Making A Case For Investment Clubs/Syndicates and The Building Of Generational Wealth: Where We Are Now.
If you’re not much unlike me, raised in the heydays of Nollywood where little is made of much and there is often a herd of lessons the director intends to pass across amongst other things, you might be familiar with this three-part movie titled Owo Blow.
My focus is not so much on the movie, though it does have its poignant lessons, but the quote in the above image from over 20 years ago.
It’s eerie how some works of art are frozen in time, and remain quite relevant, after a number of decades.
It’s almost more eerie when the lessons become more relevant than they were when shared and this is despite its author thinking the times, he/she lived in were the height and that it couldn’t get any worse
It is also due in part to amazing foresight on the part of the writer (more often than not, the ability to step away from the hub and buzz to figure out the pattern to the madness and the place where order and chaos meet. (Shout out to Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm)
The other part is a testament to how things remain the same despite how much they change.
Quite the thesis in paradoxes.
( A 38-Year Range Given)
Inflation, in Nigeria is a well beaten horse, but one that manages to kick us from behind irrespective of earning capacity, after having delivered a well-packed punch. I say this because, no matter how much you earn, what it provides is a safety blanket of sorts and a thinner margin of error that you can live with, without losing much sleep.
The movement of the finish line to a few meters ahead might not mean much to the well-winded marathon runner, but to the person who is near exhaustion and on his/her first competitive start, it might as well mean a thousand leagues away.
The increase of a commodity by the smallest of amounts may just be the tipping point that makes the purchase of an entire staple item totally impossible.
So how do we get a people who are barely afloat interested in the process of rearing an animal that will become a sumptuous shish kebab or be a store of value later on?
How do you get someone who’s barely alive interested in the concept of harvest many years from now?
How do you convince them, seeing as the yield may not be great because of the input he/she has available?
The answer is, you don’t.
While there are arguments for investing, irrespective of the level you are on, those arguments are based on a certain kind of bubble; a bubble that is oblivious to the actual reality of many.
Those arguments often factor in the working professional or enlightened person who may not be earning something super, but definitely has options or should have options due to their exposure and mobility.
The reality is that many reading this, have only heard of that life and maybe seen it a number of times, but have never actually lived it and owned it.
What would be the entire political leaning, economic posture and social position of an individual who is drowning? It’s quite simple; to be brought to safety.
(Culled from It’s a Class Struggle, Godamnit; a speech by Fred Hampton)
In those moments, it’s not about liberalism, communism, populism, capitalism or segregation. It’s not about preserving the status quo of the United Nations or a revolution in a third-world country.
It’s about being saved from the water. Engaging that person in such a conversation at such a time is tantamount to vested interest in the subject’s death.
In the same vein, the man who can barely feed or meet the basic essentials would be utterly uninterested in any conversation about even his strongest ideals.
Bring him to shore, get him to recuperate and expel all the sea water from his body and then, that conversation may happen. But to ask for it while he’s right at the jaws of death is an incredibly tall order.
So there indeed exists a plane of life where keeping a thing for even something that seems as close to tomorrow, may be asking too much.
But for you, who can’t relate, the point of this is to awaken you to an economic genocide of sorts that has been on for no less than three decades.
It is the encroacher of lands, ideals and beliefs and it pushes one to fight for his life on a daily basis. It has slowly, but surely reduced and redefined what the middle class means in this country.
At present, a good part of what was the middle class is held up by uneven pension payments, a few wise investment choices made many years back, chief of which usually entails owning a house and the success of their children who can now support them financially.
Economics is deemed a social science, and while the scientific part of it is fairly exact and predictable by a course of actions, the human(social) part isn’t. It leaves a lot open to chance.
I said earlier that we don’t convince the drowning man to save/invest and it might seem blunt.
It is and I’ve got a pet theory to fixing that.
My pet theory is the reinstatement of the middle class.
That reinstatement will be the theme of my next piece.
Even in chaos, there is a rhythmic predictability and whatever took planning to disrupt will take same to dislodge.
About Me:
Words and numbers is what the world often comes down to and I’m in the journey of being on the right side of both.
I tinkle with operations in a financial outfit and the above is my first of many pieces speaking to the realities of where we are and actionable steps from there onward and upward.
