Tag: money

I Really thought that I had finished my treatment of various aspects of money on this platform with my last article. However, it seems that there are a few loose ends that need to be tightened hence, another article about this interesting subject.

There is no doubt that the subject of money is so broad that it is a difficult to do justice to it. To make matters worse, I made what I now see as the more or less fatal error of straying into the truly nebulous territory of happiness in my last article, can money buy happiness? My contention is that money can buy a lot of things which can create a state of happiness. The problem here is to come up with a universally acceptable definition of happiness. Everyone is sure that they know the meaning of the word but I doubt that everyone is reading from the same page and were we to interrogate the meaning of happiness, we are not likely to advance from first base as it is a word that is used all the time. This is even if it’s precise meaning  differs from one person to another.

A cursory examination of the state of happiness shows that it is a combination of emotions; joy, pleasure, satisfaction born of achievement, bliss and I am sure several other words are associated with happiness without any one of them covering the meaning of happiness satisfactorily. One thing is sure however and that is, everyone wants to be happy and consciously or even unconsciously engage themselves in those things which promote happiness or create situations that will lead to the attainment of happiness. But, is it possible, given the human condition that a permanent state of happiness can be achieved?

I am happy, agh, that word again, that I came to the conclusion rather early in life that happiness is a state that is always tantalisingly just beyond the reach of the normal human being. And reaching out for it may be an exercise in futility comparable to the torture of Tantalus who was condemned never to slake his thirst or satisfy his hunger even though he was knee deep in clear, running water and luscious fruits were hanging just out his reach. We all want to be happy without really knowing what it is to be happy.

The sad truth is that happiness is like that mythical moving finger which having written moves on, never to come back to make any amendment. The Yoruba qualify happiness with the word, tiny because any state of happiness is frustratingly fleeting. You can only be happy for a short while before the feeling of euphoria engendered by an event or an achievement before you are brought back down to earth by other realities. The Yoruba also warn unequivocally that you are most vulnerable to danger and unpleasantness when you are in the state of being happy. This suggests that happiness travels in tandem with its opposite, sorrow. Where you find one, you can be sure that the other is lurking with intent.

Now, to the vexed issue of the contribution of money to happiness. It is clear that there are many issues and problems which can be redressed with money and this is not to be sneezed at. It is said that a hungry man is an angry man and since the rich hardly ever go hungry, they are protected from the anger which frequently blights the lives of those who cannot for the life of them guess where their next meal is coming from.

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Life is full of choices and we all have to take decisions virtually everyday of our lives. Some of those decisions determine the trajectory of our lives and some of them we take more in hope than on the reality that we are confronted with. Money can make it possible for you to take the right decision in the same way that poverty can blind you to a lot of possibilities. Even more important are the temptations we have to confront from time to time. For example, it is easier for a rich man to resist the temptation of selling his conscience for the proverbial mess of pottage. On the other hand, money may inflame the ego of those who are backed by vast sums of money and this may drive to take decisions which may not be in their favour. For those who cannot be described as rich, their pecuniary situation may be so crushing that it is the single most important determinant of how life unfolds for them. That is because they may have to spend a great deal of their time trying to make the money with which they can buy bodily comforts both for themselves and for their offspring whose basic needs they are unable to provide. Thus the status imposed by poverty is inheritable, often for several generations in the same way that a wealthy man can pass down his wealth to familial generations yet unborn. These conditions must weigh heavily on both the poor and the rich heirs to  such an extent their respective characters as human beings are determined by their different backgrounds.

The burning question and one on which I was burnt earlier is if money can buy happiness. I feel more confident about putting an answer now than before because I am at least clearer in my mind about how to describe the meaning of happiness.

Having money can allow one to buy those things from which it is possible to derive some joy, satisfaction or pleasure all of which can be added up to give happiness. From this point alone, it is suggested that money can indeed buy happiness but that is only part of the story as a legion of things, none of them remotely connected to the source of happiness. It is indeed possible that the Ferrari, the purchase of which is being celebrated may veer off the open road to hold a lamentable congress with an inconveniently positioned gnarled tree bringing celebrations to an abrupt and painful end. After all, we are most vulnerable to various calamities in our moments of joy.

