, your children will have to have co-equals and superiors. It is your responsibility to help them understand and test how to relate in healthy ways with their peers and how to work for their superiors. Many problems we have of poor team-work skills, insubordination or even over-dependence on superiors is because parents do not spend enough time giving examples of these behaviours to their children. Also, there is humility and there is inferiority: only the former is acceptable. Children must know how to be assertive yet non-rebellious with leadership and with their peers. Finally under this dimension, children only learn how to be their brother’s keeper from their fathers. These relationship aspects form part two of the fourth dimension of inheritance. 5. Professional skills. A profession is one of three closely related things, i.e., a declaration of belief, a promise/vow, or an occupation that is carried out in a highly disciplined or regulated manner. For a person to be successful at anything – Robust Wealth

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children whether sport, teaching, law, medicine, engineering, comedy, building or street vending – they need to be professional. They need to be disciplined and work out of deep belief in the value and principles of their work. If children are not helped to be professional at what they do then they have lost the fifth dimension fo inheritable wealth. Now, some wrongly believe that it is the job of universities and colleges to impart professional skills! But professionals will tell you that academic intelligence and work experience are only fractions of what makes a professional professional. The rest is an x-factor which comes from nurture – the sort of upbringing that causes one to truly care for others and to serve them using whatever occupation it is that they find themselves in, without first asking “what is in it for me?” That x-factor (some might want to refer to it as attitude) works hand-in-hand with intelligence and experience to create a well-rounded professional. Have you noticed that some family names have a certain buoyancy that elevates them to the top wherever they are while others seem to have the reverse? These things are certainly handed down. Even in a perfect meritocracy, no one will ignore the impact of attitude, and attitude is one hundred percent a result of nurturing. 6. Cross-generational goals. Especially if we had paid attention to the higher ideals of living such as justice, righteousness and human progress, there shall – without fail – be tasks we have not completed and which our children need to take over and carry to the next station. It might be the building of an institution of learning, the maturing of tree plantations, the delivery of justice to a mistreated family, etc. These cross-generational demands emphasise our connectedness as mere named players in the longer human story, and they form the sixth dimension of inheritance. 7. Business processes and assets thereof. Finally something that looks like money. In fact, this final dimension of inheritable wealth is what often appears in people’s wills. It is only one out of seven: no wonder we have so many societal problems, including financial ones. A father needs to leave to his children’s children the means to create financial wealth. I have seen many versions of the scenario where a parent leaves houses to children and before long the children are found to have sold off these assets and shared the cash. Several years down the line, there is nothing more to show for family financial security. The reason these sell-offs happen is that the assets are not handed down as the business tools that they are. Part (a) of this last dimension is deliberately “business processes”. Unfortunately, we tend to rush to Part (b), “assets thereof” so fast we miss the whole point! The point of this dimension is to enable the children to have a headstart for generating cash. Whereas wealth is a lasting thing and is good for longevity, lack of cash can often be the stray bullet that caught us unaware. Parents must therefore teach children to always have a passive cash generator (or, if the Robust Wealth

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children business is the core business, to have a robust cash generation system) and the children must become competent – via understanding and practice over a period long enough to make them an expert – at running this system. This will become their fallback in case other ventures fail them. There must always be a passive line of income which can be called upon at any moment. If this line of income is sold off, there must proir to the sale be a replacement to bring in equivalent cash at the very least. This seventh dimension will help the children’s children to never be enslaved. Because the moment they go out to borrow, they shall become, for the period of the borrowing, a slave to their lender. So where is the cash? One might ask. To which the accountants among us shall answer “on the asset side.” Money is a liquid asset so it is included in this seventh dimension. Only an inclusion and not important enough to have its own subtitle.

The Eightth Dimension: A Differentiator Love without conditions. This is the one dimension without which the others will lack a unifying message. Love is the one aspect that ties them all together. I say this out of deep – some would say privileged – experience, not out of the need to repeat lines others have said in better ways a billion times already. In the early parts of this book, I spoke about my own relationship with my father. It took another sitdown with one of my younger brothers for my eyes to open to a deep seated reality. I came to see that most of my pains – especially the economic pains – were because I had always felt insecure, always worried about the future. Even when I had “powerful” jobs, I wouldn’t hold such jobs with both hands as I was always on the look-out for how to make things more secure. Ironic that in attempting to make things more secure for the family, I actually ended up becoming less so! I was always busy. And the busier I made myself, the more mistakes I made. But the source of that type of worry and busy-ness was not necessarily because I was concerned about others but primarily because I was missing something critical to living, something that gives security – an assurance that one is safe; that it’s all going to be ok. Worse than the quintessential busybody, I was a serial worrier. My brother said something that amounted to me existing so much in the future that I was leaving the present too far behind. He said “I hope this doesn’t... offend you. I just hate seeing you torn apart with heavy thoughts, a thousand questions.... At times we try to dig deep for answers and lose touch with people who need our presence. It’s going to be ok… trust me.” That got me thinking. Ironically, it got me to dig deep with a thousand thoughts! But this time in a safe way and for safe reasons. I failed to hold back the tears and the deep cry that I needed to release for hours on end. Because I discovered something which my brother unintentionally revealed earlier in the same message. He said “Dad loved you. Very much. Maybe you can start from there. But please try to… let go. We can meet, I explain further.” Robust Wealth

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children So I met up with him later the next day to listen. And as he illustrated how he thought dad had shown his love, all did indeed become much clearer. About how dad’s love was so conditional! Dad would tell my siblings to read, to solve crossword puzzles like me, to behave like me, basically to “be smart like your brother.” That is liking someone; it is not loving them. It was premised on my performance. What would happen if one day I suffered a concussion and became the most brain-dead person on earth? Could that type of love absorb the shocks? In this regime, the amount of commitment one received was proportional to how clever they were thought to be, wasn’t it? So then those of my siblings who might fail to reach the lofty targets I had set would remain only partially loved, wouldn’t they? Far from comforting me that I had been the loved one, it saddenned me to note that my father did not exactly know how to separate love from motivation. I had always suspected that (because the loved ones were myself and another brother of mine who was following closely in my footsetps, gaining entry into Hillcrest Technical Secondary School in similar ways to how I had entered Mpelembe) 18, but here now was my brother confirming it from his own observations. Dad had wanted his children to do well; that needed motivation. But his children just needed his unconditional commitment; that is where love resides. A person without intelligence or other talents can navigate the storms of this life and do quite well for themselves, but a person without love will only ever know stress; because without love one can never be content. And people who hitch their love to things that people do will only ever get disappointed because one day their loved ones will fall short of expectation. Then the love will transform into a crusade of displeasure. Their “lovers” will constantly complain about the person they used to love; they will feel unappreciated for all those years of commitment and wasted admiration. The love will be proved to have been lacking cover at the back. My father did love his children but unfortunately did not know how to express that love without tying it to his children’s giftings, talents or performance. Maybe I actually inherited the serial worrying from him! Maybe he too was a security seeker and that security seeking led him to push his children toward education and academic excellence, because, well, don’t they say that education is the great equaliser? These thoughts helped me to relate to the big man a lot more. To understand him as a man with challenges just like mine and to seek to respect and to extend his name. Without understanding him I could not understand myself, and vice versa. These steps were necessary before we could move to letting go of things that needed to be let go of. I knelt down and said a prayer, forgiving whatever 18

Hillcrest and Mpelembe were – and still are – some of the very best schools in the country, certainly well in the top 10 in the country on anyone’s charts any day. Funny enough, that brother and I a re the same two who were dossiered (See Chapters 1 & 2) in our employment years.

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children needed to be forgiven and embracing the man as my beloved father whose legacy I needed to continue. Love ought to have nothing in it that is complicated – it needs to be plain and simple commitment. If the loved person does well and pleases us, that is to be received as a bonus, not the basis. If the loved person failed to do well and kept needing attention then we give them our love sacrificially – as if we were losing something for nothing in return, but we give them our love and attention like they were the only thing on earth that mattered. Love is something we owe each other, especially our children. Read that again: we owe them love. The presumed debt of love is a Biblical principle at Romans 13:8. This – love – is something absolutely everyone can afford to give to their children and their children after them and everyone else beside. It does not matter whether one is rich or poor, smart or a fool, they can always love and they know very well when they receive that it is love that they are receiving. In fact, it is much easier to show love to someone when we are poor than when we are rich. If you are a wealthy person, you actually have a far greater battle to leave an effective inheritance than the person who is poor; not just because there is more material to worry about but also simply because you need to cut through all that foliage and let your children learn simple, unadulterated love from you. Without hiding behind the things you can give them, can you show them love? Could you even spend a whole day with them without referencing any of the “Seven Dimensions of Inheritance”? Time spent together without any material attachments? There was once a mantra in our young adults group at church (well intended as well) that said “romance without finance never took anyone anywhere”. I agreed. Romance never. But love did. In fact, I would say now that love without money is the very best! Just ask a high flying prostitute how many of her clients actually loved her. Or which one(s) of them she could come to love. It will more than likely be the one(s) who made an attempt to understand her as a human being, away from her work, the ones who maybe didn’t even pay her that well. Every person has a cry inside them that needs love – not money, not preaching, not lessons, just the uncondeming commitment called love. And very few of us have tasted that. Even fewer know how to get it, let alone how to give it. But I have also discovered that love always happens in silos. And it has tunnel vision. It is not possible to know if someone loves another person just by looking. Only the recipient of love knows when they get it – it is a mystery that only two can really know the truth of, and no scientific proof can be made of it. Not even a pregnancy or children together can prove love. I like the fact that nowhere in the Holy Bible does it even say something like “…and Adam loved his wife and she became pregnant…” In fact, nowhere in that book is the word ‘love’ used in the same sentence as the having of children! Not even anything to the extent of “…and so-and-so knew his wife whom he loved and she Robust Wealth

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children bore him a son/daughter…” This is not to imply that children are not born out of people who love each other, but to show that the two matters are independent. Naively – and sometimes deceptively – we attempt to wrap them up together trying to make them mean the same thing. But deep pain is the only thing that can come out of such innocence. It is good to have love and “the knowing of each other” happen at the same time – and that is what we all aim for – but the “knowing of each other” does not prove love any more than the eating of fruits proves hunger. Just as it is possible to eat just for the mere taste while other people stand aside and salivate with hunger, it is possible to get intimate with people who do not have any amount of love for us while those who truly love us suffer on the sidelines. The power of love is such that it does not need assistance from intimate activity to justify or prove itself. And as parents, we are the only ones with the power to train our children to be sensitive and recipient to love. Our task is to help them know (as in interact with) what love is and what it is not; by strong example. We do it in the same manner that we train them to eat, to speak, to walk and to learn their own names. We guide them through the experiences and in unwavering commitment. It is those who receive these things consistently and in good balance who turn out well. If only we realised that the moment we wean them off the breastmilk, the moment we complete their syllabus on how to walk, how to interact with their friends in baby class and how to use the potty, we have just entered a much longer program of training them in how to love! Allow that one to sink in; we have entered a much longer program. We ourselves are still completing some components of the course, but these young ones are our disciples to mentor. We must commit to them regardless of what they do to earn our happiness. It is the sacrifice of fatherhood and motherhood. This thing is not about us and our happiness; contrary to what some overzealous motivational speakers will say; this thing is about the children and the children’s ability to love and to receive love. We start to bequeath this to them the moment they are born. For my part, I realised that my father simply did not know better. He had done really well for his background. I am convinced that in his heart, he ached to show love, to shelter, to protect and to make sure his children turned out well. That was love. But like I mentioned before, every man has his flaws and here was one of his own: that he failed to separate love (unconditional and free) from motivation (conditioned on how one performs, and intended to bring out the best from them). I am not making excuses for him. He showed it in his behaviour. He even once said to me “we all know that you are the smartest person in the family; we all observe what you do and we value your input.” Or something to that extent. I could see the sincerity with which he said that. And a myriad of other actions he took which convinced me that he was reaching out for a connection the only way he knew how. I did not gloat or resent him, or criticise the fact that he was referring to smartness Robust Wealth

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How to Leave an Inheritance for Your Children’s Children or the lack of it again. I just felt sorry for both of us. Because I too never quite knew how to respond to those overtures, although I knew exactly how I felt connecting with my father like that: it gave me immense strength from the deepest parts of me – like I could face almost anything on this earth, because my daddy believed in me without me first proving myself or giving him anything to write home about. But then again those were just glimmers of him, spoilers (little video clips that reveal an otherwise hidden part of the story) indicating some things that sat in the man’s heart. For the rest of the time, dad’s love appeared conditioned (like the day I handed him a hundred kwacha note (US$12) and he threw it at mom in a gesture that belittled so deeply at a time when I never had any more money than that). As a result, those of his children who didn’t quite need the motivation part ended up lacking seriously on the love part. We became like the man who dresses up really smartly for the once-in-a-lifetime business presentation to his boss’s boss but forgets to brush off the green bits of vegetables stuck to his front teeth, to zip up his trousers or to wear the same colour of shoes. Everyone knows there is potential here but everyone knows also that there is something fundamental that needs repackaging in this young man. The eightth and final aspect of inheritance – love without conditions – can be afforded by all and can be given without money. But it is the one that places the limit on how effective all the other facets of inheritance will be. It is like the fabric that determines how much stretch the other things can achieve as the ball is filled up with substance. Little love, little stretch, little impact. Much love, much stretch, big reach, powerful impact. As a result, I look at love as being the core or nucleus of inheritance, while the other aspects are just faces like the connected leather polygons on a football. And if the nucleus is well set and healthily formed, it will continue to attract new, recreative material to all the facets involved. So that one could say the more robust and flexible the centre, the greater the size to which the facets can be stretched out without breaking. Children who have received love and nothing else can go on and achieve far more in lives impacted than those who had received all the seven dimensions but little love. This is why love is separated from the rest of the aspects of inheritance: it is not a co-equal; it is a binder. It is also a differentiator of when inheritance will work forward and when it will fail. So, if in the end you find that all you can give is love, don’t worry at all; just give lots and lots of what you have. It will be ok. Trust me.

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Twelve Death Traps

8 Twelve Sure Death-Traps Beware of the pitfalls. This is where the Fathers also sit in labour over the family heritage. Fathers alone must bear these crosses and overcome if they are to succed in touching their children with blessings, down to the Third Generation. Examples abound of Fathers who fell short on any of these paired sets of tests; their influence is always cut short! But those who succeed in all paired tests end up with such influence that down to the Fourth Generation, their impact is so direct that their far descendants even refer to them in the first person and by first name as if they were directly connected. “We are sons of Abraham,” the Jews said when Abraham had been dead thousands of years…

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Twelve Death Traps here appears to be a double-edged sword to everything we do as human beings. The same means via which we are supposed to appreciate beauty and natural aesthetics in our environment becomes the very same pitfall that leads us into intense passions which consume and destroy character. The means via which we learn and regard honour becomes the very same vehicle via which pride enters to ruin all loyalty. The means via which we learn to be objective and scientific creatures also leads us into unending doubts. These doubts shrink our capacity to create preferred futures for ourselves. It leads us into destructive scepticism and enslaving self-critique. It also leads us into laziness and carelessness. The doubt leads us into devastating failures of trust in people and systems that have been put in place to help us win our freedom. Finally, we find ourselves battling all manner of addictive behaviours. It appears that to every good thing there is a limit of usefulness which is all too easy to cross.

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BASIC TRAPS Lusts & Curiosities At what point does our healthy preference for and appreciation of beauty turn into lust? When does our eye observant for detail and our quest for ever increasing knowledge turn into insatiable curiosities which lead us into perverse desires? When God had finished creating the earth, we are told that He looked at everything he had done and “saw that it was very good.” We are told that he checked for this goodness at each of the six stages of creation. It would seem that goodness/quality is a big deal to The Creator. Although we are not told what constituted ‘goodness’ at each stage, we can infer that it has something to do with visual beauty because we are told that He saw that it was good. But it could also mean that He saw that it was working according to plan (meaning that functionality was also paramount). But by looking at nature and our own formed bodies, we get a very good idea of what constituted good to The Creator. We are told that in Eden, even before their fall, God had already instructed Adam and his partner, Eve, to “be fruitful and multiply.” This means that procreation was part of the beautiful design that God had looked at and called good. Now an interesting thing happens when Eve eats of the tree of knowledge of good and bad. Suddenly she realises that she is naked. Pause. How did she even frame within her mind the concept of nakedness when all her life she had never known anything else? There was no precedent of any kind at this time. There was no pradigm to compare with and say “that is what covered means and that is what naked means.” Which part of her did she even cover in the end? Her nose? I mean, Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps at this time, did they even have a conceptualisation of what “private parts” meant? Yet, somehow, the understanding of nakedness, and shame thereof, just happened upon her in that one instance! Something extremely big had taken place without announcement or ceremony. Fast forward to verse 22 of Genesis Chapter 3, and God says “the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” [emphasis aded]. It appears that from the same place where we get the ability to appreciate beauty, we also get the ability to pervert it. From the same place where we get the ability to seek liberating knowledge, we also get unhealhty curiosities that enslave us. In the good design, we were never meant to be like little gods to ourselves regulating both the good and the bad. We were only commissioned to work the earth and manage its affairs by referring often to The Creater. There were to be regular face to face debriefs. We were to do all things in the pleasant company of our partners. Our innocence was in our ignorance of the shame side of things. But at the opening of our eyes to higher knowledge, suddenly, we became corruptible. Even now, the more we know, the more innocence we lose. Now the only means by which we could cut the risk of lust and perversion would be to remove from us our very identity as human beings. Not possible except by death. Indeed, it requires a daily death to self to overcome some of the most enslaving problems known to man. As such, as long as we live, we continue to bottle up afflicting battles within our bodies. On the one hand we are able to love and empathise; on the other there is a pull to lust after the things we should just love normally. On the one hand we have a healthy hunger for knowledge and learning but there is also no telling when the line is crossed and our quest for knowing degenerates into an indulgence of the senses. Some murderers murder and dismember just for the thrill. From the same heart that loves, comes hate; from the same mind that searches innocently, comes calculated sensual indulgence. This is who we are as human beings – creatures with equal power to be one thing or the other at any moment. It is not demonic activity, brothers; we just need to choose and keep choosing until the question is tired of being thrown at us. And when we look through history – even casually – we find that this problem happens across all races and all places the same. Now, lust is a creeping out of the normal drivers of human activity – a corruption of something we were given for free at the birth of humanity to make living a joyful experience. But now that we are familiar with the reverse side of everything, we easily get enslaved as we allow fairly legitimate things to get out of hand. Again, a dieing to self is needed. To be a father means to be willing to sacrifice our very lives for causes that we are fully committed to on behalf of all under us. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps So do not pray to be rid of hormonal flows or primal drives that cause you to desire things that are in and of themselves good; pray instead to be able to take firm control of your body and your mind to direct all desires into healthy avenues. Nothing more is required of you than to find out where the healthy avenues are and to walk in them. Above all, remember that exactly because you are able to love, you are also able to abuse in lusts and corrupted curiosities. Be grateful for every day that passes and in which you have been able to show unadulterated love. It is a high gift just being able to avoid the pitfalls – not necessarily due to avoidance of sin and judgement and belief-based punitives like that, but about not becoming enslaved now, about remaining consciously in charge of whatever you do with your body now. Freedom like that is what The Creator intended in the first place when He said “Let us make mankind in our own image… so that they may rule”19 How confusing then that one should be in bondage, enslaved, by the very things he should be in charge of; the ruling part just won’t happen! That was the Deceiver’s aim down here. As a father, you need to desire to be in charge. And the things that satisfy you on a personal level should meet the most royal of standards. They must be fit for a king. It is possible.

Pride & Justice When love for self goes beyond love for others, pride is the natural result. Now it appears that in our everyday use of the word pride, there is a good side (like in the phrase “proud soldier”) and a bad side (like in “pride comes before the fall”). But could something bad be hidden in this mixing up or could it just be a matter of contextual interpretation? “You should be proud of yourself for speaking the truth,” “It gives us great pride to see such grace and bravery exhibited by such young talent. This family has a great future!” “Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free, land of work and joy in unity, victors in the struggle for the right, we’ve won freedom’s fight, all one strong and free! Praise be to God, Bless our great nation, Free men we stand, under the flag, of our land, Zambia praise to thee, all one strong and free.”

The above three are instances when the noun pride and adjective proud are used in positive ways and openely accepted as good. “A nasty proud man, full of himself and altogether repulsive,” “everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life— comes not from the Father but from the world” 19

Genesis 1:26

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Twelve Death Traps “Too proud to admit his own mistakes,”

The above three are examples of how we use the same words in negative light. However, I found something interesting when I ran some searches for the words pride and proud in the Holy Bible. One of them occurs 64 times and the other 65. Not a single occurrence of these words was positive! Each time the words occur, they are a warning. It seems to me that we do ourselves a disservice when we begin to mix things up and think that there might be a good side to “pride”. There just isn’t. The dictionary variation of the word pride which allows us to mildly excuse its “positive” usage is that pride is: - feeling honoured, satisfied or happy about a fact or event; - a sense of one’s own worth These usages appear to be quite tame – even progressive. That is until we realise that these definitions have a common backbone to them: that they only make sense when used relative to other people. Behind their tame façade, there is a fiercely competitive spirit snaking around. These are what are called passive aggressive stances, where one is being aggressive over their territory but using passive language so as to appear like they were allembracing. The way to be sure is to ask how the words might change if there were no performance alternatives, no other people to be given the role instead. “Straight after landing, we located an underground bunker for shelter. Throughout the four years of war I was safely holed up with my ten soldiers. My men found a way of going out to backline, wherever it had moved to, every week to receive our supplies under cover of darkness and stealth so that we were never discovered. As a result, we never fired a shot in those four years, never had to duck a bullet, never had to kill a fellow soldier just because that soldier saluted to a different flag than our own. We are proud of this achievement!” Does that last statement sit well? You are probably saying that Warrant Officer should be ashamed, what pride is there in hiding? Is that what we trained you for? And while your friends are risking their lives every second of every day…? Until you discover that this was the team charged with setting up and maintaining sensitive communications equipment needed by extraction and rescue missions. Their one task was to stay on ground but not be discovered than to engage in fights. Only when this mission relative to other people is known do the Warrant Officer’s words “we are proud…” begin to make sense. Pride always references others; whereas satisfaction, contentment or pleasure are positions that stand perfectly fine alone. It is extremely critical that fathers appreciate the difference between being proud Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps of a child and being pleased in a child. It will even help them in assessing their own journey since they too are children in other contexts. Fathers must set family values which are not based on what others do or how others fare. For example, percentage score on a test is an acceptable family value to have, but position in class is not. That is not to say that in all contexts position in class should not be important, no, just that it should not be part of the small set of family values which a father uses to drive the family affairs forward. Position in class would come in as important only in the context of judging what is possible for next year, a totally different discussion and being had after the father has already expressed his pleasure in the child. The child then pushes himself toward better performance not to win the father’s attention but because she already has the father’s pleasure and support. This might look like the wimpier way for pushing children’s performance forward but it is far more sustainable and, over the long term, sets children up to go much farther without crashing out. A child who knows they have the father’s pleasure intact is much better equipped to deal with the occasional failure than the one who must earn the father’s pride by never failing at all at any point. Every father needs to have family values and which values should have totally nothing to do with comparing to other people. So that when time comes to compare to other people, the process is managed from a place of contentment and strength rather than from an empty one still seeking validation. The problem with pride and how it is non-existent without reference to others is that there will always be someone out there it is trying to beat and it must – without fail – come out on top. Now, some stop right there saying “yes, compete, continously improve, never relax, always strive to be the best…” Ok, I say, but not at the cost of identity. Our sense of self worth must come from a rich place of internal satisfaction in who we already are. Self worth must never be referencially defined. The problem with pride is that it is so referencially defined (dependent on being better than the competition and having people applauding it as such) that when people start to clap for someone else – even over totally unrelated topics – it waxes extremely insecure. The limelight must never shift from the proud person or the proud person loses his pin! The approval stating “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased,” came at the very beginning of Jesus’ activities as rabbi and Christian Messiah – not because he had already succeeded. In fact, some would say that it was exactly because of his Father’s very public approval that Jesus went on to fast day and Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps night for forty days continuous, to resist many temptations and to endure much worse – even death – still believing that his Father and he were one. The Father was well pleased in the son before the son did one thing right in the heat of battle. This is why terms like “pride” do not even enter the consciousness. The Father was pleased. That is a whole different universe of relationship from the type of fathers who express “pride” in their sons for things their sons have done or are eagerly expected to do. The original sin, pride, comes because we seek our identity from things outside of ourselves, a constant striving for something we’ll never attain. In fact, it is the pride that sees to it that we never actually attain anything in the end. In the case of Jesus, the Holy Bible is clear that his humility is what won him the prize in the end: “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, …made himself nothing… he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,”20 Is it becoming clearer why terms like “pride” do not sit well on the positive side in the entire Bible? We can take a leaf. In fact, we are asked to take a leaf. What we have here is a perfect representation of a relationship playing out. We have a father who is pleased in his son not for outclassing others but because the son stays true, to the limit of his abilities, to the one task he was given, no matter how unglamorous. Then we have a son who is totally obedient – to the point of losing his own life – not because all things go well for him but because of the confidence and security he has in the cover he recieves from dad. How do I know this? Well, because in his dying moment he says two things in a very important sequence. He says first, “My God, my God; why have you forsaken me?” because the loneliness – the painful darkness all around him – is like nothing he ever faced before and fully unbarable. But then, like one who admits that there may be something to this that he does not fully know, he cries again to the same father “Into your hands I commit my spirit” to finally breath his last. Who felt more pain in this moment, I ask: was it the Father or the Son? The answer of course is that it was just as painful for the Father looking as it was for the Son dying. That oneness is a natural result of refusing to plant a relationship on pride. Now, there is another problem that springs from misplaced identity. That problem is that our understanding of justice when our identities are rooted in

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Phillipians 2:6-8 NIV

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Twelve Death Traps something outside of our control twists to become that of gaining retribution for pains inflicted instead of normalising behaviour so that good is glorified and bad is fully atoned for. Our Courts of Law, for example, are designed to chase the latter objective only. Can we truly pay for wrongs done using a one sided justice systems like we currently have all over the world? How about lost opportunity at the exact time and circumstances when the wrong was done? Can money or time served restore that? They say that they facilitate for a And how about assigning just society. But, in actual fact, what recognition and honour where it is due? Are our Courts of Law they do facilitate for is a society set up to be able to do any of where wrongs do not get out of hand. that? Of course they are not. There is a big difference between Because their only concern is providing justice and correcting the negative side of society: wrongs. facilitating for punishment for offences, resolution of disputes and compensation to offended persons. They say that they facilitate for a just society. But in actual fact what they do facilitate for is a society where wrongs do not get out of hand. There is a big difference. Our understanding of what is just cannot be complete until we become satisfied in who we are without reference to things outside of ourselves. Only then can we know truly what is an offence against a person and what is a mere delinquency; what is a crime and what is a mere infringement of rights. What does all this mean in plain speech? Until we are safe in where our identity lies, we are going to be so insecure that we are too easy to offend. Our justice system will be packed with all manner of petty matters crowding out the real critical issues. Until we know where people’s boundary lines of identity lie who are offended we shall never really know what reconciliation to offer against what offence. Our justice system will have all manner of conflicts and lacunas and it will need constant updating. Until a father is secure in himself, he cannot truly know how to discipline his own children or even how to ensure that there is peace between all the people under his care. We think we know justice – people’s actions and their consequences both in terms Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps of rights and wrongs. But we cannot begin to know justice well enough until we are comfortable in our own skins. Only then would concepts such as mercy, forgiveness and perfect reparation begin to have firm meanings. And at that time we might actually manage to write these concepts into our laws without muddling ourselves into a system that cannot actually operate. At that time, we might actually come up with a justice system which – unlike what we have now – is not built to favour the proud and punish the humble. Our current justice systems are designed to favour the proud because the proud are the ones who like to cry the loudest at even the tiniest hint of infringement. They are not afraid to game the system if needed. While for the humble, well, longsuffering is a central part of what defines their humble nature. The humble never know how to play the system to their advantage, and so they quietly absorb many injustices. Many of us need to take long steps back and look again at our conceptions of what justice and right and wrong are. For example, many of us already appreciate that just because it is legal does not mean it is right to do, so just because something is legal does not mean it is just. In the same way, just because there is no illegality does not mean that there is justice. Our justice systems are at best very coarse approximations at correcting the offense side of life. True justice for its part would also have a component of the positive – like giving sensible recognition to those who go out of their way to do good. Such good-doers provide clear example which others can follow, thereby making our social system operable from the positive side too (as opposed to just being driven by parading the negative side such as the bickerings in court cases, prison sentences, police action against crimes, etc.) Fear of painful penalties is the main driving philosophy behind our justice systems today. Our respected Judges and Justices might not admit that their professions – especially the western court systems – are propped up on fear. But they are. “We are based on ultimate respect for The Law,” they will say. And they will be right. But only as right as a bird sitting on the branch of a tree might say, the leaves on this tree are not what holds me up, it is upon that big trunk down there that I here sit! But of course you and I will know that without the leaves daily supplying food down to all parts of the tree, “that big trunk down there” would not have come into existence. Without man’s innate fear of painful consequneces like prison time, lashes of the sjambok, fines, etc., a huge part of our present justice systems will become inoperable. I am yet to meet a person who surmons someone to a court of law in order to commend them for a wonderful job done! That would be madness; it is not the sort of thing that our courts of law are designd to do. For that, you buy an advert in the Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps newspaper or on TV or something similar. “A court is a place for sombre business,” we are going to be advised, “not for clowning around!” What that will mean is that a court of law is a place for disputes, grievances and penalties thereof; if brought here, be afraid. The weighier your matter, the more afraid you should be. Even the good scriptures agree saying: “Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are out on the way with him, lest [he] deliver you to the judge and the judge hand you over to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. …you will [not] get out of there until you have paid the last peny.” 21 Now, I often wondered why, in the Holy Bible, God spends so much time demanding praise, worship and love. The first of the ten commandments asks for total love for God, while the Psalms even prescribe the various instruments to be used, the words and much else besides for praising and pouring adoration on God. A part of me kept asking why God would take away from his own credibility so much by appearing like he needed a praise fix daily – like he depended on human validation to feel good about himself before He could get on with just being God. But now, with understanding of the positive side of Justice, I realise that all those instructions in the Holy Bible are an attempt to bring us into the loop on a certain type of justice system. Unlike our systems, it has both the punishment side for wrongs as well as fair reward and recognition for rights, happening in the same court at the same time for a perfect result. When people are involved in this justice system what we see is them devoting themselves as key members, them worshiping in ceaseless praise of the good (the far positive), error being delt with using the ultimate penalty, death (the far negative), much freedom of choice and a certain indiscribable optimism. And then we are told that even if planet earth should pass away, the words contained in the Holy Bible shall not pass away (i.e., the system presented there has no lacunae to be weeded out). Finally, I understood the benefit in seeding us with suggestions of how to offer worship and asking us to praise Him to our very last breath. We get busy dealing with the positive side (recognising good and letting such examples reside in our hearts and minds the longest) while God gets busy dealing with the negative side (sin and its pricetags) because only He can engage that closely with sin and come out untouched, having created the potential for it Himself. These activities (glorifying the positive while dealing with the negative) sit right in the centre of this most perfect justice system in the universe. And we didn’t even recognise it as such! 21

Matthew 5:35 NKJV

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Twelve Death Traps I saw a post on social media once claiming that God demanded praise from His people or He kills them. “Wow!” I thought, how could a person be so misled? But then when I saw the comment by Jesus at Luke 19:40, I began to at least see this person’s point somewhat. Jesus mentioned that if his disciples stopped themselves from praising him, during his symbolic entry into Jerusalem, the inanimate stones would break out into song! I began to see that the praise requirement in the Holy Bible goes deeper than the simple act of gratitude that I originaly thought it was. Although Jesus knew that the rocks could sing for him if no humans opened their mouths, the disciples knew nothing of that and simply sang out in jubilation. There was a justice system at play and to which the praise was a critical component; the court session was never going to close without the praise part being played out also, whether Without relationship, which by human beings or by incorporates atonement for bad, inanimate things like stones. glorifying of good, and working with The dying on a cross (with the truth only, there can be no justice – bold inscription “King of the only other things like tyranny or Jews”) was never going to happen if this reception (open democracy. acceptance as “King of the Jews”) had failed to happen first. What Jesus was implying by saying the stones could break out in song was that this reception accorded him was absoluetly fitting – that so fitting was it in fact, that the laws of nature could be brocken in order to make this one moment count. Without relationship, which involves atoning for bad, glorifying of good, and humility (the capacity to accept and work with truth whether that truth is favourable to self or not), there can be no justice – only other things like tyranny or its siamese twin, democracy (for what is democracy other than a tyranny of the many over the few? And where is the power of tyranny if not in the proof that the many are being dragged along against their democratic will?) Now, what are we to learn from all these things? What traps are we to beware of? Well, three key take-aways, actually: (1) We should not over-rate our justice systems. They are far from perfect. They favour the proud, the articulate and those who can game the system the most. (2) We should remember the many voiceless among us. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps (3) We should recognise and celebrate the good far more often than we presently do – we cannot overdo praise for what is praiseworthy. Instead of complaints or grumbling, praise for what is good as often as we can.

