When can one say, “I am rich?” What is the thermometer for measuring degree of richness? What is the difference between being rich and being wealthy? Is there a stage in which someone can relax and say, “I am rich enough?”
Perception of richness depends on the environment in which you live. One can say being rich or poor is a condition of the mind. A man in Trukana with a specific number of livestock, number of wives and children can feel he is rich enough. A businessman with a shop in the remote countryside may proudly brag of being rich.
But that is not what a businessman in Nairobi or Mombasa would say or feel. The greed of richness intensifies when you live in urban and international places, where the song of being millionaire is sung in all business corners. Where, even when you are a millionaire of shillings, you strive to be a millionaire of dollars and pounds. The goal is set even higher. You want to be called a multi-millionaire. Then a billionaire aiming at the goal of praised for being a trillionaire one day.
But, really, do you need to be a millionaire to be the happiest person? Do rich people worry less than ordinary people? One can even ask, do rich people laugh more often than poor people do? Do rich people sleep more peacefully than poor people? Does the quality of spiritualism change with material ownership?
Great wealth is a big responsibility. A big responsibility is a burden. The bigger the wealth the bigger the burden. Reality is that the less you have in material things, the less responsibility you have; hence, you worry less. All rich people have one thing in common. They worry about losing their wealthy. The rich you are in material things, the more competitors and heartaches you have. Your wealth raises jealousy among people. That jealousy brews destructive interests in people who would feel better if they bring you down. You worry about thieves after your wealth, manipulations, tricks and misfortunes.
There is a stage in which wealthy people are threatened by their challenged health. If you command a great fortune, you discover what a threat it can be to your health. You have hardly any free time to yourself because you have to attend to numerous things. You have little time for family matters. Your wealth builds a private prison for you in which it locks you up. You become a candidate of hypertension and heart attack. Sleeplessness. You feel like a pilot in the air that, since he is on air, he can’t take anything at ease lest a fatal catastrophe strikes.
Many people strive to be rich not because they really want enjoyment of their wealth, but out of sheer demand of recognition. The human is born with a chronical feeling valuelessness or uselessness. You acquire value by doing something to be recognized. To make people begin to ask, “Have you seen how successful he is?” The person strives because he wants to prove to his competitor that he is more valuable. He is engaged in a psychological marathon rally where he must outrun everybody and become the marathon champion.
So, there is the material richness and the emotional riches. You can be materially rich but socially poor. Here one talks about the wealth of material things and the wealth of the heart, which can be described as spiritual wealth. You can meet someone who is materially wealthy but very poor at heart. Greed is one of the things that increase the poverty of the heart. But, irrespective of how much money you have, you can eat only the ordinary measure of food and sleep on one bad. Wole Soyinka said however rich you maybe you can’t buy yesterday.
The traditional sense of wealth based on livestock domesticated the mind with a sense of socialism, commonly known as ubuntu. Forces of nature drew the limitation of how far you can go in terms of ownership of property beyond which it becomes unhealthy. Maximum cattle head and you have arrived.
The monster in capitalist ownership has no limit of how much you should own. It is as if the sense or balance of ownership is swallowed by the greed of wanting to own everything, whereby if you own a town, you want to own two towns; then as many towns as possible. If you are given Nairobi, you want to be given Mombasa, Kisumu. If you are given Kenya, you want to be given Uganda and other countries. No, you should be the wealthiest person in Africa and finally the wealthiest person on earth.
What is the sense of that kind of capitalism? What is the philosophy behind it? At what stage should it be sees as madness? It is out of that civilization greed that British colonized nearly a quarter of the world countries. This is the material philosophy Africans have learned and embraced from Europe.