Only yesterday, the results of a fascinating study which has been going on since 1935 was brought to my notice. Over that period, the lived of thousands of men from all strata of society were minutely studied. This was with a view to finding out what made them tick. In the final analysis, it was found that indeed money could buy happiness to the limit of $100,000. After that, rather modest sum, if you lived in the USA, it did not matter how much money you had, the overload of cash did not make you any happier than those who were more modesty endowed with money. This implies that those who continue to work, sometimes relentlessly, to pile up the cash are not necessarily looking for greater happiness. They simply enjoy making money to satisfy a craving for it. In other words, they are turned on by the sheer pleasure of making money and it is the pleasure derived from the process of making money that drives them on to make even more money than they can spend in a million life times like the robber barons. Or perhaps in the manner of Silas Marner, a simple weaver in the eponymous novel by George Elliot. In the days before power looms were invented, master craftsmen like Silas could make a great deal of money from their craft and because of his dexterity, Silas made a great deal of money in gold coins but the only pleasure he derived from his money was to simply look at the money and revel in the knowledge that he was rich. When a chance thief deprived him of his money, he was heart broken over his loss even though the money up till the time of his loss was spectacularly useless, at least in terms of buying things to gladden his heart or make him happy. This story is perhaps no longer possible first, because unlike gold coins which have a beguiling beauty of their own, the paper money which we all spend now do not have that intrinsic beauty which will compel us to stare at them for hours on end as Silas Mariner did with his gold coins. However, there is a story which tells of the compelling physicality of money. The story concerns Dangote (your fame is secured when you are known everywhere by one name; such as Pele, Messi Beyoncé etc). According to the story, Dangote was described as a rich man by friends, acquaintances and even his detractors as a rich man. But the man did not see himself as such. To test his hypothesis, he went to his bank and presented a cheque for ten million dollars. To his surprise, that sum of money was released to him, no questions asked. When he got home he spread the money out on a table and it was seeing all that money spread out in front of him in his own home and under his absolute control that finally convinced him that he was a rich man.

This brings to the contemplation of another character of money, it’s lack of attachment to anyone including the one that has propriety rights over it. You cannot patent your money such that you and only you can spend it. A thief who has no idea of how the money in any purse he stole was gotten, is instantly conferred with the power to spend that money on anything that catches his fancy and frequently does so at his earliest convenience. This means that apart from making any money, you have to fence it round in such a way that the random thief cannot have access to it. In the end anyway, most fortunes are passed on to other persons who no matter how closely related they are to the original owner of the money may have absolutely no idea about how the money was made, their only consideration being how to spend it.

Taking everything into consideration, it is perhaps tragic that money is the universal badge of worth as it is a determinant factor for virtually everything. I once asked a young man what the importance of his education had been to him. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied that it was his education that made it possible for him to get a good job which paid him enough money to marry a fine young lady. Without the lift which his salary gave him, he would have had to settle for someone beneath the quality of his wife. The lesson here is that his genealogy from that point was dependent on the availability of the money he spent on the pursuit of his wife. I suppose that everything considered, the young man of this story considered the money spent on courtship as money very well spent. From this point of view, who says that money can’t  but you love? It surely can which is why you can say,  Money – that’s what I want!

It is often said these days that what goes round, comes around. A few Sundays ago, the series of articles about money began with the title of a song which was made popular on a global scale and because many things go round, it is appropriate to at least complete the circle with another song about money which again the Beatles turned into a monster hit. After saying Money – that’s what I want, they turned round to dismiss the very idea of money by saying that Money can’t buy me love. It is pertinent to point out that like the other song, this song also came out of Tamla Motown and is not a Beatles original. Anyway, for all our love of money, we are reminded that after all said  and done, money cannot buy love. That saying is open to contention but whichever way you stand in the matter, it has to be said that money cannot take you all the way all the time. Another musical icon who had something weighty to say about money was the evergreen Bob Marley who on his deathbed declared with great authority that money cannot buy life. He certainly knew what he was talking about because if money could buy his life, he certainly had enough of it to buy just one life, his own.

There are many, especially those who have very little money of their own who confidently declare that money cannot buy happiness and since in the final analysis what we all want is happiness, then the limit of money can never be regarded as being far enough to justify all the effort that people make to lay hands on a large store of money. An appropriate riposte to the argument about money and happiness is that money can buy you a lot of things that can make you happy. At the very least, it can make it possible for you to make other people deliriously happy by giving them enough money to make it possible for some of their wishes to come true. From personal experience, I know that my generousity index goes up in tandem with the amount of money in my pockets. Ask me for any amount, however small of money at the wrong time of the month and I am likely to react as if I have been stung by a particularly unfriendly insect in the category of a wasp. On the other hand, when I can hear the jingling of money in my pockets, I am likely to part with some of it with a tight little smile on my lips. Ladies married to impecunious Nigerian professors such as I have been for far too long will nod their collective head in agreement with the point I have made here. I am of the opinion that money can buy you love, happiness and many other things beside. Try persuading a geriatric multimillionaire of the truth of this statement and you will be barking up the wrong tree. You may think that the young supermodel with a figure to die for hanging on his ancient arm is just an item of decoration but the small army of doctors at his beck and call may, but for patient -doctor confidentiality consideration, disabuse your mind of that error. There really is no end to what money can buy under the right set of circumstances. That is why it is true to say, money, that’s what I want as the Beatles most famously affirmed in that song.

