Time and Money

You may have noticed that the themes of time and money run throughout my introduction. The reason is simple. The lack of internalisation of the Western concepts of time and money is at the core of most of Africa’s personal and national problems.

Despite Africa’s vast resources, we have failed to transform our lives from mainly subsistence living to large-scale integrated economies. The reasons are many but can be distilled to a lack of skills, lack of planning and corruption.

Skill is a matter of history, while planning is factor of time and corruption is an abuse of money. Without history, coupled with a lack of understanding of time and money, you are not only lost but blind and crippled too.

Ask any number of people what money is. I doubt you’ll get a consistence response. Most say time is money which seems, to me, rather like a tongue-in-cheek definition of time and not money. I prefer to say that money is time. Others say money is the root of all evil. I say the lack of money is the root of all evil. Why do people steal, commit fraud, accept bribes? Because they don’t have the means – money - to acquire that which their heart desires; so they commit evil instead.

Money represents value.

Some might add that money, by itself has value too. If you believe that then you know little about inflation which can render money itself valueless while leaving those things that money represents still valuable.

Inflation expresses the fact that the value of anything changes over a period of time. Thus the value of a car today would be different tomorrow and the thing that represents that value – money- would invariably change too. The difference is expressed as inflation.

Money is an abstract idea.

Perhaps the most abstract idea with the most concrete manifestations known to man.

.../ to be continued