Doubt & Failure When we depend too much on what we see, doubt and failure are a natural result. I say, if in doubt, doubt your own intepretations of what you see before you doubt the principles at play. Someone might ask quickly, what if they are in a field that depends on visual data? Say, you are a surgeon at work on the operating table? Must you still doubt what you see? Isn’t medical imaging even a field on its own? Well, even in these cases, we must first listen attentively, modifying our actions accordingly before we can purport to be seeing with expert eyes. Developing the right eye for detail actually comes from hundreds of hours doubting own interpretations and verifying. In those hours, one becomes closely familiar with failure and how contextualised and limited failure can be – what we think is a failure today may actually be a huge success in the long run. If I have learnt anything about failure, it is that failure is one of the most temporary conditions on earth. Every day, literally billions of cases of failure happen at different scales. But none of them are ever permanent. Even when people who have failed try to hold on too long to their failings, eventually failure itself rejects such people – they eventually succeed at something. What must you do as a result of this understanding? Be quick to accept when you notice you have failed. Dust yourself off; recast your failure as useful experience by noting your learning points then move on. Now, I am often intrigued by Jesus’ comment to Peter when he began to sink into the lake, having taken a few solid steps forward.22 As Jesus pulled Peter up, Jesus commented “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Jesus seems to be taking doubt like something we deliberately decide on, whereas my own experience with doubt is that it seems to happen upon me naturally. Like a natural first step toward objective thinking. In fact, doubt seems to happen exactly like a bird pooping over one’s head – totally unprovoked and in a way that leaves little room for control. If I was honest with myself, I would have to work with, rather than against, my doubts then I would find myself capable of generating useful, independent thoughts. Another occasion when Jesus confronted doubt in his followers was when Thomas doubted the resurrection, stating “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will 22

At Matthew 14

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Twelve Death Traps not believe.” On this ocassion, it also seemed reasonable of Thomas since he hadn’t been there when Jesus appeared the first time round, so one could say Thomas simply wanted to be sure for himself given that nothing at this time was happening in any way one could describe as “normal” – it wasn’t everyday they crucified people who went on to call in an actual eclipse of the sun mid-afternoon! After helping Thomas to satisfy his demanded tests, Jesus then says “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Even here, Jesus seems to place a premium on believing without proof. I think the unidentified father at Mark 9 summed it up well for many in our generation because we are told that ‘the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”’ [emphasis added]. The cry and the words make the desperation clear. How do we beat the doubt that seems so natural to us? Well, there are three common behaviours I have seen which re-inforce doubt. They are coming up in detail in the next three sub-sections and they are: (1) Our desire for signs and wonders to wow us first – instead of simply following the logic (2) Our fear of being judged coupled with our failure to trust (3) Our propensity for laziness and carelessness

Signs & Wonders A closer look at what was happening in Jesus’ encounter with the unidentified father reveals more useful insights. The man was desperate and even crying, but Jesus was calm as they come. While the man kept pointing to the boy and pleading, Jesus seems to have been looking intently at the man, seemingly unworried that the boy was under intense torment. What a contrast! The person without faith was busy pleading, praying and crying. Reminds you of anything? Like the desperate people we see in our churches today…? While the Master at Faith was calm and only interested in teaching the desperate man something. When the [unclean] spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth. Jesus:

“How long has he been like this?”

Boy’s father:

“From childhood. It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

Jesus:

“‘If you can’? Everything is possible for one who believes .”

Boy’s Father:

“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

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Twelve Death Traps Only when Jesus notices a mob running toward them to come pick up some juicy gossip points does he turn to the boy and chase the unclean spirit away, healing the child in a flash, helping him up by the hand and then heading indoors. Did you notice that all this time, the child was rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth? Yet Jesus seemed to have been more interested in interacting with the boy’s father? Jesus could have healed the boy (a more immediate pressure as far as the father was concerned; clear from the fathers words) then continued to ask his diagnostic questions later. But he seems to be deliberate in his focus on the boy’s father, seeking to deliver a faith tutorial instead. This was not the only time Jesus “mixed up his priorities” when people’s very lives were on the line. Once he slept in a boat peacefully while his disciples wrestled, to the point of fainting, to prevent the boat they were in from capsizing. At another time, he received a message to “please come quickly” and he took days to arrive. The sick man had already been dead and burried some four days by the time he reached the point of call. The person who had called him wept openly saying “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But what she added revealed that she had began to work out Jesus’ modus operandi somewhat. She continued, “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask,” to which Jesus answered (I guess with contentment at last), saying “Your brother will rise again.” Even as some uninformed spectators were heard asking “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” But soon enough, the dead man, Lazarous, was called back to life! In all these instances, it appears that Jesus was in no hurry to work the miracles which people were desperate for. In fact, in the case of Lazarous, it particularly appears that Jesus was moved emotionally (it was the first recorded instance where the grown man Jesus wept openly). His first line of discussion had nothing to indicate that he intended to raise Lazarous from the dead – at least not just yet (in fact, the first sister understood Jesus assurance about his brother living again to have been referring to the resurrection “at the last day” and she calmly went back to the funeral house after that conversation, content in the “gospel of resurrection at the end of time”). This reluctance by Jesus to work miracles stands in stark contrast against today’s servants of Jesus who seem to be desperate to prove themselves through the working of signs and wonders and the delivery of many prophesies. By far the best demonstration of Jesus’ modus operandi was when a crippled man was lowered down to him on a mat via the roof of a fully packed house where he was teaching. All he said to the cripple was “your sins are forgiven” and he continued teaching. Then due to murmurings among the legal scholars present, Jesus turns and says “so that you may know [that what I just said has actually Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps happened in the spiritual dimension; that this man’s sins have actually been forgiven, here is a miracle in the physical dimension]” and he said to the man “get up, pick up your mat and walk,” and the man got up, picked up his mat and walked out physically healed and free.23 This instance shows how the priorities lined up in Jesus’s heart: internal wellness and spiritual understanding before physical evidence and circumstances in this life. Yet Jesus did work an uncountable number of physical signs, miracles and wonders, as John 21:25 states. What we take away from all this is that physical signs and wonders are a clear evidence to shut up those who do not believe – not necessarily to make them change their minds. And those who received the miracles received not because they were looking for a sign that Jesus was indeed a holy man, but because they already did believe in him and his message, and, on account of that belief, were coming for relief from various debilitations. Yes, many miracles are made necessary by the need to counter evil – and such events happen daily in the spiritual dimension – but for those who believe, miracles are only a housekeeping matter; they are not the centre of their faith. That is why Jesus would not rush to the working of miracles (dealing with housekeeping matters) before he had attended to the more important matters which he had really been sent to achieve (basic faith). Trust in God, the way that we first arrive before evil gets to do its soul-hardening work on us – was a far more critical goal for Jesus than the demonstration of his power over nature and the elements. Once you rest comfortable knowing that God is not an interventionist to be invoked into your situations to tinker every here and there at your say-so but a strategist who already knows all the key turns, your whole perspective on life changes. You stop chasing miracles and start interacting instead. Not so for those whose faith is on ‘hibernate’. For them, it is often necessary to see signs and wonders. They believe in God because God surprised them once and continues to surprise them every now and then. Their belief is so rooted in the visual and the experiential that their God has been reduced to a magician-on-call. Thomas represented them well. And Jesus responded well to such people when he said “have you believed because you have seen me [my works]?” It is not a rebuke but a reminder that there is far more where that little came from. That is why he adds: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” When we were young, we found it effortless to believe all things. One could say we are all born on the faith side. And belief comes far more naturally to us than doubt! Until we experience evil and deception. Now, instead of recognising the liars to avoid them, we generalise and come to own doubt as if it were our primal 23

Mathew 9

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Twelve Death Traps nature when in fact not. Faith and confidence are our real primal nature. We only need to vest them back into the right places. When we have found someone to trust, we must trust fully. And if the ones we have trusted in are actually untrustworthy, that will become clear to us in time. Overall, we cannot escape trusting in something. Some do not know that even human science is actually something they first have faith in before it proves itself to them. The same applies to any other knowledge system known to man today. Now, some confuse wisdom and doubt. How do I mean this? Well, it sometimes appears that when we play what we call “the devil’s advocate” on facts presented to us (i.e., we deliberatley doubt the facts, actively challenging even the most obvious details and assumptions) we tend to gain more insight and perhaps hedge against risks we might otherwise have missed. In such cases, it would appear that doubt is a useful tool. However, such a supposed partnership with doubt would be highly missleading. This is because what is at play in those instances is actually not doubt but wisdom. Wisdom is the application of facts and insight in a manner that leads to the greatest good. Much like King Solomon pretending to want to cut a newborn baby into two equal parts just so that he could discover who the real mother of the baby was.24 The King was applying wisdom. It is not doubt but wisdom that gets the job done. It therefore appears to me that, somehow, by claiming doubt as our primal nature and a necessity for objectivity, we manage to embrace a quality that is totally foreign to us and it In other words, at the intersection becomes our biggest problem. of laziness and timidity, we find The reason we do that, I put it to doubt… It takes hard work and you, is that we are simply bravery to be a person of faith unwilling to put in the energy, the time and the patience that it takes to mature our aptly named “child-like faith”. In other words, at the intersection of laziness and timidity, we find doubt. We cannot begin to tackle our doubts effectively until we rid ourselves of laziness and fear of the unknown. It takes hard work and bravery to be an effective person of faith.

24

Holy Bible: 1 Kings 3:24-28

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Twelve Death Traps

Distrust & Fear of Judgement Society as we know it now will always tend toward more and more mistrust. Less trust in the good intentions of our leaders is where our democratic systems lead. People will feel that their leaders are self-preserving, greedy and corrupt. They will do this out of projection (ascribing onto others the character traits which are actually one’s own). We have together come to believe that anything which gets done has personalised benefits for the politicians or it would never get done at all. In many instances, such beliefs become self-fulfilling prophesies, while in other instances they simply become activity blockers, discouraging others from doing the right thing. What I am attempting to say here was best communicated via some now widely circulated social media satire. A picture of three interview scenes is shown where, in the first box, titled “French” the interviewers ask the interviewee what certificates they have. In the second picture labelled “USA” the interviewers ask “what skills do you have?” and in the third scene labelled “Africa” the interviewers are leaning forwards pushing the paperwork aside and asking “Who sent you?” The Africa picture demonstrates a heightened form of political cronyism to the total disregard of systems. In short, everyone and everything here is perceived as having a selfish motive and little else beyond. Sadly, while the originators of this belief are non-Africans the perpetrators are, and the majority of them from poorly informed positions. Thus, Africans have become their own worst enemies, hurting each other far more often than they are hurt by outsiders. All this is courtesy of extremely low levels of trust. Africans have become fiercely xenocentric (favouring foreign societies to the detriment of their own) – one of the most complicated social problems to resolve. Where trust is lacking progress will be lacking too. Ironically, one of the strongest means by which to win trust is to be willing to come under fierce judgement by others. Those who fear judgement by those that surround them often lack what it takes to gain trust and to lead. We often forget to our detriment that in order to gain people’s trust, we need to pass through that valley of the shaddow of death where we do not have their commitment. Often, when we seem to have lost trust, we have actually just been presented with an opportunity to fast forward our path to unwavering trust. If you maintain your own trust in you, many others will soon congregate around you who agree. You need to be willing to be judgmentally judged by others before you are able to be trusted. Nobody wastes time passing judgment on a nobody. One young church youth leader put it most clearly when he said: “When you see people saying ‘don’t judge me,’ there often is something to judge.” Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps When we give other people the freedom to judge us we are not necessarily saying that we draw our meaning from such people but that we are emotionally mature enough to take their criticism and to use that to improve ourselves for the future. It is, however, much easier said than lived through. People’s judgements can be harsh. We need to prepare ourselves to hear the worst and most unexpected things come at us from the people we least expected to criticise us. But being ready like this is half the job done. The other part is constantly reminding ourselves that very few things that people say or believe are ever final. In fact, they only become inescapable when we allow it ourselves. If you do not let people’s criticism grow on you but you tell yourself “I will grow past that old definition of me,” you are halfway there already. Stretching beyond our own selves, we need to accept You need to be willing to be people’s opinions and thoughts judgmentally judged by others which differ from our own, before you are able to be trusted. without feeling personally attacked. In fact, we need to Nobody wastes time passing embrace those that think judgment on a nobody. differently from us because they are often our best teachers. They help us to get to where we should be by providing the context for us to test our own thoughts and beliefs in the most disciplined manner possible. If all people near us thought exactly as we do, you know, we would never really come to know how robust – or not – our own ideas had become. Until we meet those who are ready enough to say something different and cause us to question our convictions. We then get the chance to articulate and reposition for best effect on our hearers. Ultimately we come out better exactly because of those who oppose us. The best we can do is be humbly grateful for these opposers. But then again, the task is much easier stated in a book like this than lived out. Your emotional self will be boiling, impatiently agitating for the slightest opening for you to fire out your answers to your critics. Emotions are like that always. The best thing that helps, I find, is to remind yourself that their ability and willingness to hear what you are saying will be directly proportional to the length of time they spend talking. The more you allow them to speak, the more they deplete their armoury. At some point, they will want to size you up by at least hearing your voice. Make your statement as short as possible. Act disinterested in stating your own points and more in rephrasing theirs. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps Once they see that they have connected with you at that level, you can rest assured they will listen even if they pretend not to be doing so. Nobody ever wants to come out unreasonable to people who are “getting them”. They will work hard to identify some safe grounds of agreement. Objective achieved. Finally in the game of trust and judgement is the need for self sacrifice. Every justice system has boundaries which help it to make sense. When two small children are trying to share four sweets, the task of understanding justice starts with being able to count and ends with being able to divide by two. Anyone who can do these two things effortlessly will easily “get” this little justice system. But as our needs grow, so too does our need to understand complex concepts in order to appreciate justice. When this growing gets going, we begin to separate out into fast, slow and moderate learners just like a marathon race opens out as soon as the runners spill out into race. As such, those who seek to be trusted begin to face much greater challenges getting everyone to give them that trust as our justice systems become more complex. Actually, it becomes practically impossible to win every person’s trust! Understanding of justice suffers also. Because of this, anyone who seeks leadership in a complex people system must know that they will have to sacrifice a lot (on the one hand because people who would otherwise never hesitate to give you their trust now waver due simply to the number of conflicting voices around them; on the other extreme, because people just outrightly refuse you and oppose you). In some cases – not uncommon actually – people even pay with their own blood (being misunderstood and misjudged until long after they are dead and gone before the pennies begin to drop for everyone else). Beware, therefore, of the boundaries of your justice system. The more complex your social system, the less visible the mechanisms of your justice and the greater the need for self sacrifice. Often, what you believe in will demand sacrifice just beyond your normal willingness to give. You will have to be ready daily to step up. It is crucial, therefore, that whatever it is you believe in and are working for be worth dying for.

Laziness & Carelessness These flaws can be “motivated” by different things. Too much pressure, too little pressure, too much work, too little work, etc. Psychologists have studied laziness for some years now and some impactful insights can be drawn to overcome procrastination (postponing of work usually with guilt attached) in particular, but not exactly laziness (total avoidance of work without guilt or regret). Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps Interestingly, none of the reference texts we usually run to for life philosophy attempts to explain the cause(s) of laziness or carelessness; they seem to only provide descriptions of behaviour, warnings on consequences and some jurisprudential prescriptions (suggestions on how we should write our laws with regard to lazy or careless people). One description I find quite dramatic is the following description of a lazy person: “The lazy man buries his hand in the bowl; It wearies him to bring it back to his mouth.”25

The lazy person is too lazy even to feed himself! I used to think this was an exaggeration until I watched myself around my own wake-up alarms in the mornings. Even to reach my hand out and mute the alarm is a labour. Other descriptives on laziness from the Book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible: “As a door turns on its hinges, So does the lazy man on his bed”26 “The lazy man says, “There is a lion in the road! A fierce lion is in the streets!”27 “The lazy man is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly”28

A prescriptive on laziness: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat”29

Some texts with information on consequences, deterrence and/or causes: “Laziness casts one into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger”30 “A worker's appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on”31 “Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty”32 “He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap”33 “I went past the field of a sluggard, past the vineyard of someone who has no sense; thorns had come up everywhere, the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins.”34 It appears that:

25

Holy Bible Proverbs 26:15 Prov 26:13 – careless sleep 27 Prov 26:14 – fearing the unknown to the point of paranoia 28 Prov 26:16 – giving unending excuses 29 1 Thes 3:10 30 Prov 19:15 – excessive sleep and its result 31 Prov 16:26 – hunger and appetite as aids against laziness 32 Prov 28:19 – working off common sense is better than attempting clever unknowns. 33 Ecc 11:4 – work as the season dictates instead of venturing into details that work procrastination into you 34 Prov 24:30-31 – Pain, error and lack of self discipline follows lazy people. The effects are clear to all. 26

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Twelve Death Traps  Laziness and carelessness are relative terms. There is no absolute work rate which if one worked below it we could say one were bieng lazy. Laziness is relative to the amount of responsibility that one has. 

Laziness and its antitheses (hard work and innovativeness) are highly personal affairs. The most effective and permanent way to beat laziness is to work on self motivation.



There are clear discomforts that militate against laziness. However, they are all late-maturing effects. It appears that one of the reasons laziness is so potent is that it has no immediate stingers to quickly warn those who might otherwise fall in. Thus, one other factor that needs attention on this matter is our tolerance for the level of discomfort or disorder around us.



People who appear to be hard workers or highly innovative are those who either have high levels of self motivation or are intolerant of discomforts around them. If driven by self motivation, then certain internal desires they have drive them to achieve certain goals they believe are reasonably attainable for them. If driven by the lack of tolerance for discomfort then the fear of pain drives them to work to avoid meeting the said discomforts.

We all have strengths and deficiencies in each of these two areas, internal drive and fear of discomfort. We are usually stronger in the one area than the other. Those who are hard workers are those whose strengths in their area of strength outweigh the deficiencies in their area of deficiency. So if a person is not afraid of discomforts (i.e., is tolerant of discomforts), that may lead them to be more apathetic to working (they will tend towards laziness or slow work because they can absorb any negative consequences better than most) but if they are also highly goal oriented (strong internal drive), that will tend to pull them toward more and/or faster work. The net effect will depend on which pull is greater in the particular circumstance being faced. If, on the other hand, the person was intolerant of discomforts (afraid of pain), they will tend to be natural hard workers due to that drive. If they are also poor at setting their own life goals (i.e., low self motivation) they will be poor self-starters. A person like this could be ‘pushed’ towards their best work by helping them to feel their uncomfortable situation more clearly while at the same time providing meaningful rewards directly connected to their work. That strategy, however, wouldn’t be nearly as effective on a person who was a self starter and tolerant of his/her discomforts. Only promotion (additional responsibilities) would see this person stretching their work rate beyond what it currently was. The chart below helps to clarify. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps The Tolerance-Motivation Space TM Visualising laziness and accomplishment Tolerance for Discomfort

► ► ►

Slow to act Considered “Lazy”

3

B

► ► ►

4

5 1

2 ► ► ►

Visionary Highly deliberate Scalable impacts

Impulsive Complainer Incompetent

A

► ► ►

Act fast Rush to conclusions Self interested

Self Motivation

How does this relate to laziness or carelessness? Well, it shows that a person is only lazy when their self motivation is low and they are tolerant of any discomforts associated with inaction. There are three important principles to keep in mind in order to correctly use the Tolerance-Motivation Space: a) The TMSpaceTM uses only inherent characteristics of a person. These are characteristics developed by life training and not influenced by externalities or enticements. This means, for example that, a person’s self motivation can neither be increased nor decreased by salary. Nor can a person’s tolerance for discomfort be altered by work benefits such as a car. These externalities are most effective when they come as a result of rather than to ty and influence these underlying personal characteristics. In other words, these items are properly to be understood as work-life tools rather than influencers of character – you cannot bribe a person’s character to become what it is not. b) Self motivation (or ambition) is the person’s desire for improving his/her own living conditions and those of others. It encompasses preference and ability c) Tolerance for discomfort is the person’s ability to absorb painful or undesirable circumstances without changing their course of action or inaction. This characteristic can be good when used to help someone persevere through difficult circumstances in order to achieve known results. But it can also be bad because it raises the threshold of pain required to get someone going in the right direction who is suffering from inertia (inactivity or wrong activity). Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps Some interpretations of the TMSpaceTM (numbering based on illustration page 152) 1.

Many of us start off in this general corner. Our motivations for getting things done are high although we aren’t yet hardy enough against the likely pains required to get those certain things done. We generally want to act quickly on things and have a high level of self interest to our work. We also either move forward on insufficient data or are found to have moved forward without considering all angles to the problem.

2.

In this corner, our self motivation has taken a hit so we are not as energetic as we once were. If we do not quickly compensate by increasing our stamina against uncomfortable situations, we find ourselves complaining often about externalities, being impulsive (working with unexplained bursts of energy every now and then and which bursts can disappear almost as quickly as they appeared). Many people overall, assess us as being incompetent for our roles.

3.

While our self motivations are still low, we have now grown a good amount of emotional and physical stamina to withstand the discomforts that come with our territory so we are able to do the things required of us. However, we need to be cranked to do so and so we are overall seen to be lazy.

4.

In addition to being robustly resilient to the discomforts demanded for our own progress, we have also won our ambitions back. Now, we work with wellcalculated intent that comes with much experience. We are highly deliberate in the things we choose to do and the rate at which we execute them. Overall, we are known to be visionary and our actions are scalable (reproducible en mass) in many different environments. At this level, we are accomplished. Instead of being looked at like embarrassments, your past failings make you feel like you earned your stripes.

5.

Having middle-of-the-road abilities in everything. This place might seem to be safe but is actually a dangerous no man’s land. In this space our own actions quickly become our downfall without anyone coming to our aid fast enough. Either our insufficient tolerance for pain (work politics, pay matters, training, domestic pressures, etc.) catches us out, or we are soon found to be overloaded with unfinished tasks because we are not that great a self-starter or self manager, afterall. These last two pitfalls are indicated by the pressure arrows labelled A and B respectively. ‘A’ is the pain pressure and ‘B’ is the workload pressure. Another reason position 5 is dangerous is the relative nature of laziness and carelessness. Remember that what is sloppy work in one instance can be seen as satisfactory in another, the difference based entirely on prior expectations.

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Twelve Death Traps Pictorially, what this means is that the axes are extendable. The higher people’s expectations are the longer the two axes become for you. So imagine that the vertical line is pulled up to, say two times its current height and the horizontal axis is also stretched out to some two times its current length. Suddenly, the space that looked like it was in the centre falls squarely in corner 2 – the quadrant of incompetence, as shown in the illustration below. At this point, one will fail to meet expectation and will fall out of favour. It will be concluded that you had been “promoted to your level of incompetence” and probably exited out of your organisation. Tolerance for Discomfort

3

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► B ►

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Slow to act Considered “Lazy”

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Impulsive Complainer Incompetent

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Visionary 4 Highly deliberate Scalable impacts

5 2

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Act fast Rush to conclusions A Self interested

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1 Self Motivation

So, in order to avoid such bad turns: (a) Never let people’s expectations of you sour uncontrollably; manage people’s expectations of you to fall just behind your ability to deliver. (b) Always work on your self motivations for what you do, regardless of external rewards such as salary. (c) Always work to increase your capacity to take uncomfortable shocks and/or extended pressures, i.e., keep developing your emotional and physical resilience. It will be a transferable character trait, helping you to navigate the treacherous waters up ahead. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps So how do you avoid laziness and carelessness? Work on your self motivations as well as your ability to pre-emptively face difficult circumstances. This will include improving your skills at work by training, reading and practice. It will also include revisiting your joie-de-vivre (joy of living) via humour, letting go of past failings and learning something from every setback.

PREPARING YOUR ESCAPE Breaking Addictions Demonic oppressions flow from a similar place as do addictions. In both cases, the individual only has partial command of his own faculties. In advanced cases, whatever the individual says or does is unreasonable because they are dragged along by a stealth force that takes their system over like a virus in the operating system of a computer. It takes experience and spiritual discernment to tell for sure what is going on. An addiction is a habit which arrives like a fully controllable motive but, by willing incubation from its host, grows itself into an enslaving power, isolating and weakening the person to the point where he can no longer determine his place within the changing times and seasons. In the end, the person misses even the most glaring of opportunities to self actualise. Addictions do not exist in a well-behaved place; they are greatly animalistic in nature. That is because they exploit our most basic nature as living beings. The body needs certain chemical flows in order to produce its most primary internal alignments to the world around it. If the chemical is actually produced by the body itself, say in one organ, and transported within the body to produce its effects in another location, the chemical is technically called a hormone. The alignments produced by chemicals and hormonal flows include happiness, sadness, bursts of energy, focus, alertness, anger, levity, etc. These alignments are produced as neural pulses in the brain activated by the flow of those chemicals and hormones. These chemicals and hormones need to happen in tiny doses – in the order of micro-grams and nano-grams – exciting the nerve endings just enough to produce manageable and reasonable pulses which lead to manageable and reasonable effects on the physical body which we see. This is why all manner of chemical mixes have been artificially manufactured in order to trick the body into taking artificially desired alignments even in the absence of other stimuli which would have naturally produced such effects. Hence we have antidepressants (to lift people out of somber moods), performance enhancers (to provide otherwise unnatural energy and stamina to the muscular system), analgesics and Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps anaesthetics (painkillers: to numb out pain), aphrodisiacs (to intensify sexual desire), etc. Unlike demonic forces, addictions are scientifically explainable and can be reigned in that way too. When you think about the working process of addictions, it is not hard to see that all addictions are actually cases of substance abuse. That all addictions are cases of substance abuse is easy to see for addictions to physical substances such as alcohol or drugs. But how about such addictions to such things as video games or pornography…? How do these translate to substance abuse? And the answer is that what the body really seeks is a distraction from uncomfortable perceptions. What comes hidden as thrill seeking is actually a search for the same chemical flows that numb out other emotionally packed messages for the individual. Some people got addicted to pictures of naked people because they were visually curious and then later as the body sends chemical flows in similar ways that it does when one engages in sex, it is to those chemical flows that the person became accustomed and hooked. Others fell into the vice because it was an out for them for relationship troubles. Still others got there because they were “pressured” into it by life and spouse challenges. Yes, pornography and related addictions are actually rife within marriages – something which, at first sight, might seem odd. Now, even in those hormonal flows, the real addiction is not the dose of hormones per se but the numbing effect it produces whereby the person forgets every other matter around them except this one strong burst of neural synapses which is orgasmic in nature. This is why when one is addicted to visuals of naked people, chances are almost 99.99% certain that it will go along with self touching in sexual ways (I am straining to avoid another age-rated word: masturbation). The chain is as follows: visual cue which combines with pre-existing data about the sensations that are about to follow; sex related hormonal flows begin and the evidence is that the outer sexual organs begin to activate in the same manner as they would on a person who is about to engage in love making with another – manhoods harden and womenhoods moisten; when those flows have peaked and certain physical actions are carried out, the nueral synapses fire off and a thrilling height is reached, the hormones take a bit of a while to wear off. These last parts are the real thing which the person is addicted to and the naked visuals are simply a cue to get there. Now, this cue itself has an outer-world cue of its own which is the thing which the addicted person is trying to drown out. The cue being drowned out does not need to be negative. Even good news can give rise to “pressure”. It is all about failing to deal with the ball in the middle of Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps spinning plates. Either because the ball is too hot or too cold, too fast or too slow, or whatever other condition the ball may be blamed with but just that there is something special happening and the person it is happening to needs to deal. Negative or positive, it is all simply pressure. This is why learning to deal with pressure is actually a critical life skill which all people – especially fathers – need. Now, the flow of the chemicals and hormones in the body is activated using very basic stimuli. This is why addictions are so hard to deal with. Because a large part of the addictive activity becomes internalised, the addiction becomes way too easy to crave (and, for some, to access) again and again. After a while of going through the same chain of activities, the brain makes its passive associations that become like engravings upon it. These engravings then become like a willing co-stimulant (a stimulus which will work with at least one other stimulus to produce a powerful effect upon a body) ready to be activated at any moment. With that internally stored co-stimulant, the behaviour has become entrenched and we have ourselves a bonafide addiction. Just a little external pressure and the internal balance tips over, activating a craving response like a reflex – totally by-passing any rational or moral checkpoints. Now, the destructive nature of addictions doesn’t even need discussion. It is extremely important that addictions are broken and people – fathers – become highly deliberate in all their actions and behaviours, commanding and controlling their bodies with proper discipline. While the next sub-chapter deals with breaking of addictions, I need to mention here that addictions are actually far more common than many people believe. In any crowd of 10, chances are that you actually have 7 addicts and 2 soon-to-be addicts. It is what people are addicted to and the extent of exo-control that varies. The term exo-control is what I use to mean that someone’s actions are being controlled by a force outside of his/her core intentions – that their behaviours are dictated to them by external influences. The opposite is endo-control to mean that the person’s actions are being fully directed by his core intentions as opposed to external pressures. Most of us fall in a space where we are somewhere in the region 60%/40% endo- and exo- controlled. A 100% autonomous (fully endo-controlled) person does not exist. This is because our very existence in a connected community means that a large part of our actions are directly dictated to by others. When we speak about the Rule of Law and no one being above the law, we are actually hinting that we want everyone in society to come under a healthy level of exocontrol for the good of our community. However, the dictates of society are usually welcome to all and do not constitute anything like an addiction. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps An addiction for its part, comes largely uninvited. When the door is left just a little ajar, an addiction will exploit that open space, pulling more and more of itself in until it has taken over all space inside! And it happens at individual level. It even occurs within marriage settings where spouses can live together for years without ever discovering that their partner was an addict to something destructive. Addictions can present very lonely battles. Part of the power of addictions is that they will isolate and weaken a person’s defenses simply because the person cannot find any support system outside of his own repeatedly compromised will-power. To be discovered is to lose the battle conclusively and to be shamed. So the person continues to hide and to hope. But for how long? And at what cost?

Hearing & Listening: The Simplepowers that Break Addictive Powers For most of us, only two realities exist to fight addictions: (1) We have no social support system. If one exists, it is so full of stigma and reprehension that it really cannot count as a support to help us come out. (2) Although our countries claim to have correctional systems (systems designed to produce change in behaviour), what they really do have is a penal system (systems designed to punish wrongdoing). In Zambia, the one body committed to fight addictions is the Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC). Only very recently has the DEC started making advertorial cartoons directed at influencing children to say no to the early influences that might eventually lead them into substance abuse. But their identity as a criminal investigation wing remains solid. Their high profile cases are all about investigating money laundering, white collar crimes, drug busts and tax evasion. Although I know via other means that DEC actually do have a restorative side to them, I have personally never come into contact with any of it or even heard of how their rehabilitation programs are carried out. So how does our one institution, the DEC, help someone who is genuinely suffering, knows it and wants out, to come off their dependency? Is DEC even legally or structurally equipped to help someone come out of addiction to pornography, beside bringing criminal charges of “posession and/or circulation of materials likely to corrupt the morals”? How does this last part even find a safe place under a national constitution whose Bill of Rights guarantees freedoms of speech, expression, association, conscience and information? Surely, the Law can only militate actions (what I do) but can it realistically be used to control what I see and how I process it in my own mind? The compromise then is to only criminalise the posession and any circulation. And, in all fairness, that criminalisation is about the only thing that the DEC can do. They then try to work Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps more broadly at the problem by attempting to embrace the victims and provide a safe rehabilitational program for them. But their rehabilitational activities will necessarily focus on the more tangible addictions such as substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, nicotine, etc.) – those addictions which directly introduce chemicals (as opposed to influencing hormonal flows alone) into the body. For the addictions which abuse hormonal flows (gaming, gambling, pornography, etc.) – psychotropic activities which do not involve the ingestion of any sustance – the DEC is at a loss to be effective; they are simply not purposed or designed for these type of troubles beyond criminalising those who are unlucky enough to go in too deep and to get caught with an off-shoot problem such as possession or circulation. What would “possession” even look like for a case of addiction to computer games? A computer with a very powerful graphics card? And who would be most guilty in a case of “circulation” when dealing with addiction to gambling – the betting company advertising its services or the guy who invites his friends down to the betting shop? Our laws are just not designed for many real and troublesome addictions in our society. In some cases, our laws are openly conflicted and hypocritical. A look at the DEC Mission Statement removes all doubt about the DEC’s very narrow mission with regards to addictions. “To prevent and control illegal cultivation, production, trafficking and abuse of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and money laundering activities in order to contribute to socio-economic development.” What all this means is that apart from chemical abuse, there is little help for other types of addiction. And then even for chemical abuse, the focus is on enforcement, with rehabilitation taking a secondary role only. Only as late as July 2018, was an addictions rehabilitation centre opened at Great North Road Academy in Lusaka. It is a private centre run by a private institution. Little is known about the priorly (2011 – 2014) reported rehabilitation centre to be constructed and run by the DEC. I recourse to their mission statement and would not be surprised if there was actually a reversal of plans and reallocation of funding to address activities better aligned with the DEC’s core mission. So is there any hope for individuals to help themselves? Well, good news is that there is a lot of help! Bad news is that it requires two things which many of us are not good at, i.e., learning how our minds work, and living without all the answers. All government-based rehabilitation systems try to address chemical abuse because chemicals are the only substance which they can clearly measure and Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps legislate on. And it is very interesting and informative taking a look at the type of items they fight against: (1) Narcotics – substances which reduce pain, induce sleep or alter mood or behaviour; in short, mind numbing drugs. They work by reducing the intensity of pain signals. (2) Psychotropics – (a fusing of two words which reveals what the item does and how it does so) “tropic” refers to any susbstance that indirectly induces chemical changes in something else; “psycho” refers to the mind. Thus, psychotropic substances induce chemical35 changes in a person’s nervous system so that their mental processes follow a different course than they normally would without such substance. 36 You will notice that there is little difference between these classes of substance because the desired goal is the same. While narcotics suppress the message, psychotropics change the message. In both cases, the user is seeking to deaden some uncomfortable message from the world around them. I find that it is exactly the same thing which the alcoholic guy seeks to achieve, to the extent that even the Holy Bible agrees saying: “It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine… Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”37 In other words, alcohol is a narcotic; let those who are miserable drown themselves in it, but not kings or those of royal standing. I find that it is also the exact same thing which the gambler is trying to achieve. It is the same pressure which the consumer of pornography is trying to relieve; and the smoker of strong leaves; and the one who needs his fag (cigarette) or he will not calm the nerves… and so many more people who are dependent on chemical introductions into the body or inducing of hormonal flows within the body to drown out pressures which they feel are too intense for them at the moment.