It is often said that money is the root of all evil and there are so many examples of the veracity of this statement that it is not worth arguing over. This is why the men who built their fortunes in what has now been described as the Gilded Age in the USA will, for all time be referred to as robber barons, ruthless early capitalists who accumulated stupendous wealth through the brutal exploitation of prevailing circumstances and their fellow men. In an age when money in individual pockets was as scarce as hen’s teeth, these men appropriated to themselves more millions of dollars than they could be reasonably expected to spend in a million life times. The men who made up this caste were a small handful and were represented in popular folk lore by Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt. They built up huge fortunes which are still being enlarged more than a century after they died. Ironically, they all gave away so much of their fortunes to charitable causes that they are now known more for the charitable foundations which bear their names than for their rapaciousness as business men. For all their charity however, they still epitomise the Yoruba assertion to the effect that great wealth is built on a foundation of filth. The validity of this assertion is so strong that you can assume that the extravagant wealth being displayed by your neighbour is camouflage for a shameful secret or indeed a catalogue of shameful deeds for which penance should be done.

It has to be said however that some people just have a talent or a penchant for making money. Indeed, everything they touch turns to gold in the manner of the mythical King Midas who was so far captivated by the beauty of gold that he could not get enough of this precious metal. In his desperation for more and more gold, he prayed for the power to turn everything he touched into gold. To his great delight, his wish was granted and he was transported into his own version of heaven when he discovered that he could turn anything to gold with a touch. He enjoyed himself immensely until the time came for him to eat and the food placed in front of him turned into gold as soon as he touched it and instantly became inedible. Just as the seriousness of his condition dawned on him his daughter whom he loved even more than gold came into his golden presence but as soon as he returned her hug, she was instantly turned into a gold statue! His previous elation was instantly wiped away and he prayed that his power be revoked so that he could eat and have his precious daughter back. This may be the reason why the robber barons strongly felt the need to make restitution for the way and manner by which they acquired their enormous wealth and were impelled to give most of it away. It is in keeping true to type that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the richest men in the world today have declared their resolve to give most of their wealth to charity. After all, there is only so much that an individual, however profligate can consume in one lifetime however long it is. In the end, when confronted with their impending mortality, hardly anyone will depart the world with the thoughts of their wealth on their mind. The rest is vanity, as empty as the vacuum into which they are being sucked and where they are forgotten distressingly sooner rather than later.

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When the colonialists arrived in Africa to take over their respective inheritance from the infamous Berlin conference, they were dismayed to find a rudimentary currency system. This was not to their liking as their primary mission was to exploit their colonies maximally and without a currency with which to run their economy, their intentions were likely to be thwarted. It was therefore imperative that those cowries and manilas with which the colonised people carried on their trade be phased out as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the colonial coins which were to replace local currency were in very short supply. Indeed, those foreign coins circulated only within restricted government circles which meant that only those who dealt directly colonial institutions had any real money. Such people; court officials, teachers, railway workers, clerks and other minor actors were paid in the new coins and were instantly elevated far above the common herd who had  to navigate somehow, the mine field of colonial officialdom. These people formed the nascent elite class, playing both sides against the middle and making off with as much of the money available as they could without landing in jail. These formed the first members of the elite class which has expanded relentlessly to include the multitude that have, in present circumstances, become so disillusioned by their dwindling share of what is sharable in Nigeria that they are packing their bags and going off in continuous search for coins to places where they perceive the grass to be greener. On the same scale, the underclass, those who do not have two coins to rub together, are having to deal with the shortage of everything that make lives tolerable. In other words, our so called economy is in tatters and countless lives are being rubbished by a shortage of funds. Surely, a little more money will expand their happiness index to the level of the inflow of money into their pockets.

With money in such short supply and inflation, rampant inflation for that matter making a mockery of whatever sum is in your pocket, people are concerned more than ever to grab unto themselves more than their fair share of the money available. Just as it was at the dawn of the colonial age. It is now a case of the end justifying the means. Many of the fortunes, if not the overwhelming majority were created by corruption, so much so that this is the fuel which powers the engine that runs this country. Virtually everyone, especially those operating within the public domain are corrupt but the private system is not far behind. Think of any group of Nigerians including those in the so called liberal professions and you will find that corruption rules. Each one is corrupt to the limit of their opportunity to loot the public treasury. Funds which are meant for societal development are simply looted and in some cases buried in a convenient soak-away  pit, now instantly converted into a bank vault. Were just half of such monies to be retrieved from wherever they are concealed, our economy would rise from the ashes. After all, the sum of $12 billion has been known to simply disappear from government account  in those heydays of the first Gulf War. Were such a sum of money to be injected into our economy today, the precipitous slide in the value of the Naira would not only be halted but reversed promptly.

Not too long ago, ladies in certain parts of the country had to mount guard on their laundry spread out to dry. This was because their underwear had suddenly become a target for thieves who had somehow come to the bizarre conclusion that it was possible to use lacy underwear to create money. The craze of stealing freshly laundered underwear has quietly faded away as suddenly as it cropped up and young ladies can now go back to the days when their underwear were not a target for the attention of petty thieves.

