Do your children a favour die broke (II)

I have been thinking about the Carnegie story and this sombre topic for some time now, trying to understand the logic of it all, and I believe I now get it. You see, the chase is the joy of life. What we live for is often to go out there and struggle daily, to make money, and fame, and other assets, and to make a name for ourselves, and provide for our family. This is even more apt for the vast number of Nigerians who engage in entrepreneurship.

But the final conclusion of this essay also applies to those who hold down jobs too. The chase, the struggle, the challenges that present to us and are conquered, the hunter-gathering, the hustle, is what keeps us alive. Without these, life will mostly lose meaning. And most successful people are running away from something in their past – either to prove to the world that they too can make it, or to escape their previous experience of biting poverty and humiliating want. Of course, there are people who were born or grew into wealth and then took things to another level but compared with those who struggled to become great achievers, they are few in number. Indeed, for those ones, it takes a whole lot more to find a reason to excel as the bar is already set way too high. So, it may be a great idea to find a way of giving out everything you have while still alive, so that your children may find their own struggles and make their own names, and so that you may travel light on your journey out. Of course, this does not mean that one should be irresponsible to one’s children, but one will need wisdom to know where care and provision is adequate. It is often the case that over-pampered children turn out to be disasters in life – even while their parents are alive.

I look around Nigeria and with few exceptions, children who inherited great wealth from their parents have either wrecked such legacies, wrecked themselves or are running around aimlessly. Large, thriving companies have been liquidated in just one generation upon being inherited, while some parents who focused on amassing wealth forgot to find time to train their children.

Truth be told, many people who say they are amassing wealth, building houses and so forth for their children are not very honest. All of us have seen just how uninterested many of those children are. Today’s magnificent mansion is tomorrow’s bogus monstrosity. Our GRAs are replete with such houses, painfully abandoned to maiguards and illegal squatters, or just left to decay in the thicket, while those for whom the houses were built are abroad struggling to make ends meet.

Having seen this experience with the first generation of ‘successful’ Nigerians who excelled in the modern economy since our independence, it looks like subsequent generations are merely repeating the same mistake – for cultural and egotistical reasons? So, when you are building those houses and acquiring those monies, admit that you are doing those things for yourself – whether to prove to the world that you can achieve great things (and that is valid), or you just don’t know where your limit should be (for those corrupt folk who steal the country blind).

If you are lucky to be in a position where you can build great wealth, it is also good to quickly find an anchor for your activities – maybe like Carnegie did. Because indeed in society, some people must be bold enough to make loads of money either out of luck or prowess, and impact society through making such money. Without those people who make large amounts of money, there will be no skyscrapers or industries, and society will lose ambition in the comity of nations. Therefore, it is preferable if those people create tangibles and get patronized in turn by happy customers, thereby creating legacies and growing even larger. But here most people produce nothing and want to be as rich as the Carnegies of this world. This is the abnormality with our society and economy.

I decided to write on this today because of several incidences in our society. The other day, Mr Fred Ajudua; once famous for a different reason but rich, blurted out on social media, that the son he was building houses for is grown and totally uninterested in the monstrosities. There is another story I heard from the East, of this big man who took his children to the houses he owns, and at each location, he mentioned which among his children owned the house. In fact, they could take it over now if they wanted, he offered. But when they returned home, they all gathered to tell him that they aren’t in need of houses whether in the cities or the villages of Nigeria. They were all based abroad. Heartbreaking right?

In most cases, those houses will add to the growing statistics of dead capital in Nigeria – made up of abandoned real estate not earning or adding any value. Andrew Nevin of PricewaterhouseCoopers said dead capital in Nigeria was anything like N90 trillion. Look at the UK economy as old as it is, and they don’t have anything near the number of abandoned buildings we have here; products of sentiments, culture, tradition, ego, pride. So, is there a point at which one should set a limit? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the long-term commercial viability of those assets? It is more than evident that we aren’t doing these things for our children. We should be very worried if we have children who are interested in inheriting stuff from us. I was never interested in inheriting anything from my dad, even as a teenager. I couldn’t wait to go out there and make my way and I knew nothing will bring me to loggerheads with anyone over inheritance.