35

Some people add “and biological” I recall that the malaria drug choloquine used to have such an effect on me after some 2-3 days of taking it in the late 1990’s. I would enter a very interesting world where only happiness existed and I wanted to just hug everyone and keep them out of harm. It was like a spiritual experience! And I wouldn’t even be afraid or embarrased to air out my new dreams and visions for the world. “Nifuna chabe ku konda bantu bonse (I just want to love everyone in the world),” I would announce from a nostalgic, happy spirit. But when the effect wore out, I would become really sad thinking I hadn’t acted fast enough and now had lost my noble motivations for life. Until I heard someone talking about “coatem dreams”. I then realised that the experiences I used to have were a thing actually, a psychotropic side-effect of the drug chloroquine. 37 Proverbs 31v4-7 (KJV) 36

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Twelve Death Traps The sad thing is that the people who hold highest promise of achieving great things; those who have clearest vision of where they want to go, are the ones most at risk of addictions because they are the ones who are most afflicted by huge discomforts when they see the oppressing divide between what could be and what actually is. A dead person can never be addicted to anything. At personal level, the inability to reconcile desires with realities can create huge pressures too. So addictions often flow from a good place. We all need to aim for accomplishments which are beyond where we are currently at. So that we work hard. But there need to be counterpoints which regulate our “youthful ambitions” and help us to stay the course to achieve our dreams at acceptable cost. This is the social support ingredient which many lack before they fall into substance dependence. The problem is not the ambition or the seeking of pleasure. Both are often very necessary for life. Trouble enters when these good things are not recognised and harnessed. The problem is management of the dissonance. I have used another big word ‘dissonance’: it simply means the conflict between where things say they should be and where they actually are. Thankfully, there is such as thing as self management and I am here to lay the roots for that. All support systems work to back people up as they try their hand at self management. You have all the power to break the dependencies. Any support networks will only help to point you in the right direction but you are the one who will do your own person management. Thousands have managed to do it. You too will if you really want to. One of the largest points of weakness in fighting addictions is that the person doing the fighting will, by the time they are receiving assistance, be so beaten down that the last person on earth they will confidently entrust their own life to is themselves! Countless episodes of repeated failure quickly rise to mock and weaken any faith they try to summon up. While logic and reason can be debated and won in a clean fashion, fighting chemical movements within your own body – or cravings for such chemical activity – is like a computer whose processor has been infected with a virus trying to use the same infected processor to work the virus out. Chick, chick chick, blip! Chick chik, bleeeeeep! Chick bleep dead! You never really can know how your own system is going to react as the heat turns up. Will you successfully skirt the dirt or will it just be a matter of time before it all mushes up and you are back in the mud? Super tricky. Unless you have a cheat sheet somewhere! I present to you, in the few pages to follow, something like a good cheat sheet. It really is easy if you try. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps For my part, I fought a couple of psychotropic addictions – which I never knew at the time were addictions – for almost twenty years. Until I stumbled upon this liberating truth. And the way to tell that you have stumbled upon the truth is that your actions are fully condemned like black from white but in the same breath, you are offered a powerful way out which sets you fully free from exo-controls. You regain total command of your decisions and actions and are able to enjoy life once again, without condemnation and without hang-ups. I urge you to listen well. And, above all, I pray that you find freedom and power like I did. Firstly, that example of the computer processor was deliberately chosen. Because you do not fight a virus on the system using the same system. You have to go outside to principles that operate at a more formative level. That would be the same method where investigators will kill off all natural light and use ultra violet radiation in a room in order to illuminate organic fluids more clearly on any clothes or surfaces. In so doing, they are able to separate some otherwise completely inseparable things. The power comes from following more foundational principles to shed new light on a situation. At the core of this new light we would like to shed is the command centre of your identity, and which command centre is called your soul. At this point I would normally be expected to share the depths of a human story – maybe my own story – as a sort of cementing testimony. But I have come to discover, after lots of relapse cases, that even testimony needs somewhere more foundational to sit or else its effects will wear off and the person falls back into their original battles – maybe even worse. The power of a testimony is only in the hope that it gives that if you followed this advice, you too would win. Hope is the point. When we have hope, we become able to squeeze impossible levels of energy out of our tired system to see us through any challenge put in front of us. Hope is what brings our command centre back to life; it is the fuel which motorises our soul. Hope is energy within your soul. Now, often, when we begin to access immaterial concepts like soul and hope, many people actually lose hope(!) This happens because we often make the same old mistake that got us into trouble in the first place – we want to first understand everything with our limited mind. Using an infected computer to remove the virus! This is why we couldn’t deal in the first place and ended up looking for mind deadening agents to which we then got hooked. If this system is going to work for you, you have to be willing to live with not being able to fully understand a thing and be ok with it, in quite the same way that you do not understand how the protein chemicals in milk, beans and meat travel around your body and make you grow but you still eat. And end up living another day to possibly find out. So be ok Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps with having only a partial understanding of soul and hope and get on with other stuff. There is a soul within you and it is your true identity. It is the thing that commands and instructs you to behave the way you do. While you may not identify anywhere within your chest where the soul is located, you can sense its effects. This is exactly the same way in which although you cannot physically point to the location of your identity, you know that your identity is a thing and it is real. If today you found a note under your pillow saying “we can find you anywhere; we can get you anywhere; watch yourself!” how do you deal? Without anything physical happening upon you, suddenly the hairs on your back cannot settle, you cant find sleep, your heart keeps racing, your palms are sweaty and you cannot be calmed down. That is your mind going through its various processes. And if you let it continue unchecked, you might even end up in hospital with a real disease! There is only one sure way to stop the heartrace and calm you down completely and it happens in the soul. It is only when you know that no matter what happens, you cannot be defeated that you can even dream of re-claiming the original freedom of your life. If you go around depending on a legion of bodyguards, well, who is to say if the note was actually not a trick to get you to hire your own assassin as a bodyguard? Who can you really trust? Your life cannot ever be expected to be the same as it was before. Ever again. Well, unless you have a cheat sheet like we do here. Freedom has to flow from an unexplainable place where you know that no matter what anybody attempts to do, they cannot suppress you. Only then will anything else you do make sense. There has got to be a unifying belief in your undefeatability. In other words, you have to know “in your heart of hearts” that everything will be fine. It is called faith; it cannot be scientifically explained but its effects can be felt in very real and powerful ways just like any other force of nature. What we call our “heart of hearts” is our most unique identity as a living being and it is called the soul. This is the same thing about which the Holy Bible says “the soul that sins dies.”38 Every time you fall into mistakes and addiction traps, a part of your powerful identity dies. You cannot see or touch the soul but you can speak things into it and it, in turn, builds up hope from the things it hears. When hope rises within the soul, your mind is able to stay up late giving you productivity, your muscles command the kilocalories needed to work and produce very tangible results which you can measure scientifically. Even if you had starved for days, when the soul regains sufficient hope, suddenly energy is summoned from an unknown place and we 38

Ezekiel 18:20, Ro 6:23

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Twelve Death Traps notice eyes open, muscles move and things begin to shift again. Your soul – your command centre is back on its seat! But how can we tap into this power which we know all humans actually posses? How do we activate it when we need it? How do we maximise its effects? The answers to these questions are also the means via which we overcome psychotropic powers, unwanted habits and addictions. The answers help us to overcome otherwise enslaving powers. Here is key number 1: the soul works only on what it hears. I like to put it this way: although the brain can see, the soul works best when all eyes are shut. I am talking about literal eyesight. Perhaps that is why most of us close our eyes when we pray – so that we can speak out of the soul, undisturbed. The problem that leads most of us into all our compromised corners is not lack of understanding of consequences, lack of examples, or anything related to knowing; the problem is that we hear too little of the right messages! We fail to send the right messages into our soul, our command post. But then our physical eyes are always consuming. And they end up working like the entry point of much confusing noise for the soul. I am talking about literal hearing and physical eyesight. What we hear builds us up (and if it does not, it is easy to fight off). But the things we see are highly deceptive and difficult for the soul to manage. This is the most powerful principle for breaking addictions. The soul thrives on what it hears. If what is heard is wholesome, it builds up and empowers greatly. “faith,” a commanding energy that flows from the soul of a person, “comes by hearing,” says the Holy Bible.39 While hope is energy within the soul, motivating actions, faith is energy flowing continuosly from the soul and influencing everything around it. All these things are built up and strengthened only by what is heard by the soul. If the soul hears things that are pleasing or liberating, it fills up with hope and is able to direct the positive energy into the overcoming of practically anything! On the contrary, if the soul hears things that are burdensome or confusing, it curls up and becomes unable to control – let alone fight – any pressures incoming. So we need to be in control of what our soul hears. Even if we are met by negative news, we are still the ones in charge of repurposing and repackaging the message that trickles down to reside in the soul. This is beyond thinking positive thoughts, actually. It is about taking control of our very cognitive processes (the means by which we perceive the world around us) so that the messages arriving do not cow us into negative spaces and defeat us. How do I mean this? Well, let me introduce

39

Romans 10:17

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Twelve Death Traps you to a process called recasting. You will see the importance of all these tools very soon. You receive news that you have just lost a contract. You have two choices. You can straight away begin to work on that and what it means for the workers, etc., or you can recast it. The difference is subtle and easy to miss. When you recast, you choose to deliberately delay your thoughts on a matter. You decide to only extract a placeholder headline and then file away the details until later. Beside the opportunity presented to practice living with uncomfortable facts, it also helps with conditioning your responses to negative feedback. Eventually, to all events, there are three decisions needed from you as the recipient: (1) What is the important point from all this? (2) What is the headline? (3) What action to take? So when this news of your loss of contract happens to your ears, you want to – I mean you need to – choose what to underline. Firstly, ask yourself why this news was important to you. In this case, it was a loss of contract which means you have no work to give to some of your workers and you lose a good part of your income. This news is important to you because you will lose income. I will underline. I will now recast the news to “we have lost an income line”. And my headline will be “Tough Times Ahead”. At this point, you can even stop and return to it after a day or two to consider what to do about it. Can you already see how much easier the matter is to live with now? We can do it even for the case of losing a job. I can recast to almost the same thing “I have lost my one income line” and headline it “Tough Time Ahead”. Then I might even add action “(1) downsize rent, (2) look for some small business I can do, (3) start applying for jobs elsewhere”. The activity happening here might look like over-dressing the matter but for dealing with addictions, it makes the crucial difference. When you recast, you are actually preparing the messsage to trickle down into your soul. You need to be responsible for making sure that your soul does not receive negatively packed messages. You must send in messages that are full of energy and direction instead of butt-ended signals which only drain you out. Put differently, you have physical ears that receive the first message; but your soul only listens to an inner part of you which orients all the messages a certain way in addition to prioritising what comes before what. You can choose to be careless and let whatever comes go right through and sit inside of your soul or you can put well trained gatekeepers to ensure that whatever reaches your “heart of hearts” are messages of the right quality. That is how you begin to change who you Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps are and deliberately repackage yourself into a person of emotional stamina and positive energy. Recasting all your messages – especially the negative messages – is a powerful investment into your future self. After you have recast the message, call the topic closed and ignore every other feeling. Every battle has gunfire and noise; you wont go anywhere far if you have to stop and check out every sound of a firing rifle. If you know the field you are in, you owe it to your own self to conserve your energy. As long as you have packaged and sent a message into your soul, your soul will get busy creating visions of what you are actually facing and what to do about it to survive and to be successful. As you send more and more deliberately re-cast messages into your soul and as it chews on this material, eventually, your behaviours line up in a deliberately chosen direction and your responses to further messages take on an energetic, positive character. This is faith beginning to happen. It is a certain confidence that is hard to explain but is rooted in nothing else other than hope within your soul. And that hope has been deliberatly fashioned by the messages you have been causing your soul to hear. When people speak about objectivity and the scientific method, sometimes they go so far as to insinuate that we all ought to be “open minded”. At least one thing is correct there: open minds are the only things that can truly be objective. But, I ask, when did we so enthrone Objectivity that we even want to throw away our very lives for it? In order for you to take proper control of your life and to command your own body well, you cannot afford to be so open minded that any trash and filth is welcome at any time. You have to filter and block out the nonsense, and, for that to happen, you want to be quite subjective actually! Objectivity is one of the biggest scientific fallacies we have created to enslave ourselves to. You see, in order to make progress in any scientific field, we build tests designed to accept certain facts and to reject others. We invest huge amounts of time and resource into subjecting all our thoughts to existing scientific principles and if what we think does not align or satisfactorily explain its departures from already proven and accepted “scientific truth”, we reject it straight away. Judges do exactly the same thing in our courts of law: if any thing presented as fact does not hold up to what has been known to be factual already, it is straight away thrown out. As scientists and legal minds, we are some of the most subjective people on the planet. Open-mindedness requires a huge army of closed-minded gate keepers! Pure objectivity is a greatly over-rated concept and, frankly speaking, does not exist anywhere. What does this mean for you? Well, it means do not be afraid to filter and recast everything that goes into your soul. You are captain of your own ship. Your team of gate-keepers depends on you. Where this Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps ship ends up depends on you. Now, go ahead and train everyone to do the right thing. At this point, some might even call you deluded for the way you respond to certain realities in your life. But that should never surprise you. Because, well, what do we call a person who picks and chooses his facts and doesn’t believe anything just because someone else calls it a fact? And that – exactly that, almost paranoid belief in their eventual success regardless of what conflicting messsages may be arriving at their doorstep – is what brings about success to the successful in the end. But why is it that so many people derail before they have travelled any distance with their beliefs? Seeing too much! You see, while it is easy to recast what you hear, what you see is a hell of a lot harder to process. In many cases, the feedback we get from our eyes is greatly dissonant from what our soul says it should be. This is one of the few cases in which I contradict myself and advise people to be open-minded: that just because your eyes say that a few milliseconds ago the situation was like that does not mean that the situation should remain like that going forward, that perhaps your soul is suggesting that you do something about the situation, thanks to that dissonance. Often, when we passively want to align what we see with our eyes to what we know with our soul, things don’t look good at all. Worse can happen if we try to force what we see with our physical eyes onto the roadmap that our soul gives us. One of them usually shuts down! You have decided that you will never go near alcohol again because of what it has done to you so far. You have been doing very well for the last three weeks until some argument with your wife caused you to hop over to a friend’s house who then brings out some six packs! One voice will have to shut down here. This type of war goes on in our soul all the time we try to bring physical visuals together with the message from our inner self. It is the reason relapse is a real thing for addicts. At Mathew 14 in the Holy Bible, Peter, having seen Jesus walking on water on the Sea of Galilee alongside the boat Peter and the other Apostles were in, in something of a reflex reaction asks Jesus saying “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Firstly, I keep wondering why Peter needed to be commanded to come. If he wanted to go out, couldn’t he just have gone out? Why did he need to hear Jesus’ voice before attempting the feat? And then what would he gain by walking on the water as well? Bragging rights? Or proof that Jesus was indeed the son of God because he had managed to make me walk on water? Was Peter’s request coming out of a heart of doubt or something else? Anyhow, Jesus obliges and simply says “come!” And Peter became the second man on earth to walk on water! And then at verse 30: Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps “But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” That verse 30 is what convinced me the guy did this whole thing in a rush, that he hadn’t really thought this one through. When Peter asked to be called out onto the water, he was pitting the two things I am talking about here most clearly:  

What he was seeing, vs What he would hear

The first time around, when he focused entirely on what he heard from where he would hear it – to the exclusion of what he was seeing around him – it produced faith from him and he walked on water! But soon, when he had crossed over his first barrier and was now a bonafide success story, there was more challenge to face. The eyes never stop bringing in their data. He let his guard down. The success he had achieved suddenly became this dreadful upswell of water, waves and wind and darkness around him. Who said success didn’t bring pressure? Or that positive news won’t cause you to trip and fall? So Peter switches back hard to his eyes and becomes as if he had had his eyes shut all along. What he sees overpowers him and he becomes afraid. His soul gets the un-recast message and it curls up. Energy falls, faith fails and bam! The water beneath him gives way just like it does for all the rest of us. As Peter crossed the edge of that wooden boat that day, he could hear his friends’ fearful voices but his eyes were focused on Jesus and his ears were attentive in active conversation. The things he was concentrating on spoke the same messages and the result was a huge miracle. But when Peter opened his eyes to feed his preexisting paradigms (recall, Peter was a fisherman and fully familiar with the behaviour of water), natural consequences followed. Rewinding all way back to Eden, we are told of a conversation between Eve and The Deceiver. Up to a certain point, Eve was only a passive hearer, a fence-sitter, not committed one way or the other. Her only error was listening to the wrong messenger. But a pivotal moment happens at Genesis 3:6 “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took its fruit and ate” Firstly, I wonder how Eve could know just by looking that the fruit was “good for food”. Anyway, food science hadn’t arrived then. And how did she know that the fruit would “make one wise”? She hadn’t learnt about putting gate-keepers at the ears of your soul to guard against messages from wrong messengers who were Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps going, without any proof, against what was the only scientific knowledge she and her husband had at the time that had said “you eat this fruit, you die”. When there is dissonance between what is seen and what is heard, one of the messages has to shut down! There is no “meeting each other halfway”. Often the soul can deal with what is heard. But what is seen, if it is coming in to validate the wrong message, can be extremely damaging noise. The soul curls. And its message shuts down! For countless days, I suppose that Eve had passed by that tree and never thought about it or salivated at the fruit before. But on this fateful day, her soul was primed with contradictory messages. She didn’t guard her soul against those. Her inner vision dimmed out as a result. And when she opened her eyes to the Tree of Life in a whole new way, there was no coming back from that slippery slope. Her walls of obedience came crashing down. All her innocence disappeared in an instant. This is precisely the process we also go through with addictions. It is never one cause but a confluence of at least two pressures. The experts would call one a primary disorder and the other(s) each a comorbidity. So I would be jobless (the primary problem), I would have extra social pressure from observing how far behind my former classmates have left me (problem 2) then I would be exposed to cheap sources of illicit brews within the compounds (problem 3). Or I would be full of anger at my fiance and “oh, what luscious bums there are on that shapely woman over there”. I have just lost the only remaining contract I had and this last cash in my pocket is just enough for one more beer to forget it all. I am so lonely and tired, but hey some quick downloads of pretty things will wake me up… besides, stuff it, everyone’s a crook in this country, including the churchmen! The common thread, if you can see, is that the soul – the seat of the person’s inner vision, the place that energises all his actions – is startved of a wholesome message but instead chocked with contrary broadsides. The broadsides do not have to be true; they just have to be served up. Starved and poisoned to irrelevance like that, the soul ceases to function as commander and controller. In reality, all support mechanisms are attempts to re-sit the person’s soul back on its seat. Without it, there is no moral compass to motivate decency, there is no greater cause for which the person must preserve themselves, avoiding abuse of narcotics and psychotropics, etc. Without the soul of the person providing him with inner visions of a greater purpose he was born for, why not go ahead and take that strong drink to forget all our poverty and afllictions? Without clear hope of a greater reason to live, why shouldn’t the rich teenager attend the sex party and sniff that cocaine away; afterall it’s not like her parents will even be around to care? Without the soul, what’s it all for at the Drug Enforcement Commission except to provide salaries and long carreers for criminal investigators? Between “socioRobust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps economic development” that may possibly happen to the country sometime in the far future and this pressure relief that will happen to me now, what to do, what to choose!? Without the soul to guide, it is a cat and mouse game between the money laundering ring and the policemen, and who is to say that the policemen won’t go rogue? Institutionalised rehabilitation programs which can only deal with chemicals, the physical body and psychiatry can only go so far. Relapse (falling back into the vice after a good period of apparent success) is a firm reality for these programs because few of them are equipped to speak to the soul of the person and be heard. Because you, the person involved, must first of all know and be willing to revive your inner man – your soul – and begin to allow healthy messages to reach there again. Voluntarily. You must be patient enough to allow your own soul to soak in enough uplifting messages, losing all the bad in the process. “Who can understand a man’s desires except the soul of the man within him?” When the soul sees hope within, there is no telling the size of miracles it can go after and how power packed the punches it can punch. The secret is for the man himself to speak messages to his own soul. The support networks are there only to provide a strong enough backdrop. By choosing the messages it hears and by paying close attention (listening) to the uplifting messages, the soul is allowed to start creating visions of itself and its future once again. Even where “visual reality” wants to speak a different message the person is able to arrest that and recast it. The soul regains command of the person and becomes able to control affairs. This is all that is needed. The rest of the picture will fall in place like night follows day. So what does the addictions cheat sheet look like? Well, it is just six small principles with three parts each. The first part is a definition part where we just come to use the same language for things. The second is an “Action Enabler” part where we draw some consequences based on how we have defined things. The third and last part is the “Specific Actions” section where we lay out actions which the interested person should do to firm up what they have learnt and to see the principles at work. You will notice one very important word – it is like a foundation without which the rest of the cheat sheet will make little sense. The word is dissonance. I defined it earlier but it is worth elaborating here. Disonance is a conflict between where things ought to be with where they actually are. We all face dissonance in our lives. In fact, we all need dissonance! I like to look at it in similar ways to how engineers like to look at what is called potential difference (PD). Without PD there can never be power; there can never be electricity. At the dam, water has to hang over a very high cliff edge then be allowed to fall through a great distance to release its energy for making electricity. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps It does so by hitting some “pedals” as it falls, in the same way that one rides a bicycle by pushing down on pedals. Without the height difference, there is no making electricity. At the thermal or nuclear plant, they also heat up and pressurise lots of water then they let it come out with force via some spouts in the same way that steam comes out of a kettle, only you put some “pedals” near the mouth to tap the energy. Without that pressure difference there is no making electricity here, either. And in the battery or cell, one part is charged up very positive while the other one goes very negative. That creates a large potential difference, which we measure in volts, without which the battery will have “no charge” and cannot power anything we connect it to. The PD, a deliberately chosen dissonance, if you like, is extremely important to getting work done. In our social lives too, if we don’t have the discomforts, we cannot get anything of use done. So, creating high expectations is important because it lifts one side of the system for us. Observing the problems is also important because it sets the other end of our system in place. The dissonance (the difference between expectation and reality) we now see, if it is just right, will cause us to get up and act on things. The only problem is if we do not have ways of staying the course and directing our energy past the correct points to get things done in a useful way. When we have that situation, we have what is known in the engineering The Addictions Cheat Sheet is 6 small world as creep – a drooling principles with three parts each: out or corrupting of the normal course of 1. Definitions – clarifying the principle and development. laying down common language It is the risk of creep that causes some to stay away 2. Action Enablers – stating some obvious from setting their implications which help in putting the expectations too highly. principle to work correctly They do not want 3. Specific Actions – stating what should be disappointments because it done to put principles to work is disappointments that bring home the nasties that lead to creep. You aimed so high you wanted to jump from Point A to Point D and now you’re stuck, hanging somewhere above Point B with lots of useless baggage in tow. What the heck, lets have a drink and drown out our foolishness – what were we even thinking trying Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps these things which our smarter friends avoid like the plague? We are good for nothings, pass me the weed! Dissonance is useful. But it must be managed. Not everyone can carry the same weight; not everyone can wrestle the same potential difference and survive. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE SIX ADDICTION CHEAT POINTS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) Dissonance is a thing and it is totally healthy – DON’T STRESS! 

If there were no difference between what you wanted and what you actually had, you would have little motivation to take action



We all live with dissonance daily in one way or other

Action Enablers 

Do not creep out at first sight of pressure or contradictory feedback. The pressue is actually proof that you are engaged in a fight that matters. So, unless you were not serious about this, you would not be running from the pressure but toward it (or at least with it)!

Specific Actions 

Watch out for places and areas where you are experiencing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Recast the dissatisfaction as dissonance in fact and try to draw out some positive actions implied. This is necessary practice in the art of harnessing dissonance for deliberately targeted results.

(2) All addictions are cases of substance abuse – YOU ARE DEALING WITH

CHEMICALS IN YOUR BODY – FIGHT LIKE YOU ARE FIGHTING A VIRUS! 

No matter the means of expression, it is the effect on your nervous system that you are trying to activate. You are either looking to dull your natural responses to the dissonance or to activate new sensations that will distract you for a while. Only chemicals and hormones will achieve those results.



Either you are actually ingesting substances or psychotropically trying to influence hormonal flows.

Action Enablers 

Now that you know that your own nervous system is what you are targeting whether by drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography or other vices, you are better able to target your management efforts and to cooperate with rehab if you should need it.



If you are familiar with the discipline of fasting, this should be easy for you because you will need to contain your bodily urges in the face of external stimuli everywhere around you.

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Twelve Death Traps 





Unlike popular notions, many cases of addiction have nothing to do with demonic activity or ancestral covenants. They are simply failures to manage dissonance. And a failure is a totally human situation, it does not need the help of demons to happen. Never take out on your nervous system, frustrations which your nervous system did not cause. The moment you see it happen, you are already in abuse territory and are advancing toward addiction. If you are already in some sort of abuse – whether or not it has advanced into an actual addiction – remember that your nervous system is a living system and, given sufficient room, will be able to reset and renew itself. You can come out. However, the longer it takes to start the renewal, the more difficult the process will be.

Specific Actions 

Protect your body (in particular your nervous system, which includes your brain) from abuse, by reminding yourself that you will never know when that red line is crossed and you are abusing.



Unless a response is immediately required form you to stem the damage, deliberately delay your reactions to negative news. This will help you to recast and to direct your energy into deliberate action plans instead of being dragged every which way by external pressures.



Train yourself. A poorly skilled individual will run to abuse much faster than one who has a depth of tools to draw from to address different situations.

(3) Struggling with addiction is proof that the soul is alive, just in a heavily

weakened state – IF YOU REGROUP AND RELOAD, YOU CAN FIGHT AND WIN! 

If a person’s hopes and dreams differ from their perceived realities, the person will necessarily struggle, and the only way to remove the struggle is to either work on the reality or kill off said hopes and dreams.

Action Enablers  

That you are struggling does not mean you have been abandoned forever; it only means that something that requires your attention is still off-centre. Weak is better than dead; struggling is better than given up; there is hope. Only the longer it takes, the more difficult the process of coming out.

Specific Actions 

Embrace your struggles and let them motivate you to act to change realities for yourself and your people.

(4) The soul only processes what it hears – LISTEN TO THINGS YOU HAVE

DELIBERATELY CHOSEN TO LISTEN TO. MIND WHAT YOU SEE. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps 

If the soul depended on eyesight then it would never be able to create visions of the future that were any different from what was available now.



The reason most of us struggle with matters like faith is that we have allowed our paradigms to become too fixated to what we see now that any other possibilities just cannot fit into our template of expectations.



The soul only needs to hear words in order for it to begin to see. Do blind people dream? Most certainly! On account of their lack of physical eyesight, most blind people have sharpened sense of hearing. The soul works in the same way. Visual information is optional – needed in heavy moderation, if at all. This is how the soul manages to produce faith – by hearing the right material and listening with heightened interest to all that is heard.



In fact, what is seen often constitutes a confusing overload for the soul.

Action Enablers 

In order to put hope back into the soul, all that is needed is to share wholesome uplifting messages



Guard the soul of man from hearing poisonous information and you will have saved and changed many lives



The starting point for breaking addictions – be it to narcotics, psychotropics, behaviours, etc., – the starting point is not much understanding, heavy consequences like jail or much community service. The starting point is in a relaxed place where simple spoken words speak the soul back to life.

Specific Actions 

Understand what it means to “walk by faith,” (by the voice of your soul), “and not by sight.”



Exercise the power of the soul by regularly cutting out everything else around you except the voice of your soul. Meditate often on what you have heard and let it speak back to you about who you are, where you need to be and how you need to relate with others. The more you do this, the more you will be able to cut out the noises of cravings and other sensory demands around you rising up at wrong times.



Train yourself to recast, especially but not only, any negative news you receive. Recasting puts you – instead of whoever the messenger is – in charge of how you respond.

(5) Although the messages to your soul may pause, visual and other sensory

data never stop pushing in – FILTER HEAVILY WHAT YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO SEE; GIVE YOURSELF SPACE TO GROW INSTEAD  

Usually, the intensity of visual and other sensory data rises exponentially as one rises from dormancy to important work

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Twelve Death Traps Action Enablers 



One of the biggest functions of leadership is to absorb and manage dissonance, recasting the news and feedback for others under them so that those others under them should not be overwhelmed The higher you go, the greater the data, contradictory or not. You therefore need to develop ways of working with more data and lots of half-answers around you without losing the plot

Specific Actions 

Be on guard because you will face increasing pressures. Deliberately give yourself plenty of alone times where you concentrate on your soul growth to cope with increasing dissonance



Be grateful and celebrate your wins often. This will serve as an auto-casting effort for your soul’s benefit, sending the right messages and connections in real time. It should be looked at as a matter of survival.



Train yourself. The more data you need to deal with, the wider and deeper your repertoire of problem solving tools must become, even your ability to deliberately operate your emotions.

(6) Addictions are nothing more than failure to manage dissonance – YOU DO

NOT NEED WHAT YOU ARE CRAVING; WHAT YOU NEED INSTEAD IS TO STAND UP TO THE DISSONANCE AND SAY ‘OR ELSE WHAT?’. 

Cravings do not occur in a vacuum. Something triggers them. Inside the something that triggers cravings, there is a dissonance. For example, you decided a while back to stop smoking and everything was going smoothly until your wife brought things to a head with “pressure”. Disecting the “pressure”, we quickly find that you had a position you wanted your wife to take but she stuck to her guns. “Stuff this,” you said as you left the house with clear dissonance running your emotions. If you tame things now, you’ll do just fine, but should you fail, well, “stuff it,” you will say again as you get yourself your first stick since you last quit one final final time a few weeks ago. This is how you chose to manage this dissonance. Or, more accurately, how you failed to manage this dissonance.



Remember that no one starts an addiction without a genuine-sounding excuse where other people – not the eventual addict herself – are the lead actors. And these lead actors keep doing bad things to me… etc., etc. ad infinitum.

Action Enablers 

We all face dissonance daily. In fact, the ability to live with it without losing the ball is one of the hallmarks of great leadership. At Mark 14:34 and Luke 22:44 in the Holy Bible, we are presented a picture of the most total loneliness and extreme dissonance to the point that the person “sweated blood”. How often have you had to sweat blood in your fight against the

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Twelve Death Traps urges, I ask. No one has yet come up who answers even “once” to that question. Specific Actions 

Accept that continual dissonance is only a part of being human, and managing it well a proof of leadership ability.



Take some regular 6am to 6pm ‘food and drink’ fasts. It will help you to train your soul to take command of your body in commanding ways.



Proactively embrace your own mess. Sometimes even enjoy watching yourself progressively coming out of your most pressurised circumstances. Often the dissonance becomes unbearable because we live in denial, taking ourselves far more seriously than we should.