On the other hand, there is the far more serious matter of stealing and killing people in the unfathomable belief that body parts can be made to conjure up money, lots of currency notes to convert yesterday’s pauper into a fabulously wealthy person today. Now, that is a depth of nastiness to which no member of a modern society should stoop to. But unfortunately, this is a reality with which we have to grapple a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. It is a grisly reality which is fatal to far too many young ladies. In other parts of the world, people are killed to provide body parts; kidneys, lungs, livers and eyes to be transplanted into ailing but rich people who need these parts, no questions asked. Here, people are simply butchered, some choice parts especially breasts and genitalia removed and the rest of the body buried in the proverbial shallow graves which are now being discovered with distressing frequency all over the place. People are now having to take stern precaution to prevent grave robbers from digging up their recently dead relatives so that their organs would not be harvested and somehow  be converted into currency notes. These truly alarming beliefs and practices stem from ignorance of the dynamics of money and unfortunately, the practitioners of these evil practices would not have availed themselves of the opportunity of reading these articles on money, to disabuse their evil, little minds of the error of their ways.

Gold has been used as currency for more than six millennia and is regarded as a repository of value virtually wherever you go in the world. But long before gold became the final arbiter of wealth in the world, the humble cowry had been used as currency in many parts of the world, stretching from parts of Africa to the Antipodes. The illustrious career of the cowry as an item of currency has come to an end but it still continues to have cultural and spiritual significance, especially within our immediate environment. This is to the extent that were people to be asked to name anything that they consider to be of cultural significance, the cowry is one of those things that would feature prominently on the list of such recognised culture icons. On the reverse side however, perhaps there is no other thing that screams fetish as loudly as the cowry, especially for adherents of those Abrahamic religions amongst us who imbue anything considered African with satanic powers, to be feared and avoided like the plague. Put a string of cowries, especially strung together with fresh palm fronds across a doorway and only the brave or even fool hardy will step across the threshold. And yet, every single cowry that has been used for whatever purpose including the sacred rite of divination has been imported into Africa, meaning that the prominence given to the cowry in these parts is as a result of cultural appropriation. The cowry is as foreign to our part of the world as any other thing that has been imported, especially over the past six centuries or so.

Every cowry that has been used for any purpose in Africa has been imported from the Maldives, a group of islands off the South west coast of India. It is no more than the dried shell of some species of  sea snails indigenous to that region. Cowries can be sourced from some other parts of the world but the type which has come to be associated with our part of the world came from this particular location.

 The cowry is prepared by collecting the relevant snails from the ocean and exposed to the sun which kills the snail over a short period. The snails are then carefully washed and the empty shells are dried to form cowries which are then used as currency; not within the area of their preparation but thousands of kilometres away from there. It has been estimated that any particular batch of cowries did not arrive on our shores until one full year after their preparation given the vast distance they had to travel, including their journey across the Sahara desert.

Unfortunately, as with other articles associated with West Africa, the impetus for the use of cowries as currency was the slave trade. The Portuguese, in the course of their world wide peregrination discovered the source of the cowries which was used as currency in West Africa and it was as if they had been presented with a jackpot. They acted to control the availability of cowries in West Africa and began to use it as payment for slaves. They shipped in cowries and shipped out slaves, as ever a win-win situation as could be exploited. The cost of a slave in the interior of the continent was very low, less than two hundred shells. The individual slave could then be sold on through a chain of buyers as they were sent to the coastal regions from where they were exported, by which time, they were exchanged for thousands of cowries. The ferocious beauty of this process is unmatched as several people along this chain gained something until the Europeans on the coast gained the only valuable thing in this chain; a living, breathing human being with all their incalculable potential. It is often imagined that those transported across the Atlantic were only used as labourers but it is clear that some of them were exploited for their knowledge and skills which were lost to the region of their birth.

The cowry was most suited to be used as currency for several reasons, not the least being the ease with which it’s availability could be controlled. The shells were each identical to the other and so each of them had the same value and could not be counterfeited so that what you saw was what you got.

This issue of counterfeit-proof currency is one of the most important things about the humble cowry and this gave it an advantage over other currencies which could be manipulated in all sorts of ways to derive some undeserved advantage from the point of view of the counterfeiter. The weight of a coin could be shaved and was usually shaved by counterfeiters wherever coins were legal tender. Also, a base metal could be substituted for the more valuable metal from which the coin was originally struck so that what was passed off to the buyer was much less valuable than it appeared to be. As for paper currency, all the forger needed to do was simply to print his own notes in the imitation of the genuine article. These practices struck at the very source of legitimate commerce and was everywhere taken very seriously, so seriously that the penalty for counterfeiting virtually everywhere was agonising death. The punishment reserved for counterfeiting in the Roman Empire was crucifixion, whilst in ancient China where paper money was first used,  convicted counterfeiters were either impaled or burnt at the stake. The profitability of counterfeiting money is shown by the fact that counterfeiters throughout the ages have not been deterred by the ferocity of the punishment which awaited them upon detection. And the widespread nature of this practice is shown by the fact that in practically every banking hall in Nigeria today, you will see counterfeit currency notes on display. As with most other phenomena, nobody has bothered to study just how much of the currency in circulation in Nigeria is fake but any reasonable guess will be on the high side.

