POVERTY IS HERE, EMBRACE IT?

POVERTY. Now, you may want to take a few steps back when considering this issue as most of us are too close to it to understand it. So go ahead and take about 20 steps back and think: What does it mean to be poor or afflicted by poverty. Like its brother wealth, poverty means different things to different people. Most people think and believe that they used to be poor because they used to take tea without sugar and now they do, they used to go to school without shoes now they have seven pairs, they used to live in mud houses now they live in named apartments, they used to walk but now they do ‘twi twi’ etc etc. However, this is just a matter of perspective because 30 years from now you might say that you were poor in 2017 because you could not afford a flying car, even though you are doing pretty good now. So what is the legitimate description and understanding of POVERTY?

Here is the thing, nature/God has given all people resources to enable them to at least thrive. If you ever visited those really dry desert villages in eastern or northern Kenya you will not doubt providence. You will find people doing just fine despite being in tight ecological corners. Then you go to a resource rich place like Nyeri or Kakamega and you find some miserably poor folks. Now I tell you, being poor does not have anything to do with how much money you have because no matter how much you have someone always have more than you do. Being poor is not about your living conditions because some people are more comfortable in caves than in mansions, so perception and social conditioning cannot be used to define poverty. Furthermore, you should not wait for the government and/or society to tell you how poor you are because that should be your own decision to make. So when the World Bank folks tell you that if you make less than $2 a day you are poor, ask them how sure they are. Just so you know, the money economy is relatively new in most societies, just a few hundred years old. However, even before money came into existence poverty was still around. So do not make the mistake of relating money to poverty.

POVERTY can be examined with one very important benchmark. Whether you are poor or not depends on whether you think of yourself as A RESOURCE MANIPULATOR or A MANIPULATED RESOURCE! That’s all. Resource manipulators cannot be poor at all at all because they are aware that nature’s resources are inexhaustible. And they have been abundant since the beginning of time. Your talents, rivers, oceans, lands, other people’s talents, wind, fire, solar, stones, trees, are all resources that can be manipulated in a bid to circumvent the poverty trap. But no, you cannot escape the poverty trap if you believe that you are in this world as part of resources that resource manipulators can use. The biggest culprits in this category are individuals who think losing a job is the gateway to poverty and having one is the only way to thrive. Not true. Practically anything in this world can be used to cater to your needs under the sun. Another category of manipulated resources are people who believe that their means are limited to certain social preconceptions and parameters. So if that is you, who cannot sell boiled eggs in the streets or be a casual laborer, poverty may be just around the corner for you. Finally, poverty is a foreign concept to any human being who understands the abundance of nature and has the wisdom and courage to manipulate these God-given resources.

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The African Teacher

Written by

Baby philosopher, African teacher, fan of creation, and a keen observer of humanity. I am here to awaken my kind!

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