Humour and laughter is a great way to manage dissonance. Calm down sometimes and have a laugh; the world will certainly not come to an end. You are going to be far more useful when you are humble and joyful.

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WORKING YOUR ESCAPE HATCHES The fightback: Do Not Engage Let me tell you a hard nosed truth: this battle is going to get lonely before it gets better. Your internal hormone system will fight back hard against your best efforts to stay free. And outside, you will be bombarded with images that are designed to trip you back into the place you have just escaped from. You will be bombarded with messages that are designed to trip you back into the place you have just escaped from. Society is carefully rigged to trip you up and hinder your personal progress to freedom. It will put untold pressure on you to conform to an intense pattern of superficial success lacking in depth. Like the lottery, there shall be intense survivor bias (the millions who lose their shirts and suffer will be shut out while the one-in-a-million who wins by sheer luck is afforded a highly visible platform, totally missrepresenting what happens to the majority). The one-in-a-million will be the one whose smiling face gets painted all over the billboards to deceive more losers into playing, handing over their cash and getting forgotten about. “You too can win like this guy,” the adverts will say, even though you – as well as they – know full well that if the advert advertised exactly what happened to the masses, the entire value system would collapse. In the same way, the rest of society will put untold pressure on you to conform once again to your old habits. You need to be aware that society is pre-rigged for your failure. And with extreme survivor bias. The system will not want you to see or think about the millions of failed cases it has produced due to its bad prescriptions and extreme pressures. Robust Wealth

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Twelve Death Traps When you jump in but fall flat on your face again, you will become nothing more than a data point to be quickly forgotten about. The extremely few who somehow pull through will be heavily showcased as though everyone who fought had ended up like them, even while you suffer your relapses and worsening situations in silence and away from the cameras. If you are going to win at this, you need to take things personal. Very personal. A person struggling to come out of alcohol dependency will be bombarded all the more with smells, sounds and the carefree exploits of former misbehaviour-mates even as he now tries to put his life in order on a sober mind. A person fighting to shrug off a life of free-wheeling sexual escapades enters a church and, alas, he is met with the same style of music that used to “turn him on”, the same kind of revealing dressing and suggestive dancing... A man or woman struggling to quit pornography is met daily with the ever mounting suggestives that used to chase him into a private hole to indulge his senses. All these are the deathtraps laid out. They will be sneaky, perhaps a little hazy too, but – make no mistake about it – they are fiercely vigorous at their core. Like a piercing arrow rushing fast at you, a relapse doesn’t tell jokes. So how do we beat them? Well, not difficult actually. It is as simple as a mind made up. Determine in your heart that you will do everything possible to protect your newfound freedom. “If your eye causes you to sin, you will pluck it out.” That is how seriously you must take this fight or you have lost already. If your life is going to count for something, you need to let that moment be now! Take no prisoners, because you wont be taken for one – the objective here is to destroy you! The real, high-potential you is what your present society is rigged up to destroy. If you can get past this point, everything else will be a downhill climb. With your mind set like this, you will be able to find the genuine positive in every setback; you will be able to fight the good fight and win before the actual fight is brought to you. Until your outward life begins to line up closely with your inner vision – original and pure. The secret is to prepare for your fights. Pull your punches early. Study. Listen. Put yourself in the right environments and, by all means, refuse any advances quickly and strongly. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Fight the fight before you have to fight it for real, i.e., anticipate the tripping points and go through your reflexes like a fighter pilot going through his scenarios. It is a fight, afterall. Now, it is widely known that there is no active way to forget something. Forgeting just happens. This is one of the biggest problems we face as we try to overcome our addictions, bad habits or flaws. The more we think about the things that we need to stop thinking about, well, the more residence time those things actually enjoy in our minds. And guess what? The more free residence time something enjoys in your mind, the more power it gains over you!

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Twelve Death Traps Someone illustrated it best on a ZNBC television interview when he said “the moment I ask you to not think about a black cat, guess what, that’s exactly what you think about in full color – a black cat!” The sure way to lose an addiction fight or other character flaws is to think very much about the battle you are having. Because the more you try to avoid your mind straying into certain areas, the more your mind actually strays into those exact areas. But, there are some strategies that can help to ensure you do not fight losing battles like that. Where the mind is concerned, it is a quid pro quo because, especially in the fast paced world where we live every day, it is not possible to just empty your mind and think about nothing. Unless you are the sort that can afford an expensive yoga instructor to come alongside you daily. You have to actively give your mind the right things to chew on. The principle is consistent, early substitution. Substitute the unwanted thought with another that is more powerful as soon as the unwanted thought registers itself. And do that so often that it becomes like a reflex action. I give my personal example below. I found that I often had to arrest nasty thoughts from settling in my mind even if they only dropped there accidentally. For that, I ran into a powerful line: “we take captive every thought to make it obedient”40 When I saw that, I realised that thoughts can actually be controlled toward a predetermined end. Knowing also that voicing out is a powerful way of controlling mental attention, I began to actually voice out, whenever I could, my refusal to cooperate when I sensed that my thoughts were straying into seedy territory. The full verse which I have partially quoted above actually identifies the object of obedience as Jesus Christ. So if, for example, I caught myself looking at a lady and some salacious thought invited itself into my mind like a bird flying over me and pooping without invitation, I would immediately cordon off the thought, disown it and say “I refuse you, in Jesus’s name,” out loud if possible, or in my heart if in the presence of other people. The effect of this was that my mind would surely shift from the initial wrong line to “other matters” without so much as a wiff of guilt. I would manage each time to successfully avoid thinking about black cats when I told myself to not think about black cats. Quick substitution. You give the thought an identity separate from you and then quickly disconnect yourself from it by submitting the rest of your thoughts elsewhere. On achieving consistency, it became second nature for me to arrest any of my wayward thoughts and to direct them exactly where I wanted them to go. Mentally speaking, this is how to “take no prisoners”. Identify, reject and move on. Quickly. Do not engage.

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2 Corinthians 10:5

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The fightback: power your escape with forward-looking questions to yourself One common way in which wrong things will seek to take charge of you again is by offering up entincing suggestions. Potiphar’s wife still says “come to bed with me,” drooling with intrigue and desire “to be one” with a successful person whose success remains precisely because he had the character to not come to bed with Potiphar’s wife even if presented with the opportunity a hundred times.41 The only way to fortify your defences and to win in such entrapping situations is to restate the suggestion into a loaded question: “Joy, is this woman – or any fellow human being for that matter – going to put an end to you that easily?” In the story of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph, the Hebrew bachelor, Joseph had successfully evaded his adulterous stalker, Mrs Potiphar, by escaping and refusing to engage her in any discussion. His loaded question was “how can I do such a thing and sin against God?” But there was eventually a perfect opportunity for the madam. All house hands had gone out on errands and Joseph had to personally go into the house to attend to something. The First Lady saw her half-chance and went for it, grabbing hold of Joseph to turn his hormones on. The only thing the Hebrew boy could do was wriggle out of his jacket and literally run out of the house! That was a bitter emotional veto for a beautiful woman. Feeling wrongly “touched”, Mrs Potiphar turned on her political offensive – If I can’t have you then no one will. She manipulated her husband into intense anger against Joseph, having the boy thrown into some dungeon and forgotten about. One could be forgiven for thinking of the Hebrew boy as one naïve rookie! Why not enjoy the ride with one of the most powerful – and no doubt very desirable – women in the country and even keep his freedom for the pleasure? Integrity? What integrity when the woman herself kept begging him to please have her, effectively making this a victimless crime? Two consenting adults can keep a secret, no? Risk? Well, isn’t it true that the most powerful offices in the land have risk itself running through their DNA from start to end? Such offices are not for the fainthearted! But the Hebrew boy knew exactly where he was standing and, to him, all the personal troubles were very much worth it. That is how determined and personal we must become with keeping our freedom. We must be willing to suffer for it if needed but still make the same decision over and over again. Because we are convinced that in the end it is all worth it. As it eventually was for the Hebrew boy who overcame against all odds by simply restating all his stalker’s advances into one simple question: “is that one thing worth losing these many things for?” 41

Based on a story at Genesis 39 in the Holy Bible.

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Twelve Death Traps Naturally – and especially if it is all a test of character – the advances will escalate to the point where personal pain is demanded of you. You will have to be determined enough to willingly undergo long periods of discomfort for the sake of your freedom. All fathers go through these tests. Often, there is no escaping the pain. That is one point we normally forget! That the real contest is not between certain pleasure now and possible pain later but between pain now and much greater pain later. Returning to Joseph and his escapes from Mrs Potiphar, we see that in reality, he was damned if he gave in and damned if he didn’t. We have already seen how damned he was since he chose to not give in. Now, let us say he gave in and started a steamy affair with the woman. That would definitely have emaciated him, sucking him out of all moral strength – like in Samson’s case in a different age and place – and the woman would have exerted great destructive power over the young man. No doubt, she would have flaunted her newfound strength openly sometimes in order to command increased respect from everyone else in her household. And the blackmail would have become his downfall if not outright discovery by a third party and perhaps a public hanging in the end. These things would certainly have happened since his God would now have been difficult to contact for strength and escape from the traps. Guilt and regret would have done the rest of the work from the inside.

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To Know, To Love and To Leave

9 To Know, To Love and To Leave The purpose of every man and father. Let me show you here how fatherhood was meant to be an institution rather than simply the sowing of seeds. Whether or not a man has biological children, he is still meant to be a Father to someone.

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The Blessing of Knowing The dictionary definition of knowledge is all about cerebral content – facts in the head. It therefore comes out quite interesting when the Bible speaks about knowledge in the following manner: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain”42 This type of knowing is different from the one that comes a few verses earlier: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked” It appears that the knowing of the Bible is not limited to intellectual facts. Knowledge in the Bible is a far more intimate affair than the loose manner in which we use it today. To know something is to relate with it at a deep interactive level. If the knowledge being spoken about relates to facts, then those facts are known to the sort of extent that we would call expert today. But it wouldn’t just be an expert appreciation of facts and how they connect with each other; it would be experiential. Without exception. In a sense, one could even say “Adam experienced his wife and she bore him a son as a result.” The experience that proves knowledge is always that which is first hand. Even in the case of events, those who know about an event in the Biblical sense are those who have first hand experience of the event. The rest of us will only hear and believe based on the testimony of those who know. So when the Bible says: “My people suffer for lack of knowledge” It actually refers to experiential relationship. In fact an inspection of the verse in context reveals that God was speaking more to His priests than the general population. The fuller verse reads as follows: ´My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me;”43 The complaint here is directed more at those who should have a first-hand relationship with God and based upon which knowledge, they should testify to the people to keep them on the right track. Knowledge is the key to your liberation. Without a first-hand experience of God and of various components of life that you want to leave to your children, you will lack the power of authenticity. You need to seek knowledge – relational and experiential. 42 43

Genesis 4:1 Hosea 4:6

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To Know, To Love and To Leave And returning to the final part of the verse at Hosea 4:6, we find full agreement. God turns from speaking only to His priest to speaking to the general populace. It is as if He goes to rebuke them too, saying that the sluggishness of the priests in continuing to cultivate that first-hand experientail knowledge of God could not excuse them. They could at least recall the law as handed down to them in earlier preisthoods and, perhaps, rescue something. He says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.” And there we have it. The biggest blessing of knowing (having a first-hand experience) is that our offspring will not be forgotten, i.e., they will receive their inheritance and will manage it well since God Himself will be with them, guiding them as He did us.

The Love of A Father A guiding love While a mother nourishes and watches one grow into their own identity, a father guides into all life. The term father generally means the source of something. Love, for a father, does not mean hugs and kisses and what is personal to the body; it means guiding a person to face far off territory, to meet strange people and to stretch oneself beyond the comforts and safety of home. A father needs to know (see above) these “far off territories”, “strange people” and “discomforts and dangers outside the home” so that he guides with authenticity. That is not to say that a good father experiments with everything. No. It is actually to say that a good father has sought out and tested the reliable sources of knowledge which he patiently passes on at right times and in good sequence. This is the first requirement on the institution of fatherhood. As you can see, fatherhood can even be a tug team sport – one person can be the biological father but perhaps they have passed on. Another will still be needed to carry out these other functions. Thus, fatherhood is not just about spreading one’s seed but about passing on knowledge (experiential and relational), expertise and courage with which to successfully takes one’s place in the world and, having done so, to keep succeeding. A protecting love Now as the father sends his children out to meet the world, he does not do so recklessly. There is an aspect to a father that is highly visionary and preparatory. It is the father’s responsibility to get up, go out and spy out the land, as it were, and Robust Wealth

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To Know, To Love and To Leave to investigate the traps so that he can put in place adequate measures to keep his children safe. The Biblical metaphor is that of a hen protecting her chicks under her wings: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, … How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,…!”44 While men will never grow breats with milk in them to feed their children, they are actually given that room in order to offer the best protection both from near and from far. It is one of the primary functions of fatherhood to cover and to protect. No matter how equal the sexes become in the eyes of the law and our customs (which they must), men will never be able to share the burdens or even understand the full extent of the pains and entanglements of menstral cycles, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, etc. But have you thought about why men seem to have been “let off” like that? Well, its actually far from a let off. In fact, it is the most burdensome aspect of parenting to have to take the best care of people that neither understand nor walk in step with you. Look at the fuller quoted passage: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” [emphasis added] It is required of fathers to overlook the children’s lack of understanding or even appreciation and to still protect them. The reason is because a father is source and sustainer. Sustainability is about longevity and durability. A father is supposed to overlook short term inexpediencies for the sake of the longer term and widerimpacting (larger community) goals. These are the things a father must busy himself with, or else his lineage or even his whole community comes to a full stop. In fact, fatherhood starts at the point when we develop a big heart for others – a heart that is bigger than any personal hurts we might feel along the way. Is visionary and purposeful In order to truly sustain his household, a father goes to great lengths looking over the horizon to what’s coming up ahead. He makes a choice as to which piece of land he would like the family to end up on and then sets the course to reach there. Then, as he goes, he is not distracted by sidegigs and drama. A father performs his duty of being sustainer by ensuring that he is both visionary and purposeful in his actions. Many of us agree on the unmatched resilience and big hearts of our mothers. Anywhere were “fate” would have led, our mothers would have raised us there 44

Matthew 23:37

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To Know, To Love and To Leave without complaint. Our mothers persevere. However, we are not meant to lean on perserverance. Perseverance helps us withstand circumstances for a while. But it is vision that places everyone in the best circumstances to flourish. A perserverant mother needs to be doing her perseverance for moving us from good to better and then to best; not from totally unbearable to basic survival to almost making it. No. It is the father’s job to give everyone their best starting points. Using foresight and wise (i.e., well informed) planning as well as razor sharp execution. Declares Itself There is no such thing as a secret lover. Love does not hide. Especially for a father, there is no such thing as an absent father. When one is not available by desire, it means that something else or someone else is more important to them than the children who call them father. Part of the duty of being a father is continually declaring oneself as such to those who are your children. They must know their heritage, their values and the fact that they are loved above all others. By observing their fathers love in open action, the children will come to learn what love and commitment are. Is not overcome by emotion or emotional entanglements People are emotional creatures. Unfortunately, though, we are sometimes emotional beyond what is reasonable. We tend to cry more often and longer than we ought. Yes, even men. And we delay the process of germination of new seasons. We tend to hold onto events and items far longer than we ought. Restricting the room available in our hearts for a new thing and the energy in our bodies for the next part of the journey. We are easily given to self pity. We are usually too quick to speak. We enjoy complaining and arguing – even in our own heads we argue with many people there! All these are results of our excessively emotional nature. ‘Now the Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go; I am sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite. For I have provided Myself a king among his sons.”’45 Here, a prophet of God was found mourning without consolation for something that his boss had decided to do. The prophet has access to some of the best teaching on psychology, human relationships and emotional intelligence, yet he was still overcome by sadness for a matter that was not going to be re-opened. It is part of the duty of being a father to rise above our sorrows, dust ourselves off and go and take action – just like the mourning prophet was himself instructed to get up and go make some things happen. The only way to win here is to turn our sadness into 45

1 Samuel 16:1

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To Know, To Love and To Leave a search for what the future may look like on both sides of the irreversible decision that has just been committed to. “It is eleven days’ journey from Horeb… to Kadesh Barnea. Now it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month,…“The Lord our God spoke to us in Horeb, saying: ‘You have dwelt long enough at this mountain. Turn and take your journey… See, I have set the land before you; go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to your fathers—to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—to give to them and their descendants after them.’”46 In this case, the people had been promised a huge inheritance spanning the generations. But as they journeyed, they began to get attached to their “nomadic” way of life and the sights and sounds of the places they met that it was much easier for them to just resign themselves to the migrant lifestyle. But that would break an age-long promise given to their ancestors about what their descedants would inherit. The promise didn’t have to break because of emotional convenience. Fourteen years they stationed themselves at a place which, if they just braced themselves and left, they would have long forgotten about in just eleven days. Because they would have reached their next destination to present them its own sights and sounds and challenges to overcome. One of the tasks of a father is to keep account of roadmaps, commitments and targets. By so doing, the father will be able to overcome his own emotional attachments and guide his “nation” to where they need to get at each time. A closely related problem that follows us as human beings is self pity. Unfortunately, there is no good that we can speak of that ever rose out of self pity. When people begin to feel so sorry for themselves that it leads them to sorrow – maybe even actual tears due to generalities and not a specific challenge – their trouble has become irretrievable. That will be proof without doubt that they have “dwelt on that mountain” for too long. Sorrow is acceptable for a time and over a specific problem but not self pity. Sorrow specifies and seeks consolation but self pity generalises, is reactive and focusses on how “there is nothing I can do!” But we can always do something about our situation if we were sincere enough, and if we truly wanted to go beyond seeking other people’s sympathy. A father steers clear of these vices. And when it comes to discipline in the children, fathers are to elevate correction above the protestations of the children or their tears. With our insistence on convenience and superficial considerations nowadays, it is becoming increasingly unfashionable for fathers to seriously manage the development of discipline in their children. However, it must be done. Good fathers know (as in closely understand) that the subject of discipline in their children is 46

Duetronomy 1:2-8

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To Know, To Love and To Leave theirs to deal with. For the survival of our society and culture. Because when discipline becomes a foreigner to people, so too does their social progress. “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.”47 “A prudent servant will rule over a disgraceful son and will share the inheritance as one of the family.”48 “Whoever brings ruin on their family will inherit only wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise”49 A father may mourn but quickly reminds himself that the new will never arrive if the mourning does not cease. Because mourning comes from reflecting and looking backwards – even from regret. Looking intently to the future is what helps us to overcome episodes of sadness or discomfort. A father may love things and enjoy certain experiences but he will quickly let go as soon as it is needed that he do so because he knows that in order to have enough room and energy for the next part of the journey, he must quickly free himself of the weaknesses (or indulgences) of the flesh. A father may experience pain but will never descend into self pity because the father knows that hardship is training ground and nobody personalises training grounds to start crying over them when there is so much life yet to explore and master. A father does not speak unless it is required of them and will edify. A father does not complain. Think about it, if the father is the leader, who should he complain about? Blaming other people for misfortunes, for a father, would mean that the father is powerless and instead depends totally on such people for sustenance. So in order to avoid becoming a serial complainer, a father makes all efforst to ensure that he is not totally dependent on other people for sustenance; he does not depend on their validation or promotion in order to be useful. Many poorly informed fathers complain so much about their bosses or managers that one would think their bosses or managers were God. Even in situations where a father finds himself temporarily dependent on only one person for daily bread, the wise father knows that “man does not live by bread alone.” Even if he were to find himself alone and without support, he would still be able to survive. Finally, a father speaks with grace because all his thoughts toward others is premised on the fact that every person is a manifestation of the glory of his maker. When people do hurtful things or act out of spite, the father knows that what such people need is not a piece of the mind but rescuing from the fire.

47

Proverbs 19:18 (KJV) Proverbs 17:2 49 Proverbs 11:29 48

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To Know, To Love and To Leave Rejoices in the greater good It is one thing for a parent to say they love their child. It is a totally different one for that love to be expressed evenly across all their children. As the children settle into their different characters, favouritism and preferential treatment follows. And to the natural eye, such preferentialism is only logical. However, for a father whose love is upright, his children’s different characters are only passing factors. What is unchanging is the fact that all children carry his bloodline (the very worst of them might turn out to be the last man standing after a wiping plague, for all the father knows) so to look down on any child just because, for the moment, that child is wayward would be a terrible error. In fact, a good father knows that the wellbehaved children must sacrifice in order to bring back their lost brothers and sisters. It shall be a most intense pain to have to watch one child – faultless in terms of behaviour – taking on battles that are none of their fault just to help restore his/her siblings. But usually this is what it comes down to. The only comfort a father will have in these circumstances is that there is far greater good in having all children back in order; that there is greater good still in the best behaved of his children going a step further and knowing sacrificial love for their brothers and sisters. If the children can care about each other that much then the task of fathering has been completed with glowing colours. This is probably the story of the Gospel at John 3:16.

The Sacrifice of A Father Enables the father to let go so that the child can fully actualise To be a father is to be a source and a sustainer. When one is a source of something, it means that whatever they have produced is a part of them. Blood connection is understandable that way. No father ever truly forgets their child no matter how separate they may live. Worse still for a mother. However, the true test of fatherhood is in how able one is to let the thing that has been produced become its own thing. To let a child actualise into a unique individual with a distinct personality is the indispensable first step to passing on values. A person cannot truly internalise strong family values if they are hindered from fully actualising into a separate individual who seeks on their own to inherit family values. It is therefore required of fathers to not be overly controlling or possessive of their children but to let them feel for and explore (within safe bounds) their own personality. I look at personality and family values as being like canvas and paint. Personality (or individuality) is the canvas upon which family values can be painted. If the painter is to be able to pay much attention to how masterful their strokes are stroked, they must disentagle themselves from moving the canvas every here and there as they paint. The child will have to be allowed space to actualise on their own (with only solicited guidance every here and there) but the task of imparting strong family values cannot be left to chance. Letting go is the Robust Wealth

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To Know, To Love and To Leave power that enables a father to win the willing permit to pass on family values. The father has to win the battle of letting go. Knows that going away is part of the plan In order for a father to win the battle of letting go, he must practice the habit of going away from his children every now and then. Even sending them to school is part of the practice. Loving a child fully and then letting them go is part of the growth plan for both the child and the father. For the father, going away helps the father keep in focus the urgency and extreme importance of efficiently teaching all things to their child in a short space of time. The child will not have forever to launch out from the support they have received and make an impart on the world. For them, the father going away helps them focus on learning everything quickly and effectively, knowing they shall be alone soon. A good father begins to prepare for his departure from the lives of his children the moment his children enter his life. When children are up to the age of comprehension and emotional understanding, a good father begins to speak about and prepare the children for life without him. It shall be a process for both sides and one which they can enjoy if they approach it well. Let your child practice thinking independently, making decisions and surviving challenges. They will be much better for having been well prepared. Starts to prepare the child to be alone from the day the child is born Like for any other uncomfortable tasks, preparation takes away half the pain. A successful father will have prepared his children for a life without hand-holding. And the process starts the moment the child is born. Now, such things are easier said than done. How does a father begin to peel away from his children the moment they are born? And how does he make sure that when he begins to speak about them remaining alone, that they can understand and follow the program? Well, firstly by showing his love unreservedly knowing that he does not have all eternity to be with his children. Secondly, by avoiding selfish indulgences that tend to take him away from them. It can be painful to have to regret later when all opportunities have been spent and by the time you want to sit down and be a part of your children’s lives, they have found means of filling in for you and do not quite need your presence. The third way of preparing children for being without one’s guidance is to befriend them as though they were grown up people from a totally different family and who one seeks to get to know very well. This will allow children to express their individuality, grow their assertiveness and learn to reason independently. In this context of friendship, a father gets a totally unparalleled opportunity to rub off valuable life lessons. I can distinctly recall some four or five occasions when my father did this for me. The lessons he taught me in those few minutes – perhaps 60 minutes in total and no more – have been indelibly etched on my personality. My young brother who Robust Wealth

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To Know, To Love and To Leave would sometimes drink with my father has even more memories and cautions to share. Interestingly, the sibling who grieved the most – away from the cameras, as it were – when the big man passed on was the person who spent the most time sabotaging his own friendship with the big man. No matter the big man’s weaknesses, it paid to let him be his own man and to simply take a non-intrusive look into his uniqueness as Anuel Edson Simwawa. The reverse applies perfectly as well. Our children are not our property; they are meant to be our closest friends and padawans (apprentices who are intended to build on all the know-how of their teacher and necessarily go beyond). Finds a way of planting himself in the children so that when he is gone, he should speak even louder The film Star Wars demonstrates this concept in the best way. In that movie series (fictional, I must add), there is a power called the Force which connects all things and all creatures dead and alive. When a Master has trained his/her padawan up to the requisite level, he knows that it is fine for him/her to depart. The powerful Jedi Masters (master fighters who protected the good balance of the Force and used it’s power for good) were those who had discovered that even after their death they could still actively participate in Jedi affairs by using the communicative power of the Force. As such they were never afraid of death. One Jedi Master, Obi Wan Kenobi, deliberately allowed himself to be killed so that he could then be an omnipresent advisor to his young padawan who he knew had already achieved the requirements of his basic apprenticeship and now just needed to trust the power of the Force and use it to win the battles that were his alone to fight. In much the same way, good fathers commit to causes that outlive them many generations. In order to win those wars, good fathers know that they need to plant all their most intimate know-how into their children so that the children can win their own battles faster and take the war much deeper into enemy territory. Thus, a good father will speak with his voice while he is alive, but knows that he has to speak through the actions of his children when he is gone. So, firstly, he must sell his cross-generational commitments to his children for willing buy-in. Then he must ensure that his children are well equipped to deal with the canons and nuances of the battles involved. Handing material things over to your children will be a good thing but handing them an ideal to fight for will be far better and much more meaningful. When it comes to children, you start out for them, then live with them, then in them until finally you work through them. A good father starts to make himself redundant the moment he has children.

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Labour Complications

10 Labour Complications The big three which we all face as next barriers to our progress. Rather than being pitfalls, they are simply complications and can be lived with without incident. But it is better, if one can, not to have to. Failure to find work: not just about finding employment but really about finding where one is supposed to function for life; where one can be the very best version of themselves.

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Labour Complications

Failure to find work The leading fear among the young and the poor is failure to find work that pays. I have always been intrigued by these two contradictory facts: high unemployment and serious lack of essential services. So many workers around but work lying undone all over! How do those problems manage to happen together at the same time? It is like boiling ice-cream in hot water, or having both light and darkness in the same room! There can only be one explanation: that we are not managing. Why are we not managing? Well, we are not being creative anough with our time and energy. I speak firstly from the level of community rather than from a leaders and followers perspective. What do I mean? Well, imagine that I went to the roadside where weeds had overgrown the road furniture and I began to clear the weeds out, leaving the place looking nice and clean, because I am unemployed and looking to apply my skills somewhere. But who is going to pay me? And of course that question is what stops many other people from doing such things, too: that there shall be no one to pay them for that service. But is that belief true? Is it justifiable? In order to seriously resolve our unemployment problem, we have to answer the above two questions honestly and with open minds. The truth is that the belief is untrue and the practice unjustifiable. Let us tackle the easier problem first: that the practice is unjustifiable. In a country that needs so much progress, it is totally unjustifiable that able bodied men and women should struggle to find work. This is an illness of inadequate leadership. The government cannot provide all work opportunities, neither can the private sector absorb all youth into their labour needs, but a price point can always be found where someone is willing to donate cash and another labour in order for certain common needs to be satisfied. If a leader looked long and hard enough, they would find that there are enough willing takers wanting to work in public activities and wealthy people willing enough to contribute cash for convincing causes. The only problem being connection and bureaucracy. Someone has to be willing and ready to rope in those connections and to scale the bureaucracy. And that is where things collapse. Because those who learn to rope in the connections and to navigate the bureacracy soon find themselves in the pugilistic profession called politics and they become political leaders, complete with personal-to-holder “militia” to protect their interests. This happens regardless of which continent one is on. The softer end of this pugilistic profession is called advocacy and may walk in suit-and-tie but is politics through and through. What is politics if not the art of influencing others? The “militia” in this case are one’s most ardent contacts and Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications sources of intel. The harder end of the scale is activism in civil society organisations, NGOs, political parties and similar institutions that are overtly purposed for politics. What is politics if not the active art of influencing people’s decisions over how they will be governed? The “militia” in this case are a cadre of die-hard followers whose sole purpose is to ensure that their shepherd’s views receive maximum recognition. They may even get disowned in public but, make no mistake about it, they are indispensable to the activist’s career as a professional worth his/her salt. In our part of the world, this cadre of active support can be hooliganistic in their modus operandi but they are exactly like their more white collar equals in advanced nations. In the adavnced nations, their “militia” sometimes prefer to stop at donating large sums of money, even sacrificially, or to offer calculated support in influential publications. A politician is nothing if he fails to raise enough of these sort of supporters. If one manages to steer clear of becoming a politician, they then have to face the harsh middle of the Value Cycle – the place where influence is carefully converted into economic wealth without slipping into militancy or physical force. For example, a person who has managed to gather a lot of active youth who are unemployed would face the challenge of directing their energy into either creativity which people can pay for to come and see (the arts) or services which people can call upon every now and then for a fee (job agency) or the sports or any other point on a vast array of economically chargeable activities. The constant danger is that energy remains high but off-takers for it are slow in coming forth. The energetic youth then become agitated and drop into militant activism and disturbance of public peace. In this case, the turbines of the Value Cycle would have begun to swing left instead of right, throwing people onto the ‘force’ side instead of the ‘wealth’ side. The only remedy then would be to disperse the group; mission failed. This is the constant battle that would attend anyone attempting to empower others without first accummulating enough financial power to keep the wheels of the Value Cycle turning right in the low-action moments that are bound to come. Now, if you have followed the logical flow, the above statement that one needs to accummulate enough financial power first before seeking to help others looks like a clear admission afterall that a situation where work is plenty but jobs are scarce is going to happen no matter what we try to do. Because many are still working on accummulating enough capital before they can join the fight. This is the hard reality that we have to to wrestle with. Especially in view of challenges such as statutory minimum wage, pension rules, tough labour laws, etc., which are designed to restrict how easily two individuals can establish an employer-employee relationship without the state poking its nose in. The natural Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications next problem is hard brushes with the law. So how does one navigate the challenge of there being work to do but no one to pay, in an employer-employee relationship, without picking fights with the state? The more I have looked at this problem, the more I am convinced that we have designed for ourselves a system that works against our needs. A person should be able to see work needing to be done and simply get up and go and do it without first stressing the little matter of who will pay! In the end, there should be a way of recognising those who have made the largest contributions relative to their giftings, and then due recognition made in form of payments. Does this look like communism? Somewhat. But communism, pushed to its advanced forms, also has big challenges of its own, like how to encourage innovation and how to nurture individual brilliance above the basic minimum. To all hard work, there is a reward. That is a biblical line and a firm belief of mine. When one has failed to find paying work, it is time to offer free labour. Soon enough, someone will notice and want you for keeps and will pay up. The point, I guess, is to let the work:jobs equilibrium find itself and settle where it wants to settle. I have been unemployed before and with a mountain of bills following me. In those moments, I have offered to carry out pro-bono work for clients. I have worked on those tasks just as hard – if not harder than – as I do when someone is paying me. I put the best version of me and my work forward as though my client were paying me a million dollars. In reality, I am just grateful to have been given the opportunity to audition. Soon enough, I find that they want to call me back for something they now believe only I can carry out best. At that point, I am in the money! This time I quote them a good price and they are willing to pay without negotiation – sometimes even using me, the same service provider, to discover what the correct price should be or how they should cost things! This manner of winning them over by offering free tasters first works because I have a skill that I am very good at. And the truth is that all of us have something that only we are excellent at. We can offer. Even if hungry, there is such a thing as fasting or fatherly sacrifice. Let us not kid ourselves; there is no Father Christmas to dish out the goodies in gift-wrapping. It works everywhere and in every society. Yahoo! Facebook and Google are all business models which depend on highly tasty free teasers first. And which teasers they have had to sweat hard to create and to offer up. So when time comes for them to name their price, they can literally take it away with the naming of that price, baby! The point is to be willing to work first, delivering great results even when you know you are working for something worse than a slave wage. At the end of the Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications day, if nothing else happens, you can claim some moral points of having made the world a better place even when no personal reward was available for you. And then you let “fate” (or The One “who sees what is done in darkness”) see to your getting your reward. I firmly believe that if our countries in Africa switched back to these traditions which we had before colonialism – of hard work before demanding hefty personal wages – our continent would leap forward so fast the whole world would come to watch. The belief that if you got up and fixed the broken pieces, no one would pay you for it is simply untrue! Unless of course all you were only ever interested in were immediate rewards. The sweetest rewards, actually, are the ones that linger and delay. Now, some might say that they have families and that their families cannot eat the fruits of pro-bono work or “free tasters”. True. But their families will be far worse if their leaders continued to come back home empty handed and – most importantly – with totally no one promising to give them half a chance tomorrow. Which is better, I ask: to have someone promising a cake sometime soon or no one even looking in the first place? Some might say that these are nice sounding theoretical ideas. Well, I have recruited or had recruited a handful individuals via the volunteer-first route. One person who took a liking to me and later came to ask if I could help them get a job at a small company I had some good influence over, I first got to volunteer as a production hand although he had the qualifications to make supervisor straight away. After a few months, every other director saw that the young man was hard working and he received a unanimous vote to get the job of assistant works supervisor on full salary and benefits. Had the young man turned the voluntary assistance down, that role would have been advertised and the chances of him landing it would have been just as slim as anyone else’s who would apply. My own entry into international consultancy was no different. After a closed call for tenders for a high-sounding project at one of the state regulatory bodies in Zambia, I had a similar decision to make as I had given that young man a few years earlier. The more experienced and better connected people declined to even submit the lengthy paperwork requiered to participate in the tender because the money simply wasn’t worth all the trouble. Ordinarily, the project would easily have fetched at least a hundred thousand dollars but only around eight thousand dollars was made available. I confessed to the technical contact person that I was not tendering for the money but to register my CV at the institution. He humbly acknowledged. A few months down the line and some glowing comments later and I was the hottest selling consultant in those parts. Even in a crowd of PhDs, my Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications name would stand out. About a year later, I was planning my own work trips – basically setting the extent of my own travelling allowances – not because of professional carelessness on the part of my now trusting client but because they had had a taste of what to expect from me as well as the boundaries of my behaviour with them. I was treated like an insider. I also began to receive much unsolicited attention internationally in all the places that mattered to my profession – without the headlines but certainly with the needed impact. Time and chance had happened to me, as to many others also, and it found me ready. The only problem I still see here, though, is the difficulty of offering services probono when all you can do is low-skill, labourous tasks. How could one seriously do this? Well, I have seen people ask to work for food (or somethings similar), showing their desperation. But even those offers to barter their services for food or soap or clothes for their children, etc., are often not enough to guarantee offers. Nor does any formulaic method exist that will guarantee that all job-seekers find something to do. However, all good work will eventually find its reward. As long as one has energy, one should never give up the habit of working for whatever they get. If you are being kept while you look for employment, never neglect to offer your hosts free service as often as you can. Keep active, not forgetting to spread the word of what you are looking for, and you will soon have takers.