The people of West Africa found it convenient to use the cowry as currency because it could be used for purchasing small items, for example, salt. The level of exchange which went on within any community was quite small as members of each individual community had the same things although some members of the community had noticeably more of those things than others. Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s  Things fall apart was rich and successful not because he had many bags stuffed with cowries. He was rich because he had a big barn full of yams. He had wives for whom he paid handsome dowries in yams and palm wine, not to talk of kolanut and the occasional goat and poultry; and because he had several wives, he had many children who enlarged his farm holdings and contributed to his acclaimed wealth. His success was further confirmed by his wrestling prowess as well as his valour in the low grade skirmishes which in those days, passed for war with neighbouring communities. This was the limit of his fame and he was made to pay for his distinction by offering him titles the conferment of which severely depleted his store of wealth as he paid through the nose for the privilege of wearing the anklets of honour. This ensured that he did not garner enough resources to upset the delicate balance of worth within the society in which everyone delved and spun so that there were no lords of the land. The use of money as a means of gaining power and influence was left to the slave traders on the coast who bought and sold people and by doing so introduced a fatal decadence to their own society. A society built on the commodification of human beings is one that, for want of a better word, is cursed. It would be held accountable for those wrongs down the ages.

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It is at this juncture necessary to turn once again to China Achebe to flesh out this discourse about the wealth of our traditional societies before colonisation. Then, wealth was believed to somehow be dispensed to those who had found favour with divine providence. This was shown by the experience of Obierika, the dissolute son of Ezeulu, the chief priest (echoes of the sons of Eli, the story with which any reader of the Bible is familiar) had a close and terrifying encounter with Eru, the god of wealth who bestowed his favours on anyone he fancied. Obierika might have come up close and personal with Eru as he wandered through the wilds on a dark night but the god did not consider him worthy of his favour. But the story of this encounter introduced us to the spiritual considerations associated with wealth in our traditional societies. In the riverine areas, the dispensers of wealth lived at the bottom of the large rivers which flowed through the land and they favoured whomsoever they fancied and in equal measure destroyed those who transgressed against them as narrated by Elechi Amadi. The Yoruba people also have something to say on this subject as Ajé the patron saint of commerce adopted people at random and awarded them riches, sometimes beyond their wildest imagination. These beliefs take us into the realms of superstition, even magic and muddies an issue that is plainly physical. Money is made through different forms of labour and the whole situation is skewed towards absurdity by wealth dispensing gods who could be propitiated by those who wanted to become rich. It is now left to such people to find a suitable means of clearing a path along which to approach the relevant god or goddess associated with wealth. In a place where human beings are bought and sold, reverence for human lives is diminished to such an extent that inanimate objects could be regarded as having a higher status than slaves and treated as such. In a society where human sacrifices are not only condoned but practised openly, the danger of human beings used in sacrifice to voracious gods in exchange for money is sanctioned by practice. It is therefore to be expected that even in this day and age, humans are still sacrificed in exchange for money. Such vile practices have, unfortunately been ingrained in us and getting rid of them has become impossible as too many of us have imbibed the culture of the slave trade in which the human body can be used to provide counterfeit currency all in a bid to be rich for what necessarily must be a very short period of time.

The first stage of dealing in slaves is one of kidnapping the victim and this is what we see in contemporary times. Because of the shortage of legitimate currency plaguing us, many of us have regressed in both time and orientation and have taken up what used to be a profitable enterprise. The only difference being that ransom is now demanded in lieu of selling those that are kidnapped into slavery. Everything considered, It is quite clear that in this matter of trading in human flesh, the more things seem to have changed, the more they remain the same.

It is not difficult to imagine that as man began to accumulate wealth and property, the need to devise a means of keeping track of one’s property became increasingly pressing. It was well and good to have fifty head of cattle but what were they worth? Maybe using cattle as an example in this case is not ideal because even now,  some peoples around the world measure their wealth in cattle and are doing very well. It is for this reason that in certain parts of Africa, bride price is paid in cattle. For example in Zimbabwe where the rate of inflatioin has climbed above 300%, enterprising people are setting up cow banks in which trading is in cows rather than the local currency which over the years has become a sick joke. As long as the cattle are properly looked after, they appreciate in value and because the investment appreciated through reproduction, a hedge against devaluation is built up over the years and since it can be a life long investment the appreciation over the years can become quite considerable making an investment in cattle rearing a worthwhile proposition. The next time you come across a herd of cattle unconcernedly and rather contentedly cropping grass  by the road side, or sadly on somebody’s farm,  what you are looking at is a bank on the hoof. The difficulty in investing in such a bank is the lack of transferability of such funds into other accounts to buy something as mundane as a newspaper as you can easily do with paper money.