Charity: a beautiful name for a beautiful thing This is the one area in which we in Africa have been thoroughly miseducated. For some reason, many among us have even come to believe that our race is supposed to be a recipient race. What a shame! I recall once in the early 90s when the then Zambian president Frederick Chiluba donated maize to neighbouring Malawi. And many years later, then Zambian president Michael Sata donated fuel to the same country. Both drew intense criticism from some poorly prepared Zambian nationals saying Zambia was no first world country and shouldn’t be making such donations. But often as I moved around Lusaka, I would meet billboards beside such critical items as water distribution facilities, roads, storm-water drains or sewer lines and the billboards would read “donated by the American people” or “donated by the Japanese people” or, on the wall of a clinic one would find simply “from the Irish people”. My heartbeat would stop for a few seconds as I wondered when the day would come when signs in other nations would read “donated by the people of Zambia”. Not for pride but because it is supposed to be more blessed to give than Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications to receive, isn’t it? And Zambia was supposed to be a flagship Christian country, wasn’t it? Well, is there a greater show of Christianity than selfless benevolence? Charity begins at home, as wiser people have said to us, and that is exactly where I find the problem sitting. The problem is as simple as self belief right from infancy. I recalled that in the UK, the subject of charity was common among the general population even outside of religious organisations. Average folk on the street took giving as the next natural step after they had met their most basic needs. Charitable giving is huge and commonplace in these countries and the majority of the people who give are not those with excess cash but those who can only manage to give out £2 to £5 (K30 - K75) notes every month. That level of giving multiplied by around 5 million people (approximately 7% of the population) bulges to well over a quarter of a billion pounds (almost four trillion kwacha) every year. All in charitable giving which comes down to Africa and other places all over the world from just one country. Now, even in Zambia, there is a middle class sized around a million people who can afford that level of giving without dropping anything else that they do now. In fact, if Zambians donated like that – just K30 per month each – Zambians would be able to make available around K360m (£24m) per year for charitable causes. They could donate a lot! To themselves and to other people outside. But the biggest benefits would not even be the cash available for charitable works but the financial discipline that it leaves behind. That – financial discipline – is one of the biggest blessings which only the giver gets. Few in Africa know of this. I also wish I had learnt of this much earlier in my own life. Every person, no matter their economic status, needs to think of others and to give. Everyone, even the cripple on the roadside can give something. Unfortunately, in our part of the world, we have trained our children to receive much more than to give. Many even demand to be given! The culture of working one’s own way through university is little heard of. Almost every student I meet here complains about money and they expect charity to come to them. I am yet to meet a student who works simply to donate proceeds to causes they are passionate about. I have met some who have taken jobs at casinos, restuarants, etc., and who give church tithes out of their earnings in such a disciplined manner that they can give entire sermons to classes of clergymen. However, I am yet to meet free-will donations to nearly the same level of discipline. My take-away from this is that there is much religion to the giving – as if they were making instalment payments toward their tickets to heaven – but little if any freewill donation, without religious guilt trips, is going on. Many churches have even reduced the matter of tithe to a sort of basic qualification for considering one a committed follower. For example, I discovered Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications that in many Seventh Day Adventist congregations, one’s tithing record is pulled out and studied before such a one can participate in even basic church decisions. The practice is less overt but still the same among the burgeoning pentecostals, too. The clear exceptions are the longer established houses such as the Catholics, Baptists, and other less charismatic protestants. As such, much of the tithing going on is a conditional50 sort of giving – as opposed to thanksgiving which, by its nature as a “thank you” package, can never carry conditions. It is no wonder that much talk about giving goes on in this part of the world yet the big givers turn out to be the less religious nations of the West. The Charities Aid Foundation (cafonline.org) has for many years dedicated itself to researching how charitable people all over the world are. Primary research is conducted by Gallup Incorporated (Est. 1935, Washington DC, USA) in over 140 countries. The CAF consistently finds Western countries leading in giving to the rest of the world. The three forms of giving studied are (1) helping strangers, (2) donating money, and (3) volunteering time working for free in organisations. The giving of money is only a third of the factors assessed. One might also compare household incomes and mistakenly conclude that the more generous hands of the Western countries are therefore nothing special. However, when the purchasing power of disposable income is considered, we quickly find that those Western nations truly do part with more to help others than we do here. The reasons are cultural training more than religion alone. Our friends work charitable thinking early into their children’s mental paradigms, so much that giving becomes part of every person’s development plan and not something they have to “work in” due to church sermons or wise advice later in life. Our friends plan their lives so that they become the giver rather than the receiver; they take the responsibility while we take the followership. The gap between us, with our give-me-give-me attitudes, and our more generous friends comes simply from differences in preparation of mindsets rather than the understanding of religious principles. We need to prepare our children better to be givers who do not condition their giving to the reaping of bountiful rewards in return but givers who give simply to help another person or to advance a good cause. Now, the Christian church is the single largest free money channel in the world. Firstly because there are so many people around the world who identify themselves with Christianity (it is the largest religion in the world, having around 33% more followers at around 2.4 billion than its closest rival, Islam at 1.8 billion)

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Conditioned upon the receiving of much blessing. Sometimes, the giving is even overtly called a seed (implying germination and, soon, a directly connected harvest of plenty of the same kind)

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Labour Complications and, secondly, because the barriers to entry into Christian collections are so low. Every charlatan can simply choose from an array of job titles (Prophet, Apostle, Pastor, Evangelist, Bishop, etc.), set themselves up over others and start drawing the cash in. I have always been intrigued by how even in the poorest places on earth, people are able to give away their hard earned livelihood into a system that is so corruptible (i.e., it is so easy for very insincere people to hijack it and begin to tap out millions in currency). But there is one strong positive we can draw from this state of affairs, i.e., that absolutely anyone – no matter how poor – has something that they can give. Giving should become a central part of our thinking with or without religious attachments. When habits of generosity are entrenched, it will not take long before the churches move to the right place where they need to be, which is using the bountiful gifts to help those in need – those affected by floods, famine and other misfortunes, artificial and otherwise. We should start taking pride in giving. We have become accustomed to looking for employment and working to make our own ends meet. But have you ever thought about sometimes working just so that you can meet someone else’s need? Most people who meet this question look back wryly as if to say “ok, Mr Theories Dogood, show us when you were hungry, your children dropping out of school for lack of tuition money and you worked to give the money to someone else.” Personal needs are one thing. But what I am speaking about is the fact that we must desire to give. In fact, if you have experienced hunger and failure to meet your children’s needs in time, you have crossed the first step of being able to empathise (you can relate down to the emotional detail in a personal way) with those who are struggling. That should motivate you to put something aside – no matter how small – when you do receive some money or anything of value, for other people who may be suffering. Because you have been there and suffered that. But the response of some to such encouragements toward charity is like what some stingy people in primary school used to do: they would give you a taster of whatever it was that they had to share then ask you if you liked it and wanted some, to which, if you replied “yes” they would then cheekily reply “work hard and buy yours!” while walking away laughing. You see, giving is much more about attitude and desire than ability. Africa needs to stop taking in so much outside money (other people’s efforts) when Africa is in fact the one continent that has far more resources than it can use Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications on its own needs. Because of that excess in resources, Africa should actually be the one in the forefront of giving efforts. But for our weak habits with respect to giving. Some people, however, draw a different conclusion from Africa’s resource abundance, saying Africa should in fact be making lots of money from processing resources and selling sophisticated products competitively. I have no argument with that. Because the giving can be enhanced by Africa growing its economic wealth and military advantages. You see, the point is not about what or how much to give but that we give at all levels. The point is actually about developing the mindset and the hunger to give. Some even use giving as a tool to influence others. What matters is that they give and they make other people’s lives easier. And why shouldn’t those givers be blessed by whoever is in charge of the Blessing Department? Some cultures believe that it is on them to find solutions to the world’s problems – they do not look to anyone other than themselves for solutions to their challenges. These cultures are highly self-dependent. They do not feel a sense of entitlement to other people’s money. Africa could pick a leaf. You see, from having a sense of responsibility over the world’s problems, such cultures extend those mindsets to taking care of the needs of everyone else on earth – like the need to eradicate diseases like malaria, like the need to have clean drinking water for all, like the need for human rights, etc. By setting themselves goals that go beyond the boundaries of their own and their children’s own needs, such people automotivate themselves to achieve great results on the global scale. We cannot even begin to hope to amount to anything globally if we do not put it upon ourselves to look out for and take care of other people’s needs. I am not talking about discovering needs and then going on begging campaigns; I am talking about noticing needs and tasking oneself to be the first part of the solution to the problem. There is something that drives the giving heart to achieve excellence in a manner which those who only live to receive will never understand. It is just one more aspect of the blessedness of giving above receiving.

Tithes, seeds, preachings and related transactions Now, returning to Christian church giving, the more I have related to the material and practice of church giving, the more I get convinced of two somewhat contradictory truths: Firstly, that much of the giving in churches has been reduced to business transactions no more holy than those that occur in non-spiritual environments. “Give and it will come back to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will men pour into your lap,” people are told (as this was Jesus’ only statement which appears to match the “prosperity gospel” we have invented for Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications ourselves today). Without realising what a distortion is created by truncating that part of scripture like that! The context of this scripture is actually a warning against judging others. At Luke 6:38 it appears as though Jesus were speaking only about the giving of money or items of value. Yet when the context is read from verse 37, the real spirit behind that law presents itself: “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.” The parallel text at Matthew 7:1-2 removes all doubt about the correct application of this saying. So an expanded form would read as follows: “Give [either judgement or forgiveness] and [the same judgement or forgiveness] will come back to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will men pour into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” All the other passages in the Bible that speak of giving in a transactional way are those that relate to tithes – a special matter in Levitical Law. In order to provide for the needs of the Levites (the tribe from which all Jewish priests were drawn, and which was therefore excluded from receiving any inheritance of land or economic wealth like the remaining 11 tribes of Israel – so that the said priests would focus only on interfacing the people to their God), and to create a reserve with which the Levites would be able to take care of visitors, strangers, widdows and similar who came to the temple for help, the tithe (literally meaning one out of every ten) was required of all economic income generated by the 11 non-priest tribes. At Malachi 3:10-12 God implores the Israelites to ensure that they stick to this rule of the tithe that He had handed down to them – even daring them to test Him on its dynamics and effectiveness. He assures them that if they followed it religiously, it would become a key differentiator between them and all other nations. At verse 12, it reads: “‘Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land,’ says the Lord Almighty”. Emphasis added

For our present times, that Levitical Law has been preserved by the extension of the term “priest” to mean all clergymen, “the Jewish temple” to mean all churches, and “strangers, widdows and orphans” to mean all programs of the church. As such, today’s churchgoers are to bring in those tithes just as legalistically as the tithes were brought in by every family of the 11 tribes. The evangelical churches see nothing wrong in preserving that matter of law yet they will never be found slaughtering sheep on alters for burnt offerings or sharpening knives to circumcise their followers. Further, our newday “priests” actually do receive Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications bequethments of land if land is available for them and they involve themselves in all manner of mundane income generating activities just like the 11 tribes in fact! When I enquire why all legalistic laws – including that of the Seventh Day – have been “morphed by grace” except the tithe, the answers appear to speak more to human economic principles than to anything exclusively related to the spiritual work of the church.51 One common response that is quickly volunteered is “how will the church reach out to ‘the lost’ if the church has no money?” That response assumes that the only way the church will have money is by taking tithes, a missleading assumption as well. Of course we know that the church can simply take offerings at any level (as opposed to taking them, like a government tax, at exactly 10% which is the definition of a tithe). I even heard an interesting twist which in effect said that for one to have eternal life, they needed Jesus Christ in their hearts and their tithe receipts in their hands! It went something like this: those who do not tithe are robbing God; robbers will not ‘enter the Kingdom of God’ so those who do not tithe will not ‘enter the Kingdom of God’. Nothing illogical in this, until you check what a tithe means and why it was put in place. However, just so that there is no unnecessary argument on the otherwise highly liberating habit of giving, I find no harm in giving above the threshhold of my tithe and calling that offering of mine a tithe. What I do not do is create guilt trips in the minds of people who are already struggling. It is far better to address the overall theme of sacrificial giving than a legalistic adherence to that Levitic Law. A tithe, I say, is low lying fruit for the Church today – it is the easiest thing to gun for across the entire congregation. However, without disciplined …the tithe is to us today what the faith to power it, the tithe may even look, to newcomers, like a circumcision was to them then – a payment for religious services, fringe matter to stumble many, which of course it is not priest and lay alike, who fail to see supposed to be. What we cannot the spirit behind the law. deny is the fact that the habit of tithing also gives unparalleled

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In fact, I note that the word “tithe” appears a total of 15 times in the Holy Bible and exactly once in the New Testament part as a point of condemnation for the religious leaders of the time. Our present day religious leaders had better take notice! Nonetheless, I who write these things am a tither.

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Labour Complications discipline in other financial matters. In principle, people are to be living sacrifices, giving everything down to their entire lives. In practice, they are to give generously at whatever level. God decided to start the Jews off at 10% but nothing in the entire Holy Bible indicates that His intention was for us to stay there. In fact, quite the opposite is true – we are required to seriously scale up – and for that to happen, we have to break the small mindset of the 10%, the tithe. In a similar manner, the Jews of the early New Testament times believed that circumcision was a necessity for salvation. Apostle Paul showed how small minded that was and rebuked them saying that those who wanted such a legalistic approach to salvation via circumcision would be better going all the way and castrating themselves! (Galatians 5:12). I am fully convinced that the tithe is to us today what the circumcision was to them then. A fringe matter tempting any worldly-minded priest to make it the main matter in his message of salvation. I believe that the practice of tithing has been preserved in its legalistic form just so that modern churches can assure themselves of regular income to support their regular expense lines – just like any organisation in fact. In our cherry-picking of the Biblical message, we find that the tithe is economically convenient to the execution of our projects as church organisations so we do not challenge it for where it sits in the hierarchy of spirituality. We cannot argue with the fact that preaching the gospel requires financial input today just as it did in Biblical times. But if our faith is true, we must also accept the fact that even if the financial input from tithes were to dry up, the gospel would not fail to spread and to reach the places it needs to reach. That our monies are involved, using whatever religious terminologies we would prefer to use, is a family privilege to us rather than an eschatological necessity (something that must happen before the end can come). The tithe does not purchase salvation. It is also possible that we give all our tithe and still continue living on the poor side of town; riches have nothing to do with being a living sacrifice. I am convinced that this is the reason Jesus Christ never once mentioned the word “tithe” in instruction to his disciples; he seemed to lay emphasis on such weightier matters as justice, mercy, faithfulness, prayer, forgiveness, etc. In fact, it was exactly in this point of tithing where Jesus rebuked the religious leaders saying “you filter out the gnat and let a carmel pass” (the “gnat” being the tithes; the “carmel” being the just mentioned weightier matters)!52 People should give because their hearts are in the right place, not because they are engaging with God in some sort of hedge fund for their financial fortunes. 52

Matthew 23:23-24

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Labour Complications When a farmer plants seeds in the ground, can we say he has “given” the ground something? Of course not, because the farmer has just invested and he necessarily expects to harvest. The Bible calls on people to give without expecting anything in return. On the topic of giving, we do not Yet we hear of people “giving” need religion or sermons and much seeds! I say, an investment is an of the guilt-tripping that goes on in investment, giving is giving and our churches; we just need to stop the two things are not related, being so stingy and so insecure. not even in the slightest. When people feel that they owe God something, they are no longer “giving” but “paying back”. Again, the two matters are not related. God calls on people to give – not to pay him back as if that were ever giong to be possible. People must give freely, cheerfully. On the topic of giving, we do not need religion or sermons and much of the guilttripping that goes on in our churches; we just need to stop being so stingy and so insecure. Even the poorest people on earth have a little something that they can share with others. The church falls too easily for low lying fruit when it makes ‘tithe’ its flagship message every Sunday or Saturday morning. Ironically, it was only when I realised these truths that I began to see myself giving liberally to church and to others around me. But when the tithe-mongering was on, I was just constantly stressing. When people realise that giving is both a free and a liberating act, free of legalistic entanglements, their giving actually goes up. Church researchers much better qualified than me have actually found that. The second part of the two contradictory truths I see when I think about Christian church giving is that the huge majority of church folk do not give enough. Many give faithfully and it is upon these that the bulk of church budgets depend, but there is a huge carder that has failed to understand how liberating consistent giving can be. Jesus Christ, the author of the Christian faith reveals his mind around the matter of wealth in a complete way at Mathew 19:21-29. Here he seems to lay out in clear role play and narration how Christians are to look at wealth. He appears to acknowledge that many of us seek after and hold on to the little wealth we have so closely that we would even lose our very lives defending it. Then he shows how that by giving out, we are actually exchanging wealth that can be lost for wealth Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications that cannot be lost, and getting ourselves qualified to inherit the unlosable type of wealth. On all occasions when Jesus taught on giving, he directed attention to the eternal impacts of the giving rather than to any immediate or near-future rewards. This is best demonstrated when he sees a poor widdow put into the offering box all her life’s worth and then all he does is speak to his disciples about what the lady had done, without also calling her to the side to pray for her to “receive her miracle in Jesus’ name” as I am sure the majority of our modern-day priests would be moved to do. Further on in the New Testament, we meet more passages that are saying in effect that we need to actually give everything we have, far more than the legalistic tithe we spoke about earlier! We meet an actual instance of that at Acts 2:42-47, where the new converts to Christianity sold property and shared all they had as common stock in order to grow their faith and to evangelise. As such, a person struggling to give tithe is struggling at an extremely low bar! The tithe ought to be a non-issue but for the fact that we all need constant discipling. If a person is struggling at the level of letting 10% go, they are in plenty of trouble and need help to stabilise themselves financially, to live within their practical means and then to return to consistent giving. This is a practical matter for the church leaders to address, and if they did so, they would even be helping the nation to grow its economy by developing financially disciplined citizens. Sometimes the tithemongers ought to give others some breathing space by addressing the real problem at the root. What is needed is financial discipline, living within our means and giving consistently. That the giving reaches and exceeds that 10% threshold would follow. Naturally. The target is to exceed it and, religiously speaking, to attain 100% giving – becoming that living sacrifice in every way. A mindset of continuous sacrificial giving is what we need in order to maintain our discipline with wealth. And to remind ourselves to only hold loosely to such wealth. Disciplined enough to generate it, but also disengaged and aware enough to be able to freely give to right causes. To wrap up what does all this mean in practice? Well, four things: (1)

All people of faith should learn about tithe and give that as a minimum – it will be good for them

(2)

There are people who are freely able to give that 10% minimum but do not – these should learn about giving and sharing, especially sacrificial giving

(3)

There are people who would love to give their 10% and more but are struggling even at that 10% basic – these are entangled in too many things; they need emergency recovery. Urgently. Lovingly help these to come back to financial discipline. They need to be in control of their money, not the other way round.

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Labour Complications (4) Planting of “seeds”. How does this differ from the mass selling of “anointing water” or other religiously derived commodities? They are all packaged to deliver miraculous interventions in difficult circumstances, are they not? At 2 Corinthians 9, the Bible speaks of the offerings that had been given as seeds and the givers involved as sowers. It is allegory, a simple metaphor. But on account of this metaphor, a whole religious category of giving has emerged. So we have tithes, offerings and seeds as different classes of givings. Now, if I referred to any of my children as my seed, using the same symbolism, would that make my other children non-seeds? The point is that if we use the seed symbolism then all of our giving – as long as it is free giving from a willing heart – is a planting of seeds. Looking intently at their turf, investment bankers have derived various financial instruments – futures, swaps, warrants, etc. – which they offer up to their clients for enhanced financial performance. The clergymen seem to have done exactly the same thing to achieve exactly the same end when they made the religious practice of planting seeds out of a single innocent symbolism by Apostle Paul. In fact, they nullify the power of the same seed by structuring the activity like a financial investment. There is a subtle dynamic to the giving promoted in the Holy Bible – especially the New Testament part – and that is that giving should neither be coerced nor driven by self-interest. But with our “plant a seed” gospel, we break both requirements, especially the one on self-interest, and so we greatly dilute the power of the same seeds. “Put a condition on your gift,” boomed the preacher’s hoarse voice over the loudspeakers. Then the following week, his message was “give without expecting anything in return.” But he was their all-knowing “father in the Lord” so no one dared interrogate the conflicting messages. Until a young boy began to ask the simple questions. Then the learning started. If you have a troubling situation, I say, pray without reservation. If you want to give, give without conditions. And without connecting the two matters like someone putting up a faith prop. It is exactly because of making these connections of convenience between faith requests and giving that we have so many people failing to stand on their own two feet in their faith or to become generous givers – we have trained them well to seek direct personal benefits from whatever they do. Or that in some small way they could purchase their way into God’s active memory by “planting seeds”. We do the generosity message a huge disservice when we attempt to sweeten it with all manner of derivations that have little to do with the simple act of taking from what one has and giving freely into a worthy cause. Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications

Debt

The biggest enslaver of fathers. But how do we even get into debt in the first place? And why so much of it? First, some comforting news. By the close of 2018, the IMF reported that the total debt the world owed was US$188trillion, equivalent to just under 2.3 times the total GDPs of the entire world. That means that if everyone stopped lending to each other, we would all (the entire world) have to slave-labour in our exact same jobs at the exact same level of performance for some 2 years and 4 months to settle our owings. Someone posed a seemingly uninformed but, I think, perfect question when he asked “All that debt…! Who do we owe, the Martians?” It was a perfect question because practically every country on earth has debt on its books. So we should wonder, if we are all borrowers then who are the lenders? And what exactly did we borrow all that money for? Well, it turns out our current economic order (including the way businesses report their financials and work out their worth) assumes – in fact demands – that we live with some level of cross-owings in what I call a web of debt, personal and corporate. If you are an employee and you get a salary at the end of the month, then every calendar day, your employer falls more and more indebted to you while you learn more and more how to be completely dependent on your employer for a living. You in turn also owe to your landlord, the insurers, the utility companies, the government, etc., a little more money every day that you use their things. This is in addition to the other owings that you actually create when you go out and borrow for that emergency, or the mortgage or for the car or for that business, and other things. Some industrail sectors, like banks, even operate on nothing other than the existence of debt and the creation of more debt – what, other than lending them your money to lend to someone with a so-called bankable business plan, are you doing when you deposit your earnings with a bank? It is even mandated to us nowadays that before we receive our wages, such wages first register their presence in these entities called banks. Then we draw down from those banks at a fee which we have no power to refuse. So in one sense, we humans will never escape debt. In fact, contrary to common belief, the most important aspect in our capitalist economies is actually the capacity to absorb debt. That is in fact the most important principle of capitalism – the ability to gather capital if you can work most efficiently with it. Looking at the world’s most indebted countries shows this aspect in the clearest way. The countries owing the highest amounts to outsiders are all western countries which are connected to the biggest lenders and are perceived to be safe hosts of debt. In fact, the total external debt of over forty countries of the world are more Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications than their annual GDPs, with Luxemburg and Palau each owing the equivalent of over 60 years of their total productivity! Mauritius follows at 15 years worth of their GDP owed to external lenders. The tables below show this. Notice that other than the clear outlier, Mauritius, no African country owes a full GDP’s worth to external funders, yet reports about indebtedness from such sources as the IMF, World Bank and other credible guides tend to talk up the risks of African debt far more than the debt of European and similar western countries. Perception is a large component in the debt equation. And perception is far from being an exact science. So I keep wondering over the excessive talk about sustainability of African debt. Is this a ruse to keep African debt expensive? I am convinced that it is. In the debt tables that follow, the African nations are shaded in gray so that it can be seen much clearer where in the overall debt landscape African nations sit. You will notice they are widely spaced and nowhere near the top. But there is a good side to this debt apartheid, actually. Debt is a monster, and the process of its contraction a most powerful demonstration of unequal yoking. Writing in his New York Times best seller, The Death of Money, James Rickards, author of another best seller The Currency Wars, noted that the crux of the problem in our global financial systems today was not money itself but debt.53 The West knows that they created a monster in easily contractable debt; we must save ourselves from having to go through the same painful path by learning all we can from our friends. Debt is a monster whose sole purpose is to consume its creator; if you are not sure you have the tools to tame it, don’t create it. This brings us naturally to the bad news about debt. Which most of us are only too familiar with already. There is nothing as emaciating and fully disempowering as enslavement by debt. Psychologically, debt can destroy the power base of a man so completely that widsom text actually calls it slavery54. When it is sustainable, debt might appear like it is the best thing that happened to man. But, especially on a personal level, debt is always and without exception an enslavement. It is better to labour as a free man, build up enough stock and then obtain what one needs to obtain by negotiation from a level playing field than to start from outright loans – no matter how easy those loans might be to obtain. And how can you tell you have reached that all necessary “level playing field”? Simple: if you are able to negotiate the interest rate down, you may be there. But if the interest rate (and other terms, but especially that all-important interest rate) is nonnegotiable at any stage of your loan procurement process, then you are still firmly in

53 54

ISBN 978-0-670-92370-0, page 290 Proverbs 22:7

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Labour Complications slave territory. For the majority of the population, purchase of new cars, mortgages, home improvement, even business launch comes from loans. No matter how common the matter, it is still a slave-master relationship that they sign up to. That is why a good number end up losing it all. It’s a gamble but no one from the same system will ever admit to that; they will all come in with various clever sounding explanations for what makes one succeed and another lose all their collateral. But careful statistics will show that it is quite random actually, fraught with uncontrollable Rank by %GDP 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Rank by eD 6 94 37 54 49 5 14 2 12 15 98 24 27 3 23 96 81 144 17 19 9 18 41 22 68 4 13 8 50 97 45 115 84 42 1 11 87 62 99 150 43 39 133

Country Luxembourg Palau Mauritius Malta Cyprus Netherlands Singapore United Kingdom Switzerland Belgium Monaco Greece Portugal France Finland Bahamas Mongolia Seychelles Sweden Norway Spain Austria Puerto Rico Denmark Latvia Germany Australia Italy Ukraine Jamaica Hungary Kyrgyzstan Iceland Kazakhstan United States Canada Papua New Guinea Slovenia Georgia Bhutan Qatar New Zealand Barbados

External Debt (eD): US$ 3.781×1012 1.838×1010 1.9971×1011 9.62513×1010 1.19672×1011 4.5104×1012 1.320567×1012 8.475956×1012 1.820695×1012 1.278465×1012 1.65×1010 4.76997×1011 4.47022×1011 5.689745×1012 4.83369×1011 1.756×1010 2.5215×1010 2.552×109 9.939396629×1011 6.044238×1011 2.259127×1012 6.3834×1011 1.674×1011 4.91617×1011 4.1147×1010 5.398267×1012 1.48772×1012 2.51069×1012 1.14836×1011 1.676×1010 1.48024×1011 7.8668×109 2.43906×1010 1.65501×1011 1.9765887×1013 1.9319×1012 2.204×1010 4.995×1010 1.64165×1010 2.261×109 1.592×1011 1.98815×1011 4.49×109

Cut off Date eDPC: US$/c 31-Dec-17 6,968,000 31 December 2014 est. 846,000 30-Jun-18 148,000 30-Jun-17 223,000 30-Jun-17 97,200 31-Dec-17 265,400 30-Jun-17 231,000 31-Dec-17 127,000 31-Dec-17 213,100 30-Jun-17 112,000 30 June 2010 est. 434,000 31-Dec-17 42,800 30-Jun-17 43,300 31-Dec-17 87,200 30-Jun-17 87,500 31 December 2013 est. 44,200 30-Jun-17 7,800 31 December 2016 est. 26200 30-Jun-17 94,500 30-Jun-17 117,000 31-Dec-17 48,700 30-Jun-17 73,100 31 January 2015 est. 47,800 30-Jun-17 85,700 30-Jun-17 21,200 31-Dec-17 65,600 30-Jun-17 60,800 31-Dec-17 42,300 30-Jun-17 2,600 31 December 2016 est. 6,000 30-Jun-17 15,000 31-Dec-16 1,300 30-Jun-17 72,700 31-Mar-17 9,100 31-Dec-18 58,200 31-Dec-17 52,300 31 December 2016 est. 2,800 30-Jun-17 24,000 30-Jun-17 3,900 31 December 2016 est. 2900 31 December 2016 est. 68,100 31-Mar-18 40,300 2010 est. 15,700

% GDP 6,307 6,209 1,536 879 597 522 453 313 269 265 240 228 216 213 196 194 186 180 177 169 167 167 164 163 147 141 126 124 122 122 121 120 118 117 115 115 111 109 108 108 102 100 100

GDP est. US$/yr 5.995E+10 2.960E+08 1.300E+10 1.095E+10 2.005E+10 8.641E+11 2.915E+11 2.708E+12 6.768E+11 4.824E+11 6.875E+09 2.092E+11 2.070E+11 2.671E+12 2.466E+11 9.052E+09 1.356E+10 1.418E+09 5.615E+11 3.576E+11 1.353E+12 3.822E+11 1.021E+11 3.016E+11 2.799E+10 3.829E+12 1.181E+12 2.025E+12 9.413E+10 1.374E+10 1.223E+11 6.556E+09 2.067E+10 1.415E+11 1.719E+13 1.680E+12 1.986E+10 4.583E+10 1.520E+10 2.094E+09 1.561E+11 1.988E+11 4.490E+09

Figure 11.1: External debt 1 – countries with 100% of GDP or more in external debt eDPC = external debt per capita. Compiled from CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia and IMF WEO x1012 = E+12 = Trillion, x109 = E+9 = Billion, x106 = E+6 = million

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Labour Complications Rank by %GDP 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Rank by eD 156 121 108 167 56 92 66 105 73 70 106 111 74 107 88 136 33 161 7 116 113 159 30 47 189 31 40 69 90 176 34 122 177 143 35 65 100 82 104 53 131 187 75 190 168 141 195 166 182 78 89

Country Cape Verde Moldova Armenia Guinea-Bissau Slovakia Estonia Croatia Laos Lithuania Belarus Nicaragua Mozambique Serbia Zimbabwe Trinidad & Tobago Mauritania Malaysia Belize Japan Macedonia Albania Djibouti Poland Czech Republic Sao Tome and Principe Argentina Chile Bulgaria Bahrain Grenada Ireland Namibia The Gambia Montenegro United Arab Emirates Sri Lanka Paraguay Tunisia El Salvador Romania Republic of the Congo Dominica Lebanon Tonga Lesotho Somalia Marshall Islands Liberia Samoa Uruguay Ghana

External Debt (eD): US$ 1.66×109 6.5947×109 1.0044×1010 1.095×109 8.663×1010 2.05251×1010 4.60847×1010 1.198×1010 3.64277×1010 3.8975×1010 1.11×1010 9.554×109 2.7954×1010 1.09×1010 2.15321×1010 3.585×109 2.278445×1011 1.327×109 3.586817×1012 7.6455×109 8.6315×109 1.339×109 3.63658×1011 1.37606×1011 236,500,000 3.63117×1011 1.86697×1011 4.0419×1010 2.116×1010 679,000,000 2.276×1011 6.515×109 541,800,000 2.64×109 2.204×1011 4.65857×1010 1.61224×1010 2.51247×1010 1.49×1010 1.0888×1011 4.817×109 288,600,000 2.7796×1010 233,100,000 948,800,000 3.054×109 97,960,000 1.111×109 447,200,000 2.61492×1010 2.117×1010

Cut off Date eDPC: US$/c 31 December 2016 est. 3100 31-Dec-16 1,600 30-Jun-17 3,300 31 December 2010 est. 570 30-Jun-17 15,900 31-Dec-16 15,700 30-Jun-17 10,700 31 December 2016 est. 1,700 30-Jun-17 12,700 30-Jun-17 4,000 31 December 2016 est. 1,800 31 December 2016 est. 320 30-Jun-17 3,200 31 December 2016 est. 670 31-Dec-16 15,700 31 December 2016 est. 840 31-Mar-18 6,800 31 December 2016 est. 3500 31-Dec-17 28,200 31-Dec-16 3,700 30-Jun-17 2,900 31 December 2016 est. 1500 30-Jun-17 9,500 31-Dec-16 13,000 31 December 2016 est. 1,200 31-Dec-17 8,280 31-Mar-19 9,771 31-Jan-18 5,700 31 December 2016 est. 14,900 2013 est. 6,300 31-Dec-17 49,000 31 December 2016 est. 2,500 31 December 2016 est. 260 30-Jun-18 4,260 31 December 2016 est. 23,500 31-Dec-16 2,200 31-Dec-16 2,400 31-Dec-12 2,200 31 December 2016 est. 2,400 31-Jul-17 5,100 31 December 2016 est. 1,000 31 December 2016 est. 3,900 31-Dec-16 4,600 31 December 2016 est. 2,200 31 December 2016 est. 430 31 December 2013 est. 270 2013 est. 1,800 31 December 2016 est. 230 31 December 2013 est. 2,300 31-Dec-16 7,600 31 December 2016 est. 700

% GDP 99 98 94 94 91 91 87 87 86 83 83 79 78 77 76 76 75 75 74 74 73 71 70 70 67 66 66 66 66 66 64 64 61 60 59 59 58 56 56 55 55 55 54 54 53 52 52 51 51 50 50

GDP est. US$/yr 1.677E+09 6.729E+09 1.069E+10 1.165E+09 9.520E+10 2.256E+10 5.297E+10 1.377E+10 4.236E+10 4.696E+10 1.337E+10 1.209E+10 3.584E+10 1.416E+10 2.833E+10 4.717E+09 3.038E+11 1.769E+09 4.847E+12 1.033E+10 1.182E+10 1.886E+09 5.195E+11 1.966E+11 3.530E+08 5.502E+11 2.829E+11 6.124E+10 3.206E+10 1.029E+09 3.556E+11 1.018E+10 8.882E+08 4.400E+09 3.736E+11 7.896E+10 2.780E+10 4.487E+10 2.661E+10 1.980E+11 8.758E+09 5.247E+08 5.147E+10 4.317E+08 1.790E+09 5.873E+09 1.884E+08 2.178E+09 8.769E+08 5.230E+10 4.234E+10

Figure 11.2: External debt 2 – countries with 50-99% of GDP in external debt. eDPC = external debt per capita. Compiled from CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia and IMF WEO x1012 = E+12 = Trillion, x109 = E+9 = Billion, x106 = E+6 = million

factors such as weather, disease patterns, political decisions of far-off players, etc. And the risk managers can only make their best attempts to explain things – mostly post facto – or else they will be like individuals sratching at huge mountains with nothing but a teaspoon in hand. The huge failure rates of business start-ups and loss of capital associated is evidence of what I am talking about here. It is widely known beyond the need to offer up refereRobust Wealth

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Labour Complications Rank by %GDP 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

Rank by eD 110 46 67 146 112 59 63 48 64 83 126 185 60 71 134 180 175 28 57 114 169 52 79 142 157 165 178 16 72 91 129 149 152 32 77 101 147 183 26 38 44 85

137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

36 132 20 76 95 163 145 196 25 93 109 174 29 191 55 61 86 135 140 148 164 173 58

Robust Wealth

Country Cambodia South Africa Sudan Bermuda Zambia Iraq Morocco Colombia Kuwait Costa Rica Senegal Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Egypt Angola Madagascar Solomon Islands Central African Republic Mexico Peru Honduras Faroe Islands Pakistan Dominican Republic Niger Sierra Leone Guyana Saint Lucia Hong Kong Ecuador Oman Gabon Tajikistan Malawi Indonesia Cuba Tanzania Kosovo Antigua and Barbuda Turkey Taiwan Thailand Ethiopia Saudi Arabia Bosnia and Herzegovina Brazil Jordan Panama Suriname Rwanda Federated States of Micronesia Russia Guatemala Ivory Coast Aruba South Korea Vanuatu Israel Vietnam Kenya Mali Burkina Faso Benin Togo Burundi Philippines

External Debt (eD): US$ 9.8244×109 1.42833×1011 4.5×1010 2.435×109 9.27×109 6.801×1010 4.88303×1010 1.210972×1011 4.789×1010 2.491×1010 6.186×109 321,100,000 6.73226×1010 3.77×1010 4.007×109 491,500,000 686,900,000 4.37367×1011 7.46512×1010 8.042×109 888,800,000 1.10678×1011 2.605×1010 2.729×109 1.561×109 1.143×109 513,200,000 1.08160806×1012 3.67472×1010 2.085×1010 5.158×109 2.2741×109 1.921×109 3.35289×1011 2.632×1010 1.589×1010 2.3897×109 441,200,000 4.534×1011 1.99051×1011 1.4942955×1011 2.249×1010

Cut off Date eDPC: US$/c 31-Dec-16 600 31-Dec-16 2,600 31-Dec-15 1,100 2015 est. 39700 31 December 2016 est. 540 31 December 2016 est. 1,800 30-Jun-17 1,400 31-Jan-17 2,500 31 December 2016 est. 11,700 31 December 2016 est. 5,100 31 December 2016 est. 390 31 December 2016 est. 2,900 31-Dec-16 700 31 December 2016 est. 1,400 31 December 2016 est. 160 31 December 2013 est. 800 31 December 2016 est. 130 31-Dec-17 3,300 31-Dec-16 2,300 31 December 2016 est. 1,000 2010 18,400 30-Jun-19 525 31 December 2016 est. 2,400 31 December 2016 est. 130 31 December 2016 est. 230 31-Dec-15 1,500 31 December 2016 est. 2,700 30-Jun-17 14,820 31-Aug-17 2,100 31 December 2016 est. 4,400 31 December 2016 est. 2,900 31-Dec-16 260 31 December 2016 est. 100 30-Jun-17 1,300 31 December 2016 est. 2,300 31 December 2016 est. 280 30-Jun-17 1200 31-Dec-12 4,700 30-Sep-19 2,983 30-Jun-18 7,400 31-Dec-17 2,170 31 December 2016 est. 220

2.009×1011 31 December 2016 est. 4.7166×109 5.56418×1011 2.77564×1010 1.8341×1010 1.235×109 2.442×109 93,600,000 4.688×1011 1.909×1010 1.00281×1010 693,200,000 4.07341×1011 208,100,000 8.94384×1010 5.09377×1010 2.21719×1010 3.626×109 3.092×109 2.34×109 1.173×109 705,200,000 7.2493×1010

30-Jun-17 30-Sep-17 30-Jun-17 28-Feb-18 31 December 2016 est. 31 December 2016 est. 2013 est. 01-Jul-19 31 December 2016 est. 31-Dec-15 31 December 2014 est. 30-Jun-17 31 December 2016 est. 30-Jun-17 31-Dec-15 30-Jun-17 31 December 2016 est. 31 December 2016 est. 31 December 2016 est. 31 December 2016 est. 31 December 2016 est. 30-Jun-17

6,100 1,300 3,200 3,400 4,400 2200 200 900 3,700 1,100 420 6,600 7,500 750 10,700 500 370 200 160 200 150 60 720

% GDP 49 48 47 47 45 44 44 43 43 43 42 42 41 41 41 40 39 38 38 38 38 36 36 36 36 36 36 35 35 35 35 35 35 34 34 34 34 34 33.7 33 33 32

GDP est. US$/yr 2.005E+10 2.976E+11 9.574E+10 5.181E+09 2.060E+10 1.546E+11 1.110E+11 2.816E+11 1.114E+11 5.793E+10 1.473E+10 7.645E+08 1.642E+11 9.195E+10 9.773E+09 1.229E+09 1.761E+09 1.151E+12 1.965E+11 2.116E+10 2.339E+09 3.074E+11 7.236E+10 7.581E+09 4.336E+09 3.175E+09 1.426E+09 3.090E+12 1.050E+11 5.957E+10 1.474E+10 6.497E+09 5.489E+09 9.861E+11 7.741E+10 4.674E+10 7.029E+09 1.298E+09 1.345E+12 6.032E+11 4.528E+11 7.028E+10

31

6.481E+11 1.521E+10 1.855E+12 9.252E+10 6.114E+10 4.117E+09 1.221E+09 3.228E+08 1.674E+12 6.818E+10 3.581E+10 2.476E+09 1.509E+12 7.707E+08 3.440E+11 1.959E+11 8.528E+10 1.395E+10 1.189E+10 9.000E+09 4.512E+09 2.712E+09 2.900E+11

31 30 30 30 30 29 29 28 28 28 28 27 27 26 26 26 26 26 26 26 26 25

211

Labour Complications Rank by %GDP 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 211 204 205 206 207 208 209 210

Rank by eD 102 117 125 127 151 51 172 188 184 199 118 193 120 160 192 21 124 130 153 170 123 155 138 10 171 181 128 80 158 186 154 137 201 162 197 203 202 103 119 139 198 200 204 194 179 205 206 207 208 209 210 211

Country Uzbekistan Cameroon Uganda Syria Haiti Venezuela Maldives Cook Islands San Marino Nauru Yemen Comoros Azerbaijan Guinea Saint Kitts and Nevis India Bolivia North Korea Chad Fiji Myanmar Palestine Nepal China Eritrea Swaziland Democratic Republic of the Congo Bangladesh Equatorial Guinea Timor-Leste Botswana Libya Kiribati Afghanistan Cayman Islands Wallis and Futuna Anguilla Nigeria Iran Algeria Greenland British Virgin Islands Montserrat New Caledonia Turkmenistan Brunei Liechtenstein Macau Niue Andorra South Sudan Tuvalu

External Debt (eD): US$ 1.575×1010 7.375×109 6.241×109 5.918×109 2.022×109 1.10878×1011 741,600,000 281,200,000 352,000,000 33,300,000 7.1915×109 133,300,000 6.9132×109 1.332×109 187,500,000 5.29×1011 6.3408×109 5×109 1.875×109 833,400,000 6.4012×109 1.662×109 3.4502×109 1.998×1012 820,200,000 470,500,000 5.331×109 2.5963×1010 1.364×109 311,500,000 1.6854×109 3.531×109 13,600,000 1.28×109 79,000,000 3,670,000 8,800,000 1.5047×1010 7.116×109 3.139×109 36,400,000 17,670,000 1,040,000 112,000,000 502,800,000 0 0 0 0 N/A N/A N/A

Cut off Date eDPC: US$/c 31 December 2016 est. 500 31 December 2016 est. 300 31 December 2016 est. 150 31 December 2016 est. 300 31 December 2016 est. 180 30-Sep-15 3,500 2014 est. 2,000 31-Dec-11 13,400 2016 10,604 2004 est. 3,200 31-Jan-15 260 31 December 2016 est. 160 31-Dec-16 1,300 31 December 2016 est. 100 31 December 2016 est. 3,300 05-Jul-19 383 31-Dec-15 600 2013 est. 200 31 December 2016 est. 130 31 December 2016 est. 900 31-Dec-15 120 31 March 2016 est. 340 31-Jul-15 120 30-Jun-19 1,326 31 December 2016 est. 150 31 December 2016 est. 360 31 December 2016 est. 70 30-Jun-16 160 31 December 2016 est. 1500 31 December 2014 est. 250 31-Mar-17 720 31 December 2016 est. 550 2013 est. 120 FY-2010/11 40 1998 est. 2,100 2004 280 1998 590 30-Jun-17 60 31 December 2016 est. 90 30-Jun-16 80 2010 650 31-Dec-16 570 31-Dec-11 200 31 December 2013 est. 420 31 December 2016 est. 90 2014 0 2001 0 31-Dec-13 0 27-Oct-16 0 2016 0 2016 0 2016 0

% GDP 24 24 24 24 24 23 23 23 22.5 22 21 21 20 20 20 19 19 18 18 18 17 17 16 15 15 14 13 12 12 12 10 9 8 7 7 6 5 3 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

GDP est. US$/yr 6.563E+10 3.073E+10 2.600E+10 2.466E+10 8.425E+09 4.821E+11 3.224E+09 1.223E+09 1.564E+09 1.514E+08 3.425E+10 6.348E+08 3.457E+10 6.660E+09 9.375E+08 2.784E+12 3.337E+10 2.778E+10 1.042E+10 4.630E+09 3.765E+10 9.776E+09 2.156E+10 1.332E+13 5.468E+09 3.361E+09 4.101E+10 2.164E+11 1.137E+10 2.596E+09 1.685E+10 3.923E+10 1.700E+08 1.829E+10 1.129E+09 6.117E+07 1.760E+08 5.016E+11 3.558E+11 1.570E+11 1.820E+09 8.835E+08 5.200E+07 1.120E+10 5.028E+10 1.710E+10 2.492E+09 5.155E+10 2.494E+07 2.977E+09 2.904E+09 4.900E+07

Figures 11.3 & 11.4: External debt 3 – countries with 49% of GDP or less in external debt eDPC = external debt per capita. Compiled from CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia and IMF WEO x1012 = E+12 = Trillion, x109 = E+9 = Billion, x106 = E+6 = million

-nces that well over 90% of all start-up businesses fail within their first five years of life, world over. On a personal level, things are strongly different from the institutional. You have not felt the pain of debt until someone shouts you down on the phone for it or calls you out to the police or sets the bailiffs on you or drags you to court for it. Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications I have had the special privilege of experiencing all four situations, so I do feel a healthy level of credibility to speak about the problem of debt, focusing especially on how to avoid the mistakes that get us in. But I also managed to come out of all these situations so I also feel a certain level of duty to share my experiences so that those who are ready to listen can work on coming out and staying out. Some have fared much worse than me by losing homes and other big properties – even their freedom – just to acquiesce their creditors. A friend of mine in Ndola spent some months in prison for debt his company had acquired but his employees pilfered before turning against him. I was one of those that had lent some money to his company. That prison time did not achieve anything – not deterring wouldbe “offenders”, not restoring any cash to us the lenders, not having any “correctional” effect on anyone at all except stiffling innovation and destroying many friendships in the process. It does not have to be that way. In examining the reasons that get us into debt in the first place, I have found that over 75% of the debts that we contract are actually avoidable – even unnecessary. If we pushed to forego these debts, we would actually end up in better places than we do when we succeed at contracting them. In business, we often find that the processes into which we put the debts we contract fail to follow even the least favoured scenarios we had envisaged. In the end we just manage to create greater liabilities for ourselves. Unfortunately, survivor bias works its magic and the few that actually work out are the only publicly visible cases, while the fails are conveniently hidden from view and from warning any newcomers to the game. What if you had just sat down with people to seek non-monetary ways of toning down the pain that is pushing you to borrow? Would it not be possible to renegotiate terms instead of trying to borrow from Peter to repay John? Can you put the business on hold till you have slave-worked for some cash, instead of digging a little deeper into debt to make it survive right now? Most times we just fail to brainstorm for alternative scenarios, rushing, instead, to brainstorm on who will be willing and able to lend us something fast. Emphasis on “fast”. Further, very few things we think are emergencies are actual emergencies, have you noticed? That last time when you thought everything was broken if you did not “find the money” and then you failed to find the money… well, did your life actually break apart? You can do without three quarters of the debts you bring upon yourself but for failure to arrest your racing mind, put on some faith and act with courage against the tide. And usually, the “tide” is just people’s threats to bring social discomfort on you. What’s the worst that could happen? And the best? Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications Fear has caused multitudes of people to lose battles they otherwise should have won easily. No doubt we would all prefer that our work were neatly laid out in an orderly manner, that we had all the space to plan our activities in the most efficient way and, having done that, that we could systematically move to implementation where we follow our program from one item to the next and the next and the next all as planned; that all our business partners paid us on time and in full; that when we have a challenge and we explained it to our suppliers, they understand us quickly and we have our terms smoothly renegotiated to take into account our changed circumstances, etc. Basically, we would all love the opposite of the daily chaos we now face. That would be nice. But will hardly ever happen! One role that machines will never take over is that of facing daily crosswinds, making non-systematic decisions and dealing with the nasties before they grow into the giant nasties, i.e., doing the work of management. Management is dirty work and machines arent good at doing dirty (as in randomly varying) work. Now, the reason we fail to manage without taking on more debt is often because of fear. And usually that fear is the fear of other people – negotiating is never comfortable; neither is the task of getting aggressive feedback when you are in repeated default. So we just end up trying to borrow from Peter to settle John. And whatever Peter’s terms we don’t mind just as long as the fear can disappear. For now. And that is how we take our first step into the abyss. While there are obvious wrong reasons for taking on debt, there are also some seemingly right reasons for doing so. My crusade here is to state that well over three quarters (75%+) of the debt that people take on is actually wrong debt. I understand that I have an uphill challenge already so I will restrict myself to discussing what are supposed to be acceptable or even good reasons for taking on debt and then to critically examine them. An in-depth analysis of each reason obviously belongs to a separate book so, here, we shall look at the summaries only. So what are some of the fair reasons we give for taking on debt? Personal Reasons: These include (1) home improvements, (2) school fees, (3) purchase of car, land or other valuable items, (4) wedding, (5) medical bills, (6) consolidating several debts into one, (7) restructuring old debt (repaying old debt with new one which carries better conditions or simply extends tenure), (8) paying rentals, (9) starting a business, etc. Of these, perhaps only items (5) and (7) need to be entertained by moving to asking the five “why”s to find real motives and whether or not there are altenatives. The others are bad reasons at various degrees of badness.

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Labour Complications Business Reasons: These include (1) working capital, (2) start-up cover, (3) expansion or scale up. Whatever business emergency or project for which you want to borrow will fall into one of those three categories. The unwritten assumption all over the capitalist world is that business runs on debt, i.e., that business ought to gather almighty congregations of capital at low cost and use that to add lots of value to raw materials or systems which the business then sells at fat margins, keeping their lenders happy and their owners even happier. We even classify debts into junior and senior, with the “junior” lenders being those who take the larger risks together with the project owners in promising start-up companies (these would be venture capital institutions or the so-called private equity firms) and the “senior” lenders being those who only come in at later stages when huge amounts of cash are needed for scale-up or expansion and the debt can be collateralised much more effectively than at junior stage. Even shareholders’ initial injection is held as debt owed back to them by these fictitious “persons” whose names we have registered at the companies registration house. And the give-aways that give away our debtor mindsets in business are such terms as “cost of capital” and “interest”. In fact, if we all sobered up about debt, over twothirds of our current banking sector would collapse! Some time early this century, Japan went into deflation, followed by Germany among the major economies of the world. This meant that banks effectively paid you for borrowing from them! Even as commercial bank interest rates in countries like Zambia were souring above 40% per annum! There is a three tier interest system in countries like Zambia, with tier one being the major cash wholesalers like African Development Bank and similar (with their sub-10% rates per year), tier two being the just-cited commercial banks, and tier three being the micro retailers borrowing from commercial banks to parcel out tiny bits of cash at interest rates in the near regions of 100-300% per annum! Clearly, there is an acute shortage of cash in these regions and too many people accessing the frontdesk, ready to take out that debt at the drop of a hat. If people in these regions sobered out about debt, the entire tier 3 financing institutions would disappear. And while governments go round asking lenders to be partriotic and reduce lending rates, the real problem lies elsewhere – an untamed appetite for contracting debt. Default rates in the near neighbourhoods of 10 – 20% of total potfolio (in a world that averages 2-3%) substantiate what I am talking about here. I say all these facts just to show how entrenched our attitudes around debt are and to show that much of the thinking on this topic only brings us to more poverty. A huge section of our economy – formal and informal – is actually designed to Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications commoditise and supply debt, so they will go some distance frowning upon cases that go sour but they will not do that loudly enough in case they should discourage their next good customer. It goes under beautiful names like business finance, equity funding, or project support but is all simply debt. And over 75% of the people that seek it should not be doing so. Many project owners must first tame their thirst for swift Many project owners must first tame growth by working to grow their thirst for swift growth by organically (in small, working to grow organically... before incremental steps using own they think themselves fit for…growth profits and at rates commensurate with the using external money increase in experience of their key workers as a team – not just the experience of one or two directors) before they think themselves fit to handle the heavy turbulence of growth using external money.

Duty vs Delight Debt is often like marriage or love-making: before you have them, your entire life’s struggle – public and private – can revolve around your perceived need for them. It is only when you finally have them that you realise they aren’t always as sexy as the advert said afterall; that they can sometimes be more dutiful work than romantic delight. Some find that they could have been perfectly fine without. If only someone had cared enough to tell them so. There was once a business that was modelled on signing members into some insurance-like education policies. The owner put up a modest amount of cash and with that enrolled up to fifty members. The business showed all the signs of being able to achieve exponential growth in numbers and earnings if it could advertise and back a massive enrollment campaign to achieve at least a few hundred additional memberships. At this stage some junior equity partners appear and promise to back the growth of client base to a few hundred. Based on those arrangements, the business owner goes on a rampage recruiting any and every one who comes along and fits some basic criteria for joining, so that the new cash could find ground ready when it arrived. Further, said founder expands his manpower in order to create the “more conventional” management structure demanded by the equity partners and their would-be tier1 funders. All fine up to this point. But a few months down the line and that planned-for cash is proving difficult for the partners to bring in (granted, there is an iterative relationship between the baby state Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications of the business and its ability to attract cash in, but that can be tricky for an inexperienced team to pick up quickly and to resolve correctly). The business, for its part, is now overtrading for the amount of cash it has available. Overtrading leads to many missed obligations which lead to much client dissatisfaction, massive contract closures and a tailspin of impossible cash demands. The founder goes out to tier3 lenders in perfect kamikaze (suicidal) style to borrow for what he sees as “emergency and pressing” needs, often offering personal assets in collateral. Another glaring show of lack of wisdom born from inexperience! The “kamikaze borrowings” lead to more bleeding of cash – personal and business. Crafty employees take advantage of the now porous situation by engaging in micro-schemes of corruption, sometimes redirecting client payments to their personal projects or deliberately delaying their reports – as if the matter were simply that of negligence, ignorance or innocent dislike for paperwork when in fact it was exactly the opposite – to facilitate personal business carried out using company resources. Before its fifth birthday the business is all but completely closed down, with the founder member facing a handful lawsuits for breaches of contract, surviving only by people’s high tolerance for delinquency as well as the mercy of friends who were willing to wait much longer than normal for their money to be repaid to them. Questions: Should this business have been contracting debt? Was that founder okay to go out and borrow, and to guarantee said borrowings using personal resources? Was that promise of further equity funding useful to this business at this time? “In fact, the very opposite,” you say? Alright, but then again, why didn’t that founder wait until he had seen actual cash before initiating that massive enrolment or recruiting those additional people? Did that owner take care to recruit only the right people and ensure they were armed with and had respect for the right systems? Was he disciplined and firm enough in supervising the use of those systems? (Because, what is a business but its systems?) And about those kamikaze solutions: Why did the founder feel the need to keep digging when it was clear he was already in an almighty ditch? Did the additional debt help or worsen the problem in the long run? What could have been done instead? If someone advised this business and this man to not seek out debt – no matter how cheap – would you say they were helping or not? It is clear that, in this case, experience both of the founder and of the equity partners was inadequate to take the business from where it was to where it appears they were desperate for it to get. Or else they should have been a lot more realistic about what they could achieve, even being ready to lose the shirts on their backs if they were unlucky. That realism would have dictated extreme caution before any debt (direct or implied) could be pursued. Unfortunately, sometimes we are so fixated on the wrong approach that only the best teacher – experience – will do, so we end up having to suffer much grief. Robust Wealth

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Labour Complications But was inexperience the only problem that led to that disaster? Shouldn’t the founder have taken more care than going on one-man missions of debt creation based on fragile hopes? In hindsight, and for the benefit of future projects, what realistic alternatives did the founder have at each stage which could have avoided the overheat and the cardiac arrest on his company? And, in the short term, what steps would need to be taken for the founder to get out of debt? The more one thinks about this real case, the more questions arise. But the principles that were violated were actually very few. Only four in fact: 1.

Never borrow for emergencies; whenever you find yourself desperate for money, you have already become unsafe to give debt to When you find yourself desperate for cash, you will accept any terms that a person demands who stands ready to lend to you. And only the so-called loan sharks (lenders who prey on the vulnerable in order to extract abnormal returns) will be at the front of the queue to “rescue you”. They will, of course, appear to be very helpful to you as they provide relief from immediate discomforts. In reality, you feel the relief only because they lift you from familiar hot waters to far deeper lonely waters from which it will be much harder to come out than from the first trouble. One rule I have now learnt to follow and which has served me well is to never ever have an emergency of the financial kind. If it comes as an emergency, try to take the heat out by just controlling your own panic around the matter (usually that is the only emergency there is – your fearful reaction). When that part is done, you can then try to respond to the matter like any other financial demand. In this way, you give yourself the very best chance under the circumstances to make the right decisions and take the right steps.

2.

Never pledge what you are not ready to lose to collateralise a loan Which is another way of saying you should never pledge personal things as collateral for loans. When you borrow, you are actually offering up a part of your services to the benefit of your lender, you begin to work for your lender part of the time that you are working. That is bad enough. Now you even offer them something saying “should I fall short in labouring for you, you may take this item and do with it as you please.” As you fall deeper and deeper into pressures, you will find yourself slave-labouring for others over 90% of your time and with all real assets you own pledged to creditors. It is better to live at a lower lifestyle than you know you deserve than to live at a lifetsyle where all that you have is actually owned by others and almost all your working life you are giving your earnings away to others. In the end you may find that you have nothing to hand over to your children and even your children themselves have their best efforts slave-owned by others.

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Labour Complications 3. Your business is only as safe and efficient as the tools you have for monitoring it and controlling its activities on a daily basis As I have said before, a business is nothing if not its systems. Take a cement manufacturer for example: it must mine the rocks which it crushes and melts down and then grinds together to make the cement. After that, it must have done a good job of advertising and accepting sales orders which it then fulfills by packing the cement in bags and loading on the correct customer trucks for delivery to the addresses it was supplied by each customer. If at any point in this chain, the company became indisciplined or porous, allowing data to leak or get mixed up, it would end up with cement going to the wrong places, clients screaming at the sales girls and boys for missing their consignments and before long that company will be out of business. The same applies to banks. And insurers and schools and hospitals and everyone else actually! Therefore, if the business leaders, particularly the chief executive officer as the driver of the institution, is blindsided on any part of the business, that business will be out of business also. Soonest. Trouble will initially start out as emergency needs or performance shortfalls – usually requiring the application of more cash than budgeted or the registering of lower incomes than planned. The worst thing at that point would be that management go out and borrow to cover the troubles. In fact, they would benefit far more if they barred themselves from borrowing and sat down instead to review deeply what was wrong and what they could do without external cash or additional allocations. 4.

Contrary to popular mantra, your people are not an asset; they are an extension of you and are, in fact, your only accessories for running your business the way you want to This might look like a repeat of principle #3. And in some significant ways it is because it involves the use of systems, but in many ways it is not because it focusses on people and their involvement in the business process. Since your people are an extension of you, they must on a daily basis be supervised, cared for and managed in order to do the right things at the right times. If you do not have systems to help you do this consistently and without fail then you do not have a business but a self-hep club – as in your employees will join so that they can each help themselves to something from the party you are throwing. In a little more detail, you need to see to it that your people have the right tools for their jobs, that they can drive the tools seemlessly and without conscious effort, and that you have safeguards for quickly catching and remedying unacceptable behaviour. Why do I say that your people are not an asset? Well, because assets are disposable or expendable; people are not supposed to be. As your eyes, ears, arms and legs –

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Labour Complications and often, brain – your people are an extension of you. If you are not your best asset but the owner of the assets then they are not assets either but the extended operators of your assets. That way of looking at people raises the bar on how you recruit. Be extremely choosy because good people are almost impossible to find. Get the wrong ones and you will be destroyed. Returning to the over-trading company cited above, the following were some of the tools at the leader’s disposal which could have been accessed instead of: 1.

Early promise to up-scale The newcomers seemed to have been a relief from some small cash disasters while increasing hope of a better future soonest. By requiring a more “conventional” HR structure, the equity partners were helping the business to conform to known best practice. However, with these promised improvements would come quite a few demands that every leader has to asses thoroughly before they get excited about the newfound prospects of quick growth:

2.



Control: your new partners will want equity (shareholding) and with that control. The loss of control per se may be nothing to worry about but if the equity partner has some cultural mismatches with the team on the ground, the dilution of control might become a barrier to speed of action.



Cost: the demanded adjustments to HR structure brought with it additional costs (in recruitment process itself and in recurrent expenditure).



Risk: the decision to enrol a good number of members so that funds already have a destination by the time they arrive, represented risk. This was acknowledged. What was not clearly foreseen was just how big that risk was.



Time: immediately they come in as partners, they would need to start receiving regular reports from operations and that probably meant the founder committing personal time to see to those information needs. Unfortunately, it may be that the format is special, and time which would otherwise go into operations will now go into data mining, reporting and board meetings. The leader must carefully consider whether the business is able to operate this conventionally or whether in fact, it had better continue with baby steps till it had become hardy enough to cope with standard rigour.

Kamikaze borrowing There is simply no excuse good enough for this. Negotiate terms with your original lenders and renegotiate again if necessary. If you take the first step, you usually keep a practical amount of bargaining power. Even if you should lose the business in the end, it is better to do so than to lose both the business and your personal freedom.

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Labour Complications 3. Borrowing in general It is clear from the text that that business and that founder member were not ready for any level of debt. Simply because the debt was all being contracted as emergency (even the first injection by the junior equity partner came to relieve an impending disaster). Debt that is properly repayable is never contracted as an emergency. Anytime you find yourself seeking to jump due process, slow yourself down because you may just be flying headlong in a very wrong direction.

Now, for coming out of the entanglements of debt, the methods are the same seriously simple steps implied by the logic: 1.

No such thing as an emergency or “short term” solution All solutions to your problems will have to be long term. Roll out the carpet of time in front of you and realise that time is a gift given to help you resolve your problems. If you do not stop digging (i.e., you do not quit the quick-fix, emergency mindset), you will never get out of this ditch. Lose your “emergency” talk already.

2.

Call the creditors whose amounts bare interest and have interest frozen (declare distress) into a realistic payment plan When they decided to lend to you, they – just as much as you – were taking a risk. Do not let them ride you like a donkey on this one. Let them know of your troubles and that the only way forward is that you rescue and protect their principal investment and whatever interest amount accumulated to this stage. Offer them a repayment plan that is realistic and fair. There is no policeman or judge before whom your creditors can now take you for a forced judgement, especially if you take the first step and show good faith in this manner. Only do not put any untruths in your communicatons. We usually fail to take such steps more out of fear of man than out of total ignorance. Your persistent fear of fellow men is the beginning of many troubles indeed. Remember, when business gets hard, just preserving one’s capital is success enough. That is what you are trying to do for your ceditors now. Plus whatever interested would have accumulated up to this point. The counter-argument will be “opportunity cost” but if indeed your business has genuinely suffered, it should be clear to any third party that something will have to be lost and “opportunity cost” (a mere concept at this point) would be a very reasonable thing to forfeit for the sake of recovering something equivalent to what had been invested. At this point, you need not approach the matter like a typical borrower cowering at the sight of your lender; you were engaged in a supply-demand business transaction in which you needed cash and your lender needed a taker; now you are trying to rescue something for both of you. The only reason you are weak is because your creditor held up their end of the bargain while you are still here needing extra time to hold up yours. Focus on getting that time.