Money as we know it did not always exist. It had to be invented to enhance commerce, the movement of goods and services within and between communities. In the simplest form trade developed between neighbouring people who needed to satisfy their mutual needs by exchanging goods among themselves. For example people in riverine areas exchanged their fish for the agricultural produce of their neighbours who lived some distance away from any substantial body of water. Some other examples are a lot weightier than fish, yams and other products, because of their scarcity, assume the quality of currency. There was a time when salt was so precious that it was an important article of trade. It had a scarcity value that transcended it’s utility value and the people who had access to salt guarded this resource as jealously as they could because it was worth more than it’s weight in gold. The humble pepper was at one time a very important article of trade and served as currency in some parts of the world. As a matter of fact, the Europeans had, after their exposure to spices including pepper during their Crusader misadventures were so desperate for a reliable source for their fux that they sailed west in their quest to find a route to the spice fields of the East, mainly India. This need had arisen because their route to the Orient had been blocked by the Ottomans.They sailed west in order to get to India and came to the New World. Believing that they had arrived at their destination, they called the people they encountered, Indians! Not long after, the Spanish under the leadership of the Italian, Christopher Columbus landed in the New World. Vasco da Gama sailing under the Portuguese flag sailed all the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa to correct the earlier error of sailing west in search of India. This ushered in the era of European exploitation of Africa, an era which has spread to the present. All because the Europeans were desperate to lay their hands on the spices of India. They went in search of spices but found gold all along the way striping every territory along the way of any gold that could be found under their sub-soil.

Gold has been the most trusted repository of wealth in the world and in all probability it will always be. At the slightest hint of economic distress, there is a precipitous rush to acquire this precious metal if only as a hedge against damaging inflation. So great has been the lure of gold that it has been the reason for the greatest crimes against mankind throughout the history of the world. On the other hand, it has, in equal measure been the greatest spur to human development. For example, the greatest impetuous to American development was provided by the discovery of gold in California in 1849. This led to the development of the railway from the east coast to the West and later on the opening of the Panama canal which allowed ships to go through the isthmus of Panama rather than go through the perils awaiting them in the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America. The story of gold cannot be complete without the mention of the effect of this metal on the peoples of South Africa since it’s discovery in the area of Johannesburg (City of gold) in 1886. All the crimes which the White people in that country have committed against Blacks from that time on has been caused by this discovery. All the development associated with South Africa has also been achieved on the back of this precious metal as well as it the diamonds mined in Kimberly.

Ironically, gold is useless for all practical purposes except as a reserve commodity for storing wealth. Even for this purpose gold has not exercised this function since the Americans under the presidency of Richard Nixon took the USA off the gold standard. In other words, there is nothing holding up the dollar and as much of it can be printed as the controlling authorities decide but what this means is a continuous depression in the value of the dollar. The consequence of this for the global economy can only be imagined but it is all bad. It is for this reason that the global economy has not recovered fully from the effects of the crash of 2008 when the financial institutions responsible for the administration of global finance crashed spectacularly and governments had to bail them out. It does not look as if the world has learnt anything from that crash and is waiting for an inevitable repeat in the future which could be quite near.

Gold has, more than any other metal with the possible exception of silver been associated with currency as far back as the dynasties that ruled Egypt so many centuries ago. Before and since then some rather exotic substances have been used as currency in many different parts of the world. Long before the coming of the Europeans to the Americas and their incessant and tireless foraging for gold, the indigenous peoples of that continent had used various things as currency. This is in spite of the abundance of gold and silver deep under their feet. Those precious metals were used for the manufacture of exquisite jewelry and other decorative items which dazzled the first Europeans who in any way had come so far away from home in search of Eldorado, the mythical city of gold. They did not find Eldorado but found gold which they straight away looted and carted off to Spain to strengthen their own currency.

The Aztecs and Mayans who had built impressive, centrally administered political units in different parts of Central and South America used various things as currency in spite of their access to large quantities of gold. There was a time when in some parts of their continent feathers, admittedly, very beautiful feathers plucked from the quetzal bird was the repository of the wealth of the people.

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Cocoa was so highly priced in that region that it was also used as currency. This commodity which later on became the source of both public and private wealth in certain parts of Nigeria (echoes of Cocoa House) was generated by the Mayans and the beans obtained from the fruit was considered as a gift to mankind from Quetzacoatl, the god of wisdom, making these seeds sacred. Only the best seeds were used as currency, and the smaller ones were consumed as a beverage or fermented into alcohol. Cocoa beans, in spite of several difficulties including the guarantee of supplies as well as perishability were used as currency in Mesoamerica for more than a millennium.