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Labour Complications 3. Call all other creditors and negotiate progressive payment of the balance (instead of one-off payout) See (2) above. The reason for spreading your payments to each person is so that they are not queued one after the other (in which case those further back in the queue will outrightly refuse to coorperate). So you pay off a little amount to everyone so that they all know you are committed to them but, most importantly, it will motivate you greatly when you start to see progress month after month with some creditors fully falling off and thanking you for it (some will understand your predicament and actually thank you for the effort; others will not, but that is their right too). 4.

Ask partners to give you working space as you diffuse the cash pressures One of the biggest problems you will face is your equity partners (especially if international) wanting to talk almost all the time. You need to let them know you are busy putting out fires and can they please wait? Give them some realistic timelines when they should expect to begin to hear from you again. If any of them can help, that should be a welcome gesture but do not expect it – at this time, what is best is that they watch how you go about solving critical challenges. If you do it sincerely and successfully you are likely to gain much more trust that those who had never failed or made mistakes before. Its never too late for this group.

5.

Slave-work back into freedom; keep lessons alive for next generation Often, you will get some breathing space to extract yourself from your ditch. However, do not allow sleep into your eyes until you are sure that each day has inched you closer to your freedom. Any money you make now is already marked so do not even count it against your name; be quick to pass it on to where it needs to go. Soon enough, you will meet ideas that generate you even more cash rapidly in keeping with the amount of work-hours you are putting in. By the time you finish your repayment program, you should have added a few zeros to the amount of money you used to make before your troubles began. This will be purely based on the culture of burning the midnight oil and creating wealth as others sleep. Be sure to include these experiences in your inheritance package for your children’s children.

Now, none of the suggested actions are without their emotional difficulties. That is something that comes with the territory. You are waging your own small Freedom Fight; it will be emotionally draining but worth all the effort and more in the end.

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11 Faith and Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability To perfect Fatherhood – the kind most of us never have; the kind almost no one ever has; but which we can all have.

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability

A measure of faith in each one One question we all want answered – even the atheists – is what exactly is faith and how can one develop it? I have never seen an answer to that question. Now, some believe that Hebrews Chapter 11 answers. But it really does not. Hebrews 11 says “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” This looks like a close enough definition. Unfortunately, it is a descriptive rather than an analytical or synthetic statement. It tells us what faith does rather than what it is from its building blocks. How do I know that? Because the statement has words at the same level of difficulty (in fact, words which mean almost the same thing) as faith itself. These words are ‘confidence’, ‘hope’ and ‘assurance’. An analytical definition would take the big thing up from its whole and take it apart to its simplest terms, while a synthetic definition would point us to the most basic building blocks and then knit them all together until we see the full thing in action. Both the analytical and the synthetic definitions depend on us seeing the thing in full at some point, with space around it where it is not present. In order to define something, we have to first get to the point of not having it then define it in. Unfortunately, no one has ever lived in a world without faith! Even atheists believe in something first before they go about disbelieving the existence of a spiritual world with God as its overall creator! They will never give an answer devoid of beliefs when asked about the source of life or emotions such as love, anger, joy, laughter, etc. The Greek Philosopher, Plato, one of the founding giants of western science and learning, defined knowledge as “justified true belief”. A combination of very difficult concepts especially today: how do you justify something in a standard way across all cultures? As for truth, well, what is truth? But look at that third word! So in order for something to qualify as knowledge, you only have to believe it so, justify it using existing understanding and it has to be so with or without you being present to help observe it. Quantum physicists even describe matter using the very same concepts that many atheist who profess to only believe in science deny. Such concepts as colocation (being found in at least two places at the same time, as electrons have been observed to do – well, apparently so – in some prominent physics experiments) or multiple natures (having more than one sensible manifestation of existence) at the same time, or even that all things – including non-living matter and energy – are interdependent to such an extent that merely looking at any system changes it to some extent. Or that black holes exist in space which have the capacity to swallow an infinite amount of matter and energy into a space measuring precisely zero in size. Such concepts are, I used to say in university, just as dumb or just as intelligent as saying the earth was created in seven days. In fact, it seems much easier on the Robust Wealth

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability mind to believe the seven day creation “story” than to believe that one day soon, the earth and all planets in our galaxy could just be swallowed up into a space billions of times smaller than the tip of a sewing needle, and that would be it! So what we are left with doing is simply describing what faith does and then, having jumped on the train like that, we grow in our understanding of it as we see it more and more in operation. It is much like electricity. Without a source and a destination, electricity does not exist. But when the two ends are connected, suddenly we observe the movement of those electrons, the lights go on and just like that we have electricity – it cannot exist in still/frozen mode for someone to describe it systematically. In the same manner, without two beings operating in an active relationship toward each other, faith does not exist. But when even the slightest contact is made, faith is already in place! That is why faith is often difficult to define. It is much like asking a bicycle rider to stay still for a description: it cannot happen. For as long as he is in motion he can stay upright on that twowheeled device and get up to all manner of things, but the moment he stops moving, staying upright on the bicycle, without other means of support, is not possible. His art as a bicycle rider cannot be defined in a world without motion. An interesting thing happened each time Jesus Christ taught about faith. He seemed to assume that everyone had some, that they were just failing to apply it. The best contrast was when his own apprentices approached him and said “please increase our faith.” In the Gospel According to Luke55, the story is told in a more gentle manner. It says that Jesus simply answered “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed…” This is like you approaching someone selling some wares and ask him how much the items were selling for and then he answers you “ if you had even a tiny amount of cash you would be able to buy anything you wanted from these things.” That answer would be a highly loaded statement. Any sane person would begin to question the assumptions of this guy or if he had x-ray eyes that had already pierced into your pockets and wallet and seen that there was not a single coin there! Jesus had just been asked by his desciples saying “[please] increase our faith,” and then he answers “if you had any faith at all – no matter how small – you would be able to do everything which any amount of faith can do”! In other words, where faith is concerned, quantity counts for nothing. If you have just a drop, you have it all! But in the Gospel According to Matthew56, the fuller aggression of Jesus’ response is given time and focus. It shows that actually Jesus said “O faithless and perverse

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” Those are not friendly, grandfatherly words of guidance; they are words of frustration! Why are you guys failing to do just one simple thing, huh? Then he continued… “Bring him here to Me.” And Jesus rebuked the demon [that had been tormenting a boy, and which Jesus’ disciples had failed to cast out], and it came out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” [emphasis added]. Did you notice that Jesus never said anything along the lines of how much faith his team had but that they simply did not have it? Why do I say that? Because he said it himself. In public, Jesus went direct to the root and expressed his frustration with his disciples. Then in private he coached them with the compassion of a coach trying to develop his team. This approach goes against the grain of conventional management practice, did you notice that also? How do you rebuke your team in front of people (as if you were trying to push the blame for your failure as a leader onto them) then try to be kind and accommodating in private? Ordinarily, wouldn’t Jesus have to cover his team’s failings with kind words in public then turn the heat up behind closed doors? There can only be one reason that Jesus turned this wisdom on its head on this occasion. I am convinced that Jesus was actually addressing the full bunch with his first words. He was bundling his disciples, the father of that boy, that boy and all of us humankind in his statement of frustration. That is why he even references the ages. “O faithless and peverse generation,” he said. Jesus took advantage of that situation to reveal a problem the huge majority of us suffer from. We doubt. In another place when Jesus did a similar thing, his words were “when the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?”57 Here he references the entire planet! If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself, Jesus might be seen to imply as he instructs that the boy be brought to him. Then he commands the demon out without wasting time. And the demon – without wasting time – manages to find his way out. Later, in response to a searching question from his disciples now talking to him in private, Jesus goes to the next sub-topic on the subject of faith. This is the time

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability he said “[You failed to cast this one out because you had no faith. You know,] if you had faith as small as a mustard seed, [you could have said…].” In other words, “gentlemen, its not how much you have but that you have any at all that matters! This is much much bigger than nuclear power! Just one tiny atom of faith fuel is all you need to blast any mountain away. And not only that but to instantly reconstruct the same mountain in some other place!” Now, I have seen lots of people erroneously jumping to the final bit of Jesus’ words and blaming lack of fasting on the part of the disciples, because of the trailer which Jesus added when he said “However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” I used to make the same mistake until I looked closer at the sequence of events and words: faithless and peverse generation, how long will I put up with you? You couldn’t cure the boy because of lack of faith If you had faith as small as a mustard seed you could move mountains That looks like lesson complete. In fact, some Greek New Testament and United Bible Society texts actually end the narrative there. Nonetheless, some, like the King James Versions, have the fourth speech bubble that says: However, this kind only goes out by prayer and fasting. This statement does not run independent of the others, nor is it an alternative. The word “however” makes clear that the two parts are connected. In summary, if you have faith and you pray and fast, even the most stubborn thing is guaranteed to obey. It seems to me that there are some spiritual beings which hide, contest and otherwise try to hold on to their unwilling host and any show of wavering faith gives them room to hide deeper, changing the balance of power (in quite the same way that, on another occasion, wavering faith caused Peter to begin to sink even as he walked on water toward Jesus). Prayer and fasting equips one to draw from deep and show unwavering faith. The point is that faith is already there to be built upon at any time. The problem is that we open our eyes and look around and the temporary visual feedback tends to switch our faith right off. We need instead to listen and walk based on what we hear from inside (“walking by faith”), as opposed to looking with our physical eyes and attempting to “walk by sight”. Why does the Bible say that without faith it is impossible to please God?58 If faith were not a basic quality accessible to all, it would never be a pre-condition for 58

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability pleasing God. It is sin within us that causes us to doubt. Those with innocent hearts, find it easy to believe all things. Sin comes to destroy faith first of all; then it can work much more effectively in an environment where the person doubts all good things and holds on to his failings much more firmly than to his successes. So how do you preserve your place of faith? Focus on good things; fast and pray if you have to, but never ever be afraid of “losing your shirt”. Or losing your anything, for that matter. Because you could pray it all back if you had to – where there is faith, there is no losing! Another question one would ask after Jesus’ comment that “this kind only goes out by prayer and fasting” is “so the others can go out even without prayer?” The unsteady theologians try to quickly hide their skins under the fasting part. However, note that Jesus could very easily have said ‘this kind only goes out by fasting.’ But he didn’t. He said by prayer Where there is faith, there is no losing. and fasting. The simple answer to the question, surprisingly is yes! The others quickly scamper simply on the appearance of faith. Like real hyenas, they will mock, tease, bite and laugh but are certified cowards! They hunt in packs but where there is faith they split and run to hide in a hundred different ways. The problem I used to have before studying this part of scripture was that, in spectacularly confused humility, I would turn to pious prayer even when the situation just needed firm and direct command! “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.”59 It does not say ‘whatever you pray to be bound on earth shall be bound…’ One late Saturday morning I found myself in a situation where a demonic influence manifested itself as it took over a close family member. At first, I thought they were having a laugh or becoming over-pressurised to the point that they lost control of their mental functions. But as the drama unfolded I clearly noticed that what was happening was against this person’s will or normal behaviour and their physical actions – though they were not sick – were highly laboured. But instead of commanding the demonic influence out, I started to pray piously and to plead with God to help this person, please! Only some eight days later did I come to know what the correct thing to do had been. In the presence of a different person (who 59

Mathew 16:19, 18:18

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability was praying for many people at the time) the demonic influence showed up again. This other person did not even waste time in commanding the influence out and leaving his assistants to complete the deliverance which took about 2 minutes in total. And the person was free. Where I was spending hours agonising, pleading and wrestling with many nice words in prayer, these better informed and well prepared people simply issued firm commands and moved on to other profitable activities. Now, Jesus led by example in just about everything he asked his followers to do. So it would make perfect sense for him to say something along the lines of ‘this kind is more stubborn and will only run if you also pray and fast’ and then to go on and declare a fast filled with much prayer before returning to cast the bad thing out. But he did not do that! Instead he simply ordered it out immediately, military style (same way as for the “weaker” arrangements) and it went scampering! The good teacher had just said that that type only went out upon one praying and fasting but he did neither thing (he met neither of his own conditions) at this time. And yet the thing obeyed. This can only mean one of two things: either the good teacher was lying about the true dynamics here, or that he actually used to pray and fast more than all his followers and that that lifestyle is what gave him full commanding power no matter the size or rank of what he was up against. I put my money on the latter – that fasting and praying was a lifestyle to Jesus. I know because praying alone deep into the night seems to be the only thing that even caused him to miss his train (in this case, his boat), as happened at Matthew 14:23. And, as for fasting, well, who has managed in our time (or theirs back then) to go forty full days and nights without food or water? The fasting and the praying is about building faith – faith enough to cast out any unbecoming things and to put in place correct order. Faith is the point.

The cost of faithfulness There is a close relationship between faith and faithfulness. When is a person considered faithful? Is it when they:  Act in time?  Do good things?  Keep their word even if it costs them to do so?  Work consistently and with loyalty?  Believe in the good in others?

Well, in reality, faithfulness embodies all of the above. My practical definition for faithfulness is staying true even without the evidence. Faith comes from believing things; faithfulness comes from behaving consistently (out of a firm belief system). Robust Wealth

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability Somewhere in the Holy Bible there is a statement that “faith comes by hearing”60. So faith is triggered based on what messages we expose ourselves to daily. Interestingly, the Bible says nothing about what we see being connected to faith. In fact, in some place, it contrasts faith with sight and appears to make them opposites.61 “Walk by faith and not by sight,” it says. Faith, it seems, comes through the most basic of human senses (hearing: the others being sight, smell, touch and taste). All that it takes to activate faith is to invest in listening. Listening to others; listening to positive messages about people, etc. Those who said that love is blind where onto something huge! Contrary to popular belief and sexually charged advertising, what we see does not help us to love more, it only plays into our animalistic side of seeking short term pleasure above anything else. Lasting love (and faithfulness) comes primarily from what we hear about someone or something. So to the one who asked “I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me,” I say this: love is that thing which results when you consistently create around you positive and uplifting vibes about someone. That’s love. But about the “I want you to show me” bit, I say that it’s never possible. We can only see the effects of love’s existence sometimes but it is never possible to see love itself. Love grows and operates off camera. Those things we see and glow about with big baby eyes are only passing effects. When Tina Turner asked “whats love got to do with it?” “Nothing,” was the unspoken answer. Because the hand holding, the forbidden pecks, the carjoling and much more besides can happen completely with neither love nor faithfulness. If you want to be faithful to someone, what you have to do is consistently hear good things about them. The opposite is true also. If you want to behave unfaithfully toward someone, take in false or disparaging news about them every now and then. This is the simple, basic cost of faith and faithfulness. Everything else is just a natural result of the messages you have built up inside about someone.

Every father upsizes Volume! Size! That is what fathers specialise in. One of the very first rules of establishing a successful business is not how much profit will you make per item but how many items will you be able to sell? First and foremost. Before margins are considered, volume should. Why? Because although you can change the price of something, you cannot change the need for it. You have to ensure that what you

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability cannot change is in place before you go on to things you can easily do something about. Even when a competitor is selling the same item for K50, one can manage to sell for K55 successfully by working on such things as packaging, “quality” (whatever quality means), quick availability, etc. As long as the basic demand is present. As such, market size is critical to every father’s activities. Whether leading a church, running a corner store or providing high-skill professional services, demand and scale are far more critical than anything else. One weakness I have noticed in business activity in Zambia is that basic volume of sales is analysed quite poorly. As such many products and services sit on shelves trying to sell at very high price per unit. The contrast with Nigeria is extremely telling. If a person manages to sell to only 10% of the population in Lagos alone, they have far more volume than a person trying to sell the same thing to 10% of the population in the entire Zambia! That makes it much easier for a low value product to survive in Nigeria (or Ethiopia or Egypt or Tanzania or Kenya or South Africa) than in Zambia, due to population size alone. As such, it is instructive that every Zambian father seeking impact think outside his borders. Our basic market size is too small. But we can use that small population size as a factor that spurs us to quicker success. Our products need to be of a much higher quality and we need to be very outward minded in our business and professional activities. Exporting our Our basic market size is too small. products and services should But we can use that small never be looked at as a luxury, it population size as a factor that ought to be a matter of basic survival. Purely based on market spurs us to quicker success. size, all our activities need to launch with export in mind. Now, what I have mentioned above actually happens naturally in all fathering situations. The mere step of having offspring is an upscaling activity. Then the father seeks to provide shelter for his children, after which he goes out of his borders to find food for his family. Later, he begins to think about how to send the children to school and further. These demands happen upon a father naturally and he is compelled to upscale his activities to satisfy said demands. Those who can meet all their demands from one activity (a well-paying job, say) I will call the lucky Nigerians. The rest have to look beyond their borders with additional activities just to make ends meet. These expansionary pressures happen Robust Wealth

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability upon a father naturally and tend to push his life into increasingly lonely corners of life where no one really understands his troubles but everyone expects him to perform on every front all the time. As such, fathers become increasingly sceptical about the world around them, as demands on their time multiply. Go to any church building and count the number of males vs females; you will find the ratio almost always skewed toward the females. No alarm there since census experts advise us that there are more females on earth than males, anyway. But an interesting pattern will emerge as we move up the age groups. Around 26 – 35 years old, the gap between the ladies and the gents begins to open up. It is worst in the 36 – 45 year old bracket. The exact same age group where most men are becoming fathers or expanding the reach of their little kingdoms! The ratio will fall somewhere near the 1:6 mark, i.e., 1 man aged 36-45 years old for every 6 women aged 36-45 years old will be found in church. And the evarage over all age groups will come to somewhere in the near neighbourhood of 1:3. The big question is: where are all the other men? My response is that they are on the lonely side of fathering duties. They need sympathy. They are entertaining doubts on many fronts and before they can conclude the last matter in their heads, the next one is at the door; and the next and the next and so forth. They end up “letting their hair down” only over a beer or a game of football on the big screen or some other more “manly” adrenalin booster. Not because they are not interested in the more eternal concerns but because their expansionary activities deny them the room to breathe or to focus on anything else other than preservation and expansion. It is part of the very definition of fatherhood to expand one’s boundaries. We seem to be unable to help ourselves on this. The drive is far worse than that of a woman who, though personally familiar with the incomparable pains of childbirth, returns the next year to announce “I think its time to have another baby”! Now, God said at the beginning that it was not good for a man to be alone. So guess what? Whoever man’s arch enemy is, they understand this aspect of man-ness and fatherhood far more than most. So the push is to increasingly isolate the fathers into highly pressured corners where the man actually ends up very alone! While doing research for this book, I was stunned to find the BBC Future team reporting by March 2019 that suicide was the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45.62 Searching deeper, I also found the following facts (for the USA) neatly summarised by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention 63: 

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3.5 more men commit suicide than women (2017 data)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kill-themselves-than-women, Oct 2019 https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ accessed Oct 2019

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability  The rate of suicide is highest in middle aged white men, with just under 70% of all suicide deaths being white males (2017 data)  Since 2006, the highest suicide rates were in the 45 – 54 year old age group followed by the 75+; before that the order was the reverse. Further, the World Health Organisation on their Global Health Observatory 64, found that the world average suicides rate was 1.8 men committing suicide for every woman who does the same. Only in China was the ratio close to 1.0; in practically all other countries the ratio was more men than women, with places such as Russia, Ireland, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Malawi, Kenya, Egypt having more than 4 men committing suicide for every 1 woman who does the same. Questions:    

Why do men feel the need to commit suicide far more than women? Why does this problem happen across all cultures? Why is it that the most privileged people groups (white males) are the ones who feel the greatest pressure to end their lives in this manner? Why is it that the suicides happen at ages when the men are just entering the crucial “consolidation”65 phase of fatherhood or else the “bereft”66 phase?

Further, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has also analysed their data by ethinicty and they show the following order of suicides by race over the years 2000 - 2016: (1) (2) (3) (4)

White – 16 American Natives (American Indians) – 13 Asian (Pacific Islander) – 6.6 Black – 6.6

It appears that Islanders and blacks are in a lower suicide league than the whites and American Natives. Recall also that within those racial groupings, the men are on top.  Why is it that the higher the social privilege, the higher is the propensity to

commit suicide? I am convinced that the answers to all these questions lie in the isolation of men in general and fathers in particular. It is not good for men to be alone was the first declaration. And that is the same declaration that has been fought the most down the millenia. As men expand their territories and their expectations, the demands upon them multiply, laying unbearable burdens on said men who eventually crack

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https://www.who.int/gho/mental_health/suicide_rates_male_female/en/ accessed Oct 2019 45-54: where previously fuzzy responsibilities are now clarifying into concrete demands 66 75+: where the fathered children have left the nest and friends have seriously decreased in number 65

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability under the isolation and the pressure. Researchers have attempted to speak to the male/female ratio of suicides from a scientific standpoint, with clearly limited success. I believe that the reason is because the problem runs deeper than simple psychological, hormonal or sociological assessments. The problem sits at the very definition of fatherhood. It is as much a spiritual matter as it is a social one. Fatherhood here has nothing to do with producing human offspring; it is about providing the seed for the birth of things and then providing the protections and provisions necessary for those birthed things to actualise into their full individual identities. That is the function of every father. Every man is meant to be a father in that way, working closely – even intimately – with others to give birth and to nurture and to expand and upsize their little kingdoms always.

Better fathers manage to downsize The expansionist drive in all men leads them to take on isolating commitments and burdensome pressures. If unchecked, this tendency can be highly destructive. The prevention for it is deliberate and continuous downsizing. As tasks and commitments aggregate around the man, the man must find ways of disaggregating other tasks at the same rate and ensure the load they carry is bearable. Pressure-venting things in support groups and on social media is ok but not sustainable. The man must be able to manage his loading proactively. Fathers who last are those who find a way to downsize their operations daily. As pressures require them to expand more and more, they find a way to keep handing over more and more responsibility to others in a systematic manner. From what I have observed of many good fathers, the following seem to be great methods for downsizing: Delegation – handing tasks over to subordinates who are then supervised Training – equipping others with the mental and physical capacities to handle more responsibility  Mentorship – Multiplying themselves out into other people by offering them dedicated attention on life matters (teaching them by walking with them)  Essentialism – saying ‘no’ to many activities in order to concentrate on an essential few  

However, even with all the above methods in place, fathers cannot solve the problem of deep isolation at the core. This is because the above methods resolve the professional-functional aspects of fatherhood, but do nothing for the many other areas that remain. Robust Wealth

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability The remaining part of the solution lies in realising that burdens are a central part of being a man and a father. When Adam and Eve sinned, we are told that the Judgements (Genesis 3) were as follows: The woman was cursed to suffer painful childbirth, The serpent was cursed to crawl on the ground and be enemies with the woman forever,  The man was never cursed (!)  The land (an innocent by-stander) was cursed because of the man, so that “by the sweat of his brow” the man would enjoy the fruits coming out of any land.  

While it might seem on face value that the man got away with a bargain, actually, he got the shorter end of the stick! While the woman and the serpent were slapped with individualised pains (some of which were ocassional in their impacts) and for which they could get personal support, the man got his means of sustenance cursed. This third party cursing of an inanimate thing meant that the man was being burdened with a burden that could never ease up on him for whatever reason. The land has no mind to seek help for itself or to retreat to its lair and say “ok, we’ll fight again tomorrow.” That meant that the man’s pain would be a constant background to whatever he did. And that pain would be hard to relate back to that one incident in the garden67. While the man is fully concious of the high standards he needs to live up to (uncursed as he is), everyone and everything else around him is cursed and set to give him unending pressure. His wife is cursed not only on childbirth but in her relationships (with the serpent for vengeance and with her husband for lordship) also; the serpent is cursed to crawl on its belly on the ground and to unending enmity with the man’s wife, while the land on which the man and his little kingdom survive is cursed to repeatedly yield bitter results instead of sumptuous fruit. Because the man himself is not cursed, he can feel the huge pull between the cursed and the uncursed worlds, much like a person going into an open heart operation without being given any anaesthetic – they can see and feel all the pain but they know that there is no other way out of here other than to go through this quietly. Many men do not last, falling either into addictions68 or for living what they can clearly tell are impactless lives far below the potential they hold within. Their potential keeps failing to find a way to come out and express itself.

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We use terms like soil fertility, repeating “Acts of God” on the environment, hurricanes, climate change: all very traceable matters which we try to manage to the fullest extent that we can. It must never be lost on us that these topics, which all scientific authorities admit do not have end-all solutions, have an origin. 68 Repeated activities which, instead of being managed by the person, are actually managing the person and dictating that person’s behaviours. Football, work, gumbling, gadgets, substances (alcohol, drugs, etc.), sex and hormonal rushes can all become addictions just as much as other lusts of the flesh.

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Faith & Faithfulness: The Factors of Happenability But there is good news, too! Men everywhere are built to carry other people’s burdens. If its not the wife (his own family), it’s the serpent’s world (the wild and other animate pressures coming from outside his family), or else its a failing crop due to pests or a drought or something of that nature (troubles from his environment which he could even have planned for). The man is not suffering these things directly but he is the one to manage them and to bring order to the chaos. He would have an excuse if he too had curses of his own to busy himself with. But he does not. So the boss wants his answers now! At Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus asks the man to voluntarily exchange his current shackles for a much lighter yoke. “Because I am gentle and lowly in heart,” he says. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Jesus says he is gentle and lowly in heart. This is important because it means that there is finally someone who can help to take out the heat without passing judgement on the man.  Jesus says he too has a shackle to load on the man!  There are other shackles (which aren’t easy) and other burdens (which aren’t light) and which the man clearly is incapable of bearing. A man is built to support the systems around him, to support other people and to take good care of the earth. That is what a father is built to do. But the curses on those other things are so great that the man will never be able to cope. So a trade off is made where the man can exchange his current shackles for a far lighter set of problems even as he goes about the demanding work of managing. One known shackle for many unknown but clearly detectable shackles. There is no escaping the need for every man to carry some sort of burden in this life. Men everywhere ought to realise that they are designed to be burden carriers for others. But also that they are secretly equipped with the ability to trade off the challenges they carry for something much lighter. The good fathers out there know that their strength lies in daily climbing down from their highly pressured tasks and exchanging them for something lighter. It is an act of daily unloading and renewal. It is totally based on faith, and it totally works. The suicides are an affront not directly on men, but on the one who said “it is not good for man to be alone.” I have discovered that the good men do not carry their burdens alone. But even more, that some exceptional men exist out there who are fathers of nations but they do not carry burdens heavier than what a five year old can manage! These fathers are good at transmitting their burdens to a higher authority. They know and understand the principles of constant downsizing even as their spirits within them constantly upsize the territory of their influence. Not only do they know how to spiritually downsize, they also apply the four principles of professional management presented on page 232. They are wise, because they downsize. Daily. Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die

12 Dream or Die “Where there is no revelation, the people perish” but with hope in the future there is salvation.

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Dream or Die

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Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint”69

Another phrase for “casting off restraint” is “removing boudaries on behaviour”. The natural next step is disaster. This is probably why some Bible versions actually say “without revelation, the people perish.” From my own experience, I find that emotional and intellectual energy surges when I have something clear which I am chasing. But when the goal is hazy, so too will the energy be which I am able to command from my body to work on whatever task is at hand. It appears that a huge partt of getting things done is It appears that a huge part of just making the goals clear. Even on a daily basis, when my tasks getting things done is just making are written out on a list where I the goals clear. can mark or strike off the bits that I have finished, I find that I am far less inclined to procrastinate than if I just hold things in my head. Forget being organised for now, I am only talking about being able to quickly command energy from your body to work the work needed and to do that in good time. Having founded and run Kalene Education Fund Ltd for some four years, I noticed myself growing increasingly dissatisfied by the work I was doing. My tools for the job had grown blunt, and there was no rescuing me. I became unable to take phone calls, to read emails or to participate in board meetings without much dragging of the feet. This was a company I myself had dreamt up and established! The reason for this trouble? There was nothing I was aiming to achieve any more at my company. There was nothing worth fighting for except whatever small level of credibility or integrity that I could salvage under the circumstances. I had fought so much to hold things together over the formative four years, patching up mistakes and learning things the hard way that in the end all my will to work on my own company had been scrubbed out of me. I no longer had love for it. Fortunately, I found – or, more accurately, was found by – a person who still believed in the business model and the vision, and who could muster up the energy to work and grind some results out. As for me, the dream had died. No matter the words of encouragement or the consequences, my soul just couldn’t hear a thing about the company and be riled up enough to work again.

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Holy Bible. Proverbs 29:18

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Dream or Die This is what happens when a vision dies. Or when one ceases to dream of better days ahead. If you do not dream enough to energise yourself into action, you have already started dying. Intellectually, many are dead. Emotionally, many are dead. Love-wise, many are at the verge of death. In terms of household income, many are If you do not dream enough to already dead and simply depending on yesterday’s skills energise yourself into action, you and reputations to make their have already started dying. daily bread. The common strand in all these dead is that they have given up hoping for better things; they are now just grinding through their days with cynicism. “Everyone looks after their own interests first,” they say but in reality, things are much worse. At least if they took care of the said “own interests” there might have been a little hope. But reality is that all hope of advancement is dead – where they have reached is where they have finally reached and that’s it. Now “Lo que será será!”70 They just try to make ends meet. But where there is a fight, there is always a good story we could take away if only we overcame our fear of fellow men and the situations they like to create around others. If we looked hard enough into the situations that pain us, we would find a lot of good mixed in with the bad! And probably, the reason we are not quickly rescued from the tough situations is to help us learn effectively how to separate that good from that bad. When you find yourself struggling to make ends meet, it proves two things, the second of which interests us in particular. Firstly, it proves that difficulties are facing you. Secondly, it proves you are alive to do the struggling. The fight means that your soul still believes you can make things better for yourself. After sufficient patience and taking of chances, it will only be a matter of time before your efforts begin to pay off in measurable ways. The struggle is proof of life and hope.

What is in a dream or a vision that keeps one alive? “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. …, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions”71

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Whatever will be will be Holy Bible. Joel 2:28

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Dream or Die The above statement was made about the last days after Israel’s God had punished His people and all their neighbours for wrongdoing and was now restoring the survivors. The old men would dream dreams while the young men saw visions. It also says that the sons and daughters would prophesy. That is how the nations would begin to be reconstructed. But why were dreams going to be necessary to rebuild? Why were visions going to be necessary to rebuild? How were prophesies going to help with the rebuilding process? Scientifically, we say that dreams are autogenerated by the brain based on experiences already embedded within the person’s existing memory. This differentiates them most clearly from visions which can have imagery that had never before been seen or experienced by the person. The old men were going to believe again (the things they had seen and believed in before would have renewed meaning for them, giving them fresh zeal for life). This is what it means when it says the old men would “dream dreams”. It means that the old men would return to the cross-generational purposes that they had long given up on. Dreams resurrect and energise life. Now, it is often peddled in business circles and in leadership courses that the first thing a leader needs to have to take his/her people anywhere is vision 72. But what is it about vision that makes it such a powerful driver of progress? The answer is coming up soon, but first a closer look at the difference between dreams and visions… Visions and dreams can be referred to interchangeably in loose situations because they both involve insight into curent or future events. But, strictly speaking, visions are about the future while dreams can even refer to past events brought to light in the current in order to clarify something. Dreams use symbols which are fully known (saying nothing about their interpretations at this point) while visions can even contain totally unknown or previously unthought-of imagery of things yet to come. So when it says the young men would “see visions” what it means in practice (what we the by-standers would see) is that the young men would map out totally new realities for their nation, things their fathers had never even thought possible. A clearer path to or understanding of the future; that is the immediate result of a vision.

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Here, they refer to vision in its shallower sense of what the person can work out on their own about the future, based on careful observation of events and analysis of trends. But I use the word vision in its deeper sense. It is not a hopeful projection or a very good estimation but a clear knowledge of what is coming.

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Dream or Die While a vision can be had when one is fully awake and simply fallen into a trance, a dream is only had when the person’s conscious mind is in a state of sleep73. All to say that both dreams and visions happen to the inner man – the mind. Dreams and visions are highly impactful on the individual because not only do they convey audible internal messages but they also give clear visuals, leaving a lasting impression that has the potential to modify all thinking immediately and permanently, and with zero resistance because the dream or vision is already fully owned by whoever it came to. When a person has a dream, it is as if they have sent a lot of harmonious messages to the soul and now the soul is stringing together its inner vision in living colour. That is what makes dreams so powerful as behaviour altering tools. They come from within the person himself – so he cannot deny their reality and nobody need explain any context to him. Dreams interact directly with the person’s soul. This is why they hold immense power over people. Even people who do not believe in a materially imperceptible dimension of life which cannot now be sensed with our five physical senses with which we have built up what we call our scientific knowledge – even these people acknowedge that dreams are able to redefine their boundaries of truth, fact and possibility. In my own small way, I have experienced clear evidence of dreams affecting my material world in ways that would be unexplainable if I didn’t have some sort of faith in a non-material other world. Sometime around the year 2004-2005, I had a dream in which I was back at home in Zambia (at the time I was studying and working abroad) and the family had some sort of get together for some days. I had never gone back home for some seven years by that time so the home environment I saw was significantly different from the one I had left way back in 1998. The clip was short but I can clearly recall it to this day. It seemed as though I was upset by something one of my younger brothers had done. I was so incensed that the anger short up like an explosion in my soul. I grabbed him by the neck and pressed him down in a strangling attitude. When I woke up, my heart was actually racing and I knew that the dream was not an innocent concoction of my own nervous system but something with a meaning for the future. I prayed about the dream on many occasions, seeking meaning and pleading that I never do such a thing in my life as I saw in the dream. Well, fast forward some nine years to 2014 and the family decides to spend our Christmas day at our parents’ home in Chongwe (they had moved from Lusaka to Chongwe a few years back). We had braiid some nice chicken, boerewors and beef; salads had been done and drinks were going round. Two of my younger brothers 73

That is why that is called a day-dream – with sarcasm, to emphasise the mental dormancy of the activity.

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Dream or Die were taking hard drink and it was slowly creeping up to their heads. Then one of them started speaking over dad as dad tried to speak with all of us in a relaxed fireside circle. It was awkward and seriously disrespectful. I was incensed to the point of punching him or kicking him to make him shut up. After a few ignored warnings to him, I shot up, went round to where he was sitting and in a flash of madness picked up the nearest object – a rock about half the size of a man’s head and was about to knock him on the head with it. His responses were slow as he was now fully intoxicated. My father managed to quickly hold that rock back preventing me from changing the entire family’s history in that one moment of anger. A few hours later and the party had ended, everyone had driven or been driven home and people were heatedly going over the gossip points per normal pattern. This event had a transformational impact on the family. Not only did it raise much emotion that kicked up other issues we needed to deal with, but after the dust settled on my relationship with my brother who I almost accidentally injured (or killed?), a most rewarding brotherly connection began that has led to much family cohesion now. On several occasions, I have recalled the dream, the many prayers against its more obvious meaning and the eventual turn of events afterwards. Sometime in the year 2008/9, I was enjoying (actually, more enduring than enjoying) my first relationship, and I looked at it as something that would end in marriage. So I invested a lot of myself into it. Ultimately, I turned out to not be the right package for my then girlfriend and she eventually managed to shake me off. Yes, it was like that: me clinging and refusing to just get dumped properly – like a normal guy should who has been dumped, and her trying her best to free herself! “I want out,” she repeatedly demanded. Now I laugh at myself and actually appreciate the experience, but back then, it was the most painful thing a man could endure. I even wound up in a hospital bed at some point, with a “drip” connected into me. Some battles that men fight! Anyhow, so connected was I to the girl that one day I had a very clear dream about the next course of her life. At the time I came into her life, she was on leave pending conclusion of investigations her institution was carrying out. I helped her to draft her appeal against her initial suspension without pay. But one night I saw clearly in a dream the letterhead of her institution and, scanning the letter down, I found it was me being finally discharged from the institution with no higher authority to appeal to. A few days down the line, my girlfriend received her final dismissal. I had always thought she was strong against such things but she cried. At that one time, I think, I loved her unreservedly. It was too touching and I was lost for how to comfort her. Throughout our relationship, she had been the emotionally stronger one even capable of dumping a perfectly fine ‘compatriot’ but at that Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die moment it never mattered one bit. I truly cared with all my heart and I fumbled around for how to help. What helped in the end was that I had known days before that things would turn out that way. We were able to pray the matter through with some focus and to start searching for where next from there. By the time she finally got rid of me, she was working again and earning a wage she could live on. On company separations, even my own separation from the company I had worked for for almost a decade was known by me via a clear dream some one or two weeks before it happened, and via another dream some two years before that. When I was told by my expatriate boss that the company was invoking a “Clause R” in my contract of employment, I didn’t even bother going to read the details of Clause R. All I knew was that Clause R was some provision for mutual separation without the need to give reasons. Well, even mutual separations are instigated by one side, I guessed, and moved on. But inside, I hurt. A lot. I cried. Because at least I could have been made redundant so that I could walk off with a little money to help cushion my landing. Or, if not, then maybe fire me for some clear reason like poor performance or indiscipline. But this was like the company telling me “it’s not you, it’s us!” What ceremony to exit with after nearly a full decade of dedicated service. I didn’t even know where this sort of thing fitted in the country’s labour laws but I had a family to take care of immediately so I thought to maybe get busy creating other lines of income instead of tranforming my now former company’s actions into a fist fight in the courts of law. Besides, I had seen them beginning to take steps toward this action some months before, which only added to my own frustrations in the job, anyway. Strength came from the fact that I had known about this – only maybe not the fine details of exactly how we would end up here. So now I could put settled to the matter and focus on fighting the next fight. Sometime in 2018, after a visit to a relative at one of the in-patient wards at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, my wife and I came across a certain 3-year old boy, who I will call Casia, who had been admitted to the tumors ward of the hospital for a few weeks. The boy’s head was swollen to the extent he could no longer see (his eyes were covered over) and he could not move his body. He would lie for hours on end in the same position his mother had laid him until she determined to shift him. As a result his limbs had grown numb also. The only way we could tell the boy was alive was his occasional cries and the fact that he was able to move one of his arms and could grasp at things the way babies normally do. We started to pray with Casia. Something told me to focus on his mother more than him. I did. And even told her so. I told her that she probably needed to work through a lot of things in her life and which things once unravelled could lead to the child getting better. Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die On one occasion when my wife and I were praying in our bedroom for Casia, something not very usual happened. While I had visual impressions (as if a dream but I wasn’t sleeping, I had only shut my eyes for the prayers we were engaged in). In my sight, there was a lady covered by a white veil like a bride. Only I knew she was just pretending to be a gentle bride waiting patiently for her groom. Somehow, I knew there was an evil woman under that veil. When I told my wife this, she said that she too had had her own visual impressions and in them she saw a woman. Clearly. A woman she said she could recognise any day, any time, but she had never met her in real life. What she said was that the woman she had seen was older than Casia’s mom, most likely her older sister because there seemed to be a resemblance. We continued to pray, this time with renewed energy because we were convinced beyond doubt that what had just happened was coming from where we were sending our prayers to. We had a connected call! It turned out a few days later, even after inviting more prayerful people into the effort, that Casia passed on. He became the very first dead body which I spoke to as I cried over it. Not for the boy to come back to life (we had a different occurrence that bought us peace over Casia’s passing some three days before the boy actually died) but for grieving over how much pain the young man had endured and finally succumbed to. The grief was like nothing else I have experienced because we had connected very much to the young boy and his mother to the extent we would visit them daily, taking some food and other supplies each time, at a time when we ourselves were struggling and didn’t have much to eat. We assisted in various ways at the funeral but most importantly, I was given the opportunity to speak to both sides of Casia’s family. It turned out the parents had separated and were full of suspicion for each other. Several weeks after the funeral, we were informed that the couple had finally moved back together and were working on their differences. However, for that woman my wife had seen, there was an interesting turn of events. When she saw the same woman walk into the funeral house, my wife was stunned! It is one thing to believe a thing but quite another to see your belief come true right in front of you like that. My wife thought “that must be the elder sister; I knew the elder sister was an evil woman…” Well, the introduction was “please meet Mrs X, Casia’s grandmother.” It turned out Casia used to live with his grandmother because of his dueling parents. The grandmother had claimed that Casia fell lightly as he played and that that was the start of the “disease”. But we were convinced that this was a case of physical abuse of the boy to the extent that his brain must have haemorrhaged or his head filled with some other fluid, with medical intervention only being brought in late. Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die We knew then that our task in this arrangement of characters and plotline was to speak forgiveness and unity. We couldn’t legally prove what we knew inside – nor was it required of us to prove anything to anyone – but we could use the knowledge we now had to help map out a better future for the people involved. Forgiveness was exactly what I preached when I was offered the chance to speak to Casia’s extended family from both his mother’s and his father’s side. Once in 2019, during a prayer and fasting program which my wife was participating in, I had a dream in which I was back in the very first pick up that my former employer had given me to use as a tool of trade. In this scene, it was my wife driving and she drove the vehicle right into the Kafubu lake back in Ndola, the very first city I worked in when I returned to Zambia. But interestingly, no sooner had the car sunk than we found ourselves scooped out and standing on dry ground and in dry clothes but the car had sunk. Then shortly after, some huge and mighty dredger arrived, combing the lake and, just like that, scooped out our white Toyota Hilux. I could clearly see the back of the hilux as one of the dredgemen drove the car past us onto a ramp to park it some safe distance away from the lake. The car was fully functional, with clear red and orange lamps lighting up at the back as the man stepped on the brakes. But the Hilux model was, strangely enough, one of the very latest updates. When we went in closer, all in the car was indeed still functional. My computer bag was still there, wet but ok. My documents were all intact and my phone was retrieved. The phone was soiled and wet but still functional too. When I shared the dream in the morning, both my wife and I thought we knew what the dream meant. Some 7 days or thereabouts later, I received a call from my old industry of employment – but this time from a bigger player, the industry leader – asking if I was available for a specific work contract, the same one that I last held for my previous employer. I went through all the recruitment steps. As I write, I have the contract in my hands to sign and start work. What is the hope from all this? That you can see how extremely helpful inner vision can be to dealing with the battles of life. It is not about preference (some people choosing to believe in dreams and visions and being able to live that way, and others choosing to be agnostic and so getting along using different crutches). It is not. If you are going to leave a robust legacy to your children and their children after them, you cannot afford to leave it to chance. Life’s battles will come and if you do not have strong anchors for your soul, you will – without fail – be taken out without handing out those seven plus one dimensions of inheritance to your descendants. It’s dream or die without handover. Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die At the personal level, if you lose your dreams, you may suffer from continual desperation. But as a progenitor (a source and sustainer of things), if you lose your ability to dream and to envision the future, you will certainly lose everything else and end up with totally nothing to give other than a name. If you do not receive those involuntary dreams as you sleep, then create your own by setting goals and working on those goals. It works the same way.

Your sons and daughters shall prophesy Now there are those whose interactions with dreams and visions are so inspired by other dimensions of life that they are able to foretell events in our physical world with pin-point accuracy. They are able to prophesy. They do no give calculated estimations, or projections from much statistical analysis, no, they give highly accurate predictions of the future with past tense clarity – as though they had already lived through the moment and are now reporting from the future. Prophesy is particularly applicable where the future is radically different from anything predictable from scientific analysis of trends. Prophesy becomes necessary where one cannot reasonably project from past or current events that the future would take the turn which the prophesy now predicts. So, when we are told that “the sons and daughters would prophesy,” it means that the sons and daughters would be able to foretell future events with such clarity that the masses would be able to build their lives on those predictions with confidence. These prophesies have a double job: they comfort people in distress and they direct the actions of the rest so that they are together equipped to deal with what the future would bring. Without this type of readiness, extinction and irrelevance will be constant dangers. All the leaders of the best global corporations devot huge amounts of time dealing with future matters that could affect the ecosystems within which their organisations operate. Such orgnisations are constantly innovating and re…dreams prepare minds, visions inventing themselves to keep up with the times, sometimes guide behaviour and… prophesy several years ahead of their directs resource allocation. customers. The world’s best militaries are heavily involved in the development of technologies several years ahead of anything which the general public can even think of. Before there was Google EarthTM, there was powerful satellite imagery by the leading militaries of the world Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die to the point where they could pick out a needle in a haystack from the images captured by sattelites orbiting many kilometers above the earth’s surface. All these capabilities are courtesy of dreams, vision and prophetic living (without using those particular words). While dreams prepare minds, visions guide behaviour and, finally, prophesy directs resource allocation. Some may use different words but it boils down to the same thing. People’s internal desires (dreams) prepare their minds for action, their goals (vision) guide their behaviours while long term strategic plans (prepared from the best business intel available) direct how they spend their time and money. These three things work together to create a robust system of life. No one can live with any level of control over their own affairs without these three important things. …when The Book says “your sons and Have you noticed that dreams daughters will prophesy” it also – and and visions work ok at personal level but that prophesy is a most importantly – means that the team sport? I am yet to meet a younger generations will actually prophet who specialises in hold firmer to their Fathers’ faith prophesying about himself for than their fathers before them. himself! There is a third goal of prophesy and that is the attainment of faith. For those who lack belief in a non-material dimension to our world, when prophesies repeatedly come true (i.e., when prophesies set themselves apart from mere probability or statistical smart guessing), people who lack belief in these things are properly challenged to relook at their roadmaps for life. So when The Book says that “your sons and daughters will prophesy” it also – and most importantly – means that the younger generations will actually hold firmer to their Fathers’ faith than perhaps even the Fathers had done! When future generations become stronger champions of the values and ideals which kept the fathers alive, that is glowing success and robust legacy.

The house on the hillside Sometime around 1999 – that is over twenty years ago now – in a dream, I was in a low lying land walking uphill on a beaten path, because along the top of the Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die mountain there was a road leading somewhere much nicer, much better than where I was at the time. I had set out to get to the top and was making solid progress until I ran into a small house built on the hillside. There was light inside and lots and lots of people – the sort of people one only sees on television or the internet. I slowed down to look but what I saw was not good to write in full except to note that they were all sweaty and undressed and doing things that they should normally have only been doing as couples in the privacy of their bedrooms. Shortly afterwards, my dream ended without any action being shown of me reaching the highway at the top of the mountain or even catching a lift from there or seeing any scenery beyond that. You can imagine, I have been troubled by this dream, as by one or two others, partly because I have wanted to know if there was a meaning at all and, if so, what that meaning was, and partly because the scenery in the dream was very much like my native town of Isoka at a time when I lived overseas and had only ever visited Isoka for a single day in my then 22-year long life (I came to know the location of my dream for sure some ten years later when I had returned to Zambia and visited Isoka again). Isoka town centre is set in a small valley. The scene setting in the dream started from downtown Isoka as one faces uphill from the shopping centre, walking along the one main road toward the Nakonde-Kapiri highway at the top of the higher land. The small, enigmatic and well-lit house sat halfway between the valley and the highway at the top of the mountain. Now, I am no dream interpreter but there are aspects of this dream that are beginning to fall into place and to make sense. One aspect for sure is the fact that the house was set as a distraction for those who had decided to take the brave journey out of that valley. The other aspect is that the house seriously slowed my own progression to the point I do not even know whether or not I completed my journey. The obvious interpretation of that would be painful. Thirdly, although the scene was set back in my own country and my own region of origin, the people in that house were clearly foreign – I did not see much dark skin there. The house was also well lit at a time when many places in the district were not connected to electricity. There was certianly a large international aspect to that house and that dream. While I have drawn much guidance and caution for my own personal journey, such as making sure that I do not get distracted by lusts of the flesh and the cravings of my eyes if I am to make it (in faith, in work, in wealth, etc), I have begun to see a lot of parallels that are important for almost every other man and interested person out there. So much do I believe in the potency of the symbolic warning in the dream that it makes the parting message of this book. Robust Wealth

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Dream or Die Soon – and I am writing in 2020 – the following headlining things will be made legal, or else be so widely practiced that any laws against them will only be decorative, in practically all nations on earth. The cultures will just have to adjust: same sex marriage, marriage redefined to dilute the aspect of long commitment, sodomy, peodophilia and other sex related cravings of the flesh. This will happen after or along with the victory of the LGBTQIAP+74 movement in having their rights fully recognised in practically all countries on earth. It will happen as a human and gender rights issue. And who in their right minds will dare deny another their human rights based only on an orientation or a free-will preference? Especially if those rights apply to a sister, a son, an aunt, or a direct parent? Those who try to prove that sexual orientation is genetic or that there is anything similarly inherent about it will certainly fail. But the human rights angle will win the entire world over in the end. The feminists will realise that gender is the wider theme of their fight and that those many letters (LGBTQ…) are all about free expression (they will say that it is not necessarily about sexuality or what type of object one chooses to have sex with but a right to expression of a freely preferred gender identity, real or not). It might appear now that the more hardline countries will only be won over by scientific proof but that will not happen. It is the human rights push that will tip things over. Prepare for the word “rights” to become a gavel word (a word that closes the discussion with finality). People who suffer persecution in the more conservative nations will find means to flee to more liberal nations as a human rights effort or else a closely guarded real motivation. The net effect will be a concentration of voices in the freer places and a continuosly lowering of volume from the more conservative ones. And a democratic world will always levitate to where the noise is highest and the numbers greatest. Now, why will a legal argument trump a scientific one in this day and age? Well, because people will want to be openly defiant as well. It will be fashionable. But it will also be because the gloves will finally come off and people will not finesse their dislike of each other’s lifestyle preferences. In other words, people will finally see no need to hide the fact that this is not about science but choice. Even religious houses will buckle – some because of dilution of their own message as they play into the relevance trap (the desire to remain relevant in an evolving world) while others will comply because of seeking to show love without condemnation, as they should in fact, according to their religions. “Even the 74

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual and others whose sexuality may eventually emerge but is currently unkonwn to the wider world.

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Dream or Die clothing stained by corrupted flesh” will be hated75 but those who can be rescued will need to be interacted with to be extracted and so the matter will grow into a complex that no human system can solve in any sytematic or step-wise manner. It will not be uncommon to find the LGBT community themselves in the leadership structures of churches. Eventually, people will not be alarmed at infidelity. Even now, people casually flirt and speak humorously about “sidechicks” and “blessers”. Sidedudes will emerge and be equally accepted as though it were a casual matter but, make no mistake about it, it will be a serious offensive against the moral fibre of the nation. Supported by materialism and various forms of pornography, the advance will be a powerful tide. My country right now is ravaged by unfaithfulness and adultery like it was an innocent passtime, even as we try to raise the badge high as the only constitutionally declared Christian Nation on earth76. Because of this carelessness, we shall soon be at the forefront of excusing sodomy, incest and peodophilia (we already supress the open reporting of peodophiles, infamily sex predators and convenience abortion because most cases are committed within the extended family system and we do not want to draw ridicule to our family names by reporting ourselves to the state legal system). We shall say that they are just cultural weaknesses or that as long as the victim does not complain, there is no harm done for the state to prosecute, or blaming the “mistake” on lighter vices such as drunkenness, irrational beliefs or provocative dressing, etc. Regardless of what we claim with our mouths, what we declare or even attempt to prophesy with our tongues, these things will explode into the mainstream if our behaviours do not change at individual level. The country is nothing more than the sum total of its individuals. A leader will arise whose agenda will be to close down hypocrisy and that leader will open the way to legitimisation of these vices by seriously weakening the state’s ability to prosecute. That leader will create an environment where other leaders’ appetite to speak against these things is heavily parried back (of what benefit will it be to them to speak up for the other side when everyone speaking for this side is apparently making sense to all hearers?) And using a strawman77 strategy, that leader will make the 75

Holy Bible: Jude 1:22 Many Christian Nations exist, but they have not explicitly enshrined that in their constitutions, opting instead to be multi-faith, church and state separated. Let us recognise that there are many decreed Islamic Nations too. 77 Creating a highly caricatured/distorted understanding of an issue so that it can be short down easily. In a debate, one side will restate the other side’s motion but in a strategically comical or weakened way and then use powerful points to shoot that motion down. For example: “In trying to convince you to join them in their eroneous thinking that abortion is bad, my opponents will say that the easy accessibility of abortion clinics is encouraging teenagers to engage in premarital and unprotected sex. Of course we all know that such 76

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Dream or Die Christian Nation declaration and preamble in the constitution an altogether empty noise. Unfortunately, Christianity, being a liberal religion, will co-exist with shocking indulgences. Even now, men in my country have the toughest possible barriers to progress. Those that struggle, struggle hard while those that seem to be on a row are swiftly and surely roped in and entraped to the point of losing all the foundational values that got them their first smells of success. Many are stopped dead in their tracks, distracted by lusts of the eyes or other disempowering matters of the flesh. If it is not addictions then it is heartless greed; if it is not heartless greed then it is xenocentric attitudes; if it is not xenocentric leanings then it is brushes with the occult world on the promise of gathering power, making much more money or preserving their acquired wealth. How can a man or woman take their stand and escape against these sweeping traps? Our countrymen may speak all they like about values and morals but if we do not get up and say no in our own private lives, the country will surely slide in the other direction. Right now there is widespread abortion in our country – some even sponsored by foreign “charities” – and our laws are half-silent on the matter. The country only advances to where our behaviours point, not where our intentions and weekend declarations say that we want to end up.

But, just like for Lot and his nuclear family emerging from Sodom at Genesis 19, it boils down to a pointedly personal matter. Even if the entire country should slide the other way, rescue will be available for those whose behaviours are distinct and disciplined. These are the people who will still be able to leave an inheritance of robust wealth down to the third and fourth generations of their children even as everyone else around them fall into chaos. I may seem to be speaking to morality; one might even say that such sermonising tends to restrain creativity more than it frees it up. My response remains that a system can only develop longevity if it deliberately sets equally strong boundaries and restraints for itself. Without strongly respected limits, creativity becomes directionless, effort becomes wasteful and, ultimately, no useful results can arise. May the boundaries of your existence fall in pleasant places; may you enjoy the placement of limits upon your personal behaviours for your own sake and for the sake of your children’s children. And may you discover the greatest discovery we can all make as we seek to preserve wealth: that in the end, riches or pleasure or beauty are not the point; contentment is. thinking is as flawed as saying that the presence of hospitals is causing people to go flat out and contract all manner of diseases just because they can. Ladies and gentlemen, I trust that you will easily see beyond that!” A strawman argument has been made against the non-arbotionists by misrepresenting their argument and then shooting it down with a powerful appeal to the intelligence of the listeners.

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Acknowledgements My relationship with my father was instrumental to the generation of all experiences that led me to stumble upon the thoughts in this book. I am thankful to Mr. Annuel Edson Simwawa, my late father. In similar manner, my discussions with one of my younger brothers was instrumental to helping open my eyes at various stages in our common struggles to make sense of eveything. Indeed, as iron sharpens iron, one man greatly sharpened another here. All I can say now is Mercy Maketh Man. Proverbs 19:11. The bigger our hearts, the greater men we can become. My elder sister and all my other eight siblings (eight, not seven – some are in the habit of forgeting Jean!) were absolutely instrumental to making our home environment what it was. I am grateful for all the education you have given me without holding back. God bless you and your families richly. To little girl Maggie who died too early, thank you for sharing your short but highly impactful life with us at Madras in Lusaka. To my many parents (fathers and mothers) and my parents in-law, you are the education that has made us what we are. We can only hope to be half the parents that you have been to us. I certainly have the most caring mother in law in the entire world! That, I shall try to inherit. Having been put through school from eightth grade to first degree, for totally free, by ZCCM, a public company in Zambia, I am forever indebted to this nation for whatever it is that I know and do today. I am forever thankful. On top of that, many people have been extremely instrumental at various turning points of my life. For particularly the corners that made this book even possible, I am eternally grateful to Mrs Chembo Mutwale Sichinga (my student turned head-hunter), Mr Chrispine Simwanza and crew whose labour for this country is unparalleled and many others whose help was quiet and totally sacrificial. I am eternally grateful. To my all-weather supporter, par excellence, one Mr S. Mofya, you are my perfect example of the eightth dimension, one who believes and never stops believing in a friend no matter the friend’s shortcomings, which in my case are too many to start counting. May your grace, sir, speak for you and your descendants! To my children, T and Wongi, all the very best my good people! You will be just fine. Have fun and love a lot. Suffering because you loved is a far easier pain than suffering because you never loved. Not suffering at all has never been an option to anyone unless they did not want to grow up, which, when you think about it, is not an option either! To my wife and partner in crime, in innocence, in mischief, in holiness and in everything else rolled together, one Madam Gigi K. Simwaba, I thank you for your sacrifice and your grace. This project came at huge cost. Robust Wealth

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Index A Adam, 128, 132, 182, 235 addiction, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 172, 174, 177, 235, 251 Adenuga, 42 African, 3, 18, 32, 33, 41, 42, 60, 65, 75, 90, 92, 113, 208, 215 Amaranth Advisors, 111 Amazon, 56 American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 232, 233 ancestral, 22, 25, 173 Angola, 92 Apostle, 199 asian, 38, 39 atheist, 224 augmentation, 100 AWOL, 14

B Bank of England, 112 BBC, 38, 232 Belgium, 41 bequeathed, 37, 53 Bezos, 56 Bible, 3, 22, 23, 25, 63, 128, 135, 137, 140, 141, 146, 150, 160, 163, 164, 167, 175, 179, 182, 201, 202, 227, 230, 238, 239, 250 Biblical, 19, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 46, 47, 62, 64, 73, 123, 128, 182, 184, 203 Bill of Rights, 158 Bishop, 199 black holes, 224 Black Wall Street, 40, 52 , 12, 110, 153, 171 Bluefin bravery, 16, 134, 146 British, 21 bulimbo, 100 bursary, 12

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C Cain, 46, 182 cartel, 76 Casia, 243, 244, 245 CEOWorld, 42 Chaka, 46 Charities Aid Foundation, 198 child-led families, 23 Children, 2, 19, 23, 25, 37, 60, 67, 124, 130 Chiluba, 196 China, 46, 47, 86, 90, 233 Chinatown, 12 cholera, 66 Chongwe, 12, 17, 21, 241 Christian, 94, 136, 197, 198, 200, 204, 250, 251 Christmas, 194, 241 CIA, 47, 209, 210, 212 collateral, 14, 17, 111, 217, 218 Congo, 41, 42, 44, 49, 74 Copperbelt, 12, 21, 94 courage, 15, 183, 213 creditor, 27 cross-generational, 28, 125 C-suite, 20 custom, 12, 60, 124 customary, 24, 59, 61, 118

D Dangote, 20, 39, 92 darling, 12 DE, 103 debt, 60, 76, 121, 128, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 221 debts, 27, 83, 213, 214, 215 DEC, 158, 159 Delegation, 234 Demonic, 155 derivative, 104, 109, 110, 111 descendants, 29, 37, 62, 131, 186, 245 Development Agreements, 94 Devil, 26 dice, 61 Difficult Lane, 21

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E economy, 18, 24, 28, 46, 73, 83, 88, 248 education, 12, 17, 25, 33, 37, 39, 42, 55, 68, 82, 94, 120, 123, 127, 216, 252 Egypt, 231, 233 Elisha, 27 Empire State building, 12 engineering, 12, 56, 92, 125, 171 Enron, 104, 111 Epcot, 12 equity, 51, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222 Essentialism, 234 Ethiopia, 231 EVA, 105, 109 Evangelist, 199 Eve, 132, 168, 169, 182, 235 exo-control, 157 extramarital, 15

F faith, 23, 27, 28, 49, 50, 63, 75, 120, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 174, 203, 204, 213, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 236, 241, 247, 248, 250 faithless, 49, 50, 225, 226, 227 Fatherhood, 223, 234 Federal Reserve, 85, 91 Fiat, 73 flood, 108, 199 Forbes, 67 Fraser, 94 freedom, 15, 17, 30, 64, 72, 80, 83, 92, 107, 116, 134, 162, 163, 176, 177, 179, 180, 213, 220, 222

G G8, 76 Gallup, 198 GDP, 55, 109, 208, 209, 210, 212 Germany, 109, 215 Global Health Observatory, 233 God, 27, 29, 49, 62, 63, 64, 118, 123, 132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 144, 145, 167, 179, 180, 182, 183,

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185, 186, 187, 200, 224, 227, 228, 232, 235, 240, 252 good son, 12, 13 Google EarthTM, 246 Great North Road Academy, 159 Greece, 66 groom, 32, 33, 244

H Hebrew, 179 hispanic, 38 Hitler, 45 holocaust, 41, 44 honour, 12, 17, 23, 60, 62, 63, 69, 73, 115, 132, 138 household, 18, 23, 24, 63, 180, 184, 239 HSBC, 111 Huawei, 46, 47 hungry, 30, 65, 194, 199 Hunter, 111

I IC, 103 IMF, 85, 90, 113, 114, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212 Inflation, 57, 77, 90 Interest, 57 Isoka, 21, 248

J Japan, 46, 66, 91, 93, 111, 112, 113, 114, 215 Jerusalem, 141, 184 Jesus, 16, 20, 73, 91, 123, 136, 137, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 167, 168, 178, 200, 204, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 236 Jewish, 24, 63, 201 joy, 19, 23, 30, 61, 62, 116, 134, 155, 224 Jubilee 2000, 121 justice, 111, 125, 137, 138, 139, 140, 149

K Kafubu, 245 Kalene, 238 kamikaze, 217 Kauffman, 33 Kenya, 231, 233 King, 3, 30, 41, 42, 44, 112, 146, 227 Kitwe, 20 KKK, 40, 44

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L Law, 41, 63, 138, 157, 158 Lazarous, 144 laziness, 28, 41, 60, 132, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155 lazy, 28, 29, 150, 151, 152, 153 Leopold, 41, 44, 49 Leya, 16 LGBT, 250 LGBTQ, 249 LGBTQIAP+, 249 London, 112, 121 Lord, 20, 49, 143, 167, 168, 185, 186 Lumumba, 41 Lungu, 94 Lusaka, 3, 12, 81, 92, 159, 196, 241, 243 Luxemburg, 208

M Mafinga, 32 Maggie, 64, 65, 66, 252 Malawi, 196, 233 Malaysia, 46, 67 marriage, 13, 15, 32, 33, 158, 216, 242, 249 Mary, 16, 123 massacre, 40, 41 Master, 21, 49, 143, 190 Master of Science, 21 Mauritius, 208 Mayor, 112 Mentorship, 234 Milosevic, 45 mining, 12, 52, 68, 94, 220 miracle, 118, 144, 145, 170 MIT, 34 modus operandi, 144, 193 money, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 51, 54, 57, 62, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 103, 105, 109, 112, 113, 116, 123, 125, 128, 130, 138, 158, 159, 170, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 207, 213, 216, 217, 218, 222, 243, 247, 251 Muleya, 16 multi-racial, 38 Mumba, 20 Mwanawasa, 76

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N Namwaba, 16 Narcotics, 160 Ndola, 116, 245 New York, 12 New York Times, 208 Nigeria, 32, 93, 231 Nixon, 74

O Obama, 43 Oklahoma, 40, 44 OPEC, 76 Orlando, 12 Overtrading, 217

P Palau, 208 paper tigers, 15 Parmalat, 104 Pastor, 199 PD, 170 peace, 14, 15, 118, 138, 193, 244 pension, 13, 66, 193 Peter, 142, 167, 168, 213, 214, 227 PhD, 114, 195 Plato, 224 post mortem, 27 Potiphar, 179 Prayer, 27, 227 pride, 90, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 196, 199 Profitability, 85, 98, 103, 104 Prophet, 27, 199 Psychotropics, 160

Q Quantum, 224 quid pro quo, 178

R Reverand, 12, 20, 21 Rickards, 86, 208 Roman, 25

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S salary, 12, 13, 20, 152, 154, 207 SantaMaria, 16 Sata, 196 scapel, 22 scholarship, 12 school, 12, 37, 42, 65, 189, 199, 214, 231 SEATINI, 90 Simwabas, 17 Singapore, 67 Slywotzky, 98 Smith, 42, 121 Sodom, 251 Solomon, 146 soul, 28, 119, 145, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 187, 238, 239, 241, 245 South Africa, 231, 233 Soviet Union, 46 Soweto, 81 Space Force, 46 strawman, 250, 251 suicide, 232, 233 survey, 37, 44 swap, 73

T Tailand, 46 Tandon, 90, 92 Tanzania, 231 tax, 51, 60, 73, 83, 91, 95, 96, 104, 158 teacher, 14, 30, 32, 54, 114, 190, 217 The Real Africa, 94, 118 Thomas, 3, 142, 143, 145 tithe, 197, 201, 202, 205 TMSpaceTM, 152, 153 TNT, 40 Tontela, 16, 22, 26 Training, 55, 234 Tulsa, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 52 Turner, 230 twist, 59, 61, 63 typhoid, 66

U UCZ, 12 UK, 12, 94, 111, 197 United Nations, 42, 90 university, 21, 42, 56, 72, 197, 224

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University, 12, 21, 94, 243 Urban Institute, 38 US Atomic Energy Commission, 56 USA, 12, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 52, 74, 87, 91, 93, 109, 111, 112, 113, 147, 198, 232

V Value Cycle, 46, 47, 48, 72, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 114, 193 vicar, 13 vicious, 25, 28 Vietnam, 46, 67 visa, 12

W war, 43, 52, 66, 71, 74, 82, 90, 93, 113, 114, 115, 135, 167, 190 Washington, 198 wealth, 18, 19, 22, 25, 29, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 193, 200, 201, 204, 222, 248, 251 weddings, 15, 33 Wongani, 18, 22, 26 World Bank, 85, 208 World Health Organisation, 233 Worldcom, 104

Y yellow fever, 15

Z Zaire, 42 Zambia, 12, 43, 66, 68, 76, 90, 92, 94, 95, 109, 111, 121, 134, 158, 195, 196, 197, 215, 231, 241, 245, 248 Zambian, 32, 76, 94, 95, 196 Zambianism, 71 Zambians, 15, 121, 197 Zimbabwe, 74, 75 Zimbabweans, 16 ZNBC, 178 Zulu, 46

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