At the time that the Spaniards were eviscerating the ancient empires of Mesoamerica, the Portuguese were doing the same thing in Africa. Those two European powers were extracting so much wealth from their respective areas of influence that, to reduce the possibility of conflict between them, the Pope, at that time, the de facto ruler of Western Europe divided the world into two halves and awarded the Americas to Spain whilst Africa was handed over to the Portuguese. The Spanish wasted no time in wasting the indigenes in their area of the New World and began to replace them with Africans captured mainly from the Portuguese half of the world. Since the Papal Bull of demarcation prevented the Spanish from operating in Africa, they issued contracts called the Asiento to other Europeans, notably the English, the Danes and the Dutch for the supply of African slaves to Spanish territories in the New World thereby imbuing African bodies with the property of currency since they could be used to purchase goods and services.

The direct use of people as currency was not very convenient and so the slave trade led to the development of a special currency which was called the manilla. This was a horseshoe shaped trinket which was struck mainly in Britain, more specially Birmingham, Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Denmark. The different varieties of manillas which were used over several hundred years were struck from; copper, brass, an alloy of copper and zinc and bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Interestingly, recent studies have shown that the famous Benin bronzes were cast with manillas  struck in Germany and are actually composed of brass. Apparently, the manillas were melted by the Benin artists to produce those exquisite works of art for which Benin is even now, justly famous. For four hundred years manillas were exchanged for slaves in Africa and shipped under the most appalling conditions imaginable to the New World and into a short lifetime of unremitting toil and suffering. Their unpaid labour laid the foundation for the American economy which is now by far, the largest in the world. Apart from a few works of art which were looted anyway and carried of the Europe Africa got nothing, absolutely nothing from the the horrors of the slave trade.

Manillas did not fade away at the end of the slave trade as the commodity traded just shifted from people to palm oil. The Europeans produced the mantillas used in trading with Africa and just as it was with the Roman dinar, the manilla lost weight steadily over five hundred years but surprisingly, it continued to be a widely used currency in many parts of West Africa until it was decommissioned by the British as recently as 1949.

I always thought that the song, Money (that’s what I want) was first recorded by the Beatles who after all had a lot of monster hits in the sixties, a period which has been described as the swinging sixties, a period which swung, sometimes with the violence of a revolution. The situation in the sixties led to profound changes to the world in so many diverse ways that a new world was formed and the Beatles collectively and as individuals played a large part in bringing this new world into being. Yes, they were partly responsible for the new sounds of popular music but they were not the authors of the music they played. The real sources being black musicians, notably Little Richard and Chuck Berry, who because they were black could not be given the recognition that their talent deserved at that time. It is therefore excusable for me to ascribe the authorship of Money to the Beatles rather than the team of Janie Bradford and  Berry Gordy,  founder of Tamla Records which later on became Tamla Motown, the first globally successful black owned record label. As this is not an article about popular music, I will move on from it in the hope that an article about popular music will follow in due course.

This article is about money but it is good to start with the big song about money because it says a great deal about the subject. After the riveting opening riff, the singer informs us that ‘everything good in life is free but you can tell that to the birds and bees so, give me money, that’s what I want!’ Actually, the song would have lacked the punch which knocked everyone out at the time but for the fact that the desire for money was, is and would always be as all consuming as it is universal.

Money exists both in the abstract and in the shocking reality as people spend as much if not more time thinking about money as in wondering what to do to make money, lots of money with which to execute any number of personal projects. For most people their thoughts hardly go beyond this point as they can only make enough money for the bare necessities of life; food, some form of shelter and the settlement of pressing family matters. These, the vast majority, especially in the so called developing countries including Nigeria live from hand to mouth, living a life that is circumscribed by their numerous wants. For such people there cannot be any brightness to lighten the gloom of their existence as they can only dream of what they can do with money if only they had some to spend.

On the other side of the coin are those whose relationship with money goes beyond just thinking about it. They are the ones who can think of what to do with the money at their disposal. It matters little or nothing how they have come to have the money jingling in their pockets as long as those pockets are full. Indeed, the whole point of this exercise is to speculate about the ways and means of keeping those pockets full.

At the mundane level of everyday spending of money, for most people, it is all about notes and coins which are exchanged for goods and services. These are as physical as the nose on your face. The pieces of printed paper we now use as money these days are value free as they are nothing more than promissory notes which cannot deliver on their promise to exchange them for a stated amount of gold as was the case until all governments of the world conspired against their citizens by refusing to back their currency with a stated weight of gold. Each note is only worth what it can buy in the market and as countries fall deeper and deeper into debt, the value of that promissory note in your pocket decreases everyday. In the presence of inevitable inflationary pressure, that value decreases until all that is left is a worthless piece of paper. As the loss of value is cranked up, the government speeds up the process of printing money and the normal business of buying and selling becomes well nigh impossible.

History tells us, or at least those of us who care to listen, that no polity no matter how strong it is economically can survive any sustained inflationary pressure and the devaluation of its currency for any length of time and for some currencies, a terminal stage is lurking just around the next corner, especially when there are debts to liquidate. We can allow the current fate of the Naira  to wander into our minds at this point in time.

In addition to a flag and a national anthem, every country has a currency associated with it. Except of course those Francophone countries in West Africa which suffer under the lash of some bastard currency associated with France. For all that, it has to be said that some currencies are more equal than others. Some currencies are actually worthless and not worth the paper they are printed on but even then, they are still very much in demand as in spite of their troubled state, they remain legal tender.

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Talking about the value of currencies today, the American dollar is supreme and for those with problems about having money in their pocket, there is the secondary and massive problem of laying hands on the almighty dollar. A couple of hundred dollars in your pocket in certain parts of the world can lift you out of poverty, at least for a little while. The American dollar remains in the bracket of the almighty compared with any other currencies on earth. This is because the dollar is used for no less than 88% of all transactions in the global market place. For example, oil is priced and paid for in dollars and given the volume of oil traded everyday the oversized value attached to the dollar should simply be left to those with an overactive imagination. The fate of the dollar is important to all of us and for those that are genuinely rich, their wealth is quoted in those dollars. You have truly arrived on the global scene when you have a few million dollars to your name but in a world in which you have a few thousand dollar billionaires, the mere millionaire is in serious danger of being simply trampled under the well shod feet of those sitting on a pile of billions of dollars.

For those with billions of dollars to their name, it is clear that they have solved the problem of how to make money which is what everybody wants but only a few can get. But the point has to be made that as dollar fortunes rise for some people, the amount of money at the disposal of other people dwindles in the same measure even though it might be extreme to say that the people at the tip of the money pyramid are simply sucking up the funds which the multitudes at the base of the pyramid need to make their lives halfway more meaningful. To put this in some form of perspective, the richest eighty-one individuals on earth hold onto themselves more wealth than half of the poorest people in the world. That is simply mind boggling but what is even more alarming is that the richest are daily becoming richer whilst the poor are sinking deeper into the deadly morass of impecuniosity or to put it more bluntly, extreme and degrading poverty. Whilst the very rich have the headache of what to do with their money, the poorest are wondering where their next meal is coming from. As it is with individuals, so it is with countries. The United States with less than five percent of global population consumes roughly 25% of global resources and is indebted to the tune of 33 trillion US dollars with the interest on this loan rising everyday. The debt owed to the rest of the world is growing because the US cannot generate the money needed to power her overblown economy through taxes and other fiscal means of raising money. This notwithstanding, the US continues to burn money on her extensive healthcare system which does not provide adequate cover to a large percentage of her citizens. As the baby boomers, those born in the ten year period after the end of World War II, the largest demographic group in the US leave the work force through retirement, the payment of social security to the elderly increases whilst their armed forces, flung over the world are eating up a substantial portion of available funds.

The largest economy in the world is deep in debt and this must have a deleterious effect on global economy. This is bound to have an effect on the amount of money which will be found in pockets all around the world. What happens to the Dollar is the business of the rest of the world as this determines the value of whatever money you have in your pocket. The fate of the Roman currency, the dinar which was the arbitrating currency of the Roman empire some two thousand years ago is instructive in this regard.

The dinar was a coin which we are told contained two grams of silver when it was first struck. Over the years as silver became progressively scarce, the weight of silver in the coin became less in the same manner, in the same way that paper currencies lose their value as governments print more money to cover up the loss of weight (value) of paper money. As time went on the dinar contained very little or no silver and the people needed a load of worthless dinar just to buy food to eat. Eventually, the empire, the mighty Roman empire could no longer deal with the inflationary pressure bearing down on it and this, as much, if not more than the Germanic tribes which sacked Rome was responsible for the collapse of the Roman empire in the west. It is therefore not idle to speculate that problems associated with the value of the dollar will not end well for the rest of us. After all, all that the Americans need do is print more dollars to take care of at least part of their humongous debt. This is easy to do since the dollar no longer comes with the promise of a gold backing and like the dinar before it, it is shedding weight. Our local predicament with the value, or rather, the lack of it, of the Naira is in spite of the fact that what we are up against is a depreciating dollar. The dollar has lost no less than 65% of its value since 1985 and yet you need more than 1,000 Naira to buy one miserable dollar today. This means that the dollar you buy today is a whole lot less valuable than the dollar as it was at the time we entered the dollar trap with the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) as prescribed by our creditors, the IMF and the World Bank. The Nigerian government of the day decided to get into bed with those terrible twins against the expressed wishes of the good people of Nigeria. The same people who are now suffering from the product of our unholy romance with the mythical market forces which we were told would put us on the path to prosperity.