How are you still thinking and what are you thinking about? What is the total summation and the collection of your thoughts? Are you lacking in self-control? Are you wanting in discipline? Are you lacking in foresight? Are you full of personal vanity? Do you have little sense for veracity? Are you fond of excessive music? Are your thoughts concentrated on the events and the feelings of the moment? Are you suffering from little apprehension of the future or grief of the past? Are you lacking in organisation, deficient in management, deficient in the control of man and resources.
I have seen many things in my life; I have seen the rich become poor and the poor become poorer. I remember that in this Lagos while we were growing up, there was a house in Ikoyi, Lagos, where everybody in the world gathered to, because this man was one of the wealthiest men in Africa then. I passed this house a year ago and it has become a shadow of itself; the windows were broken, the paints destroyed. There was nothing in that house to ever say that life was in it. That is the lot of the African – unable to think one generation ahead, unable to think beyond himself, unable to think beyond his present needs, his desires, his wants and all the things that should belong to him. As long as you keep thinking within yourself, you cannot create real wealth.
I still cannot get over the way Colonel Muammar Gaddafi died. It was typically African. For 42 years, he ruled and reigned in Libya, and under six months, everything had collapsed because the man really had neither depth nor substance. What surprises me is the capacity of the African to allow another to dominate him for 42 years. That’s what frightens me about a lot of us; we have neither thoughts nor depth, and we are willing to be led by the nose by men not capable to polish our shoes. We allow such men to dominate our lives because we are fearful, anxious, ignorant, limited, lazy, incompetent and unable to decide where our future is going.
Many years ago, some girl was stealing my money. I was an outright rocker, enjoying the presence and the company of women and wine and a lot of good life, and every weekend there was one girl or another in my apartment. I thought I was enjoying life, but I did not know that life was enjoying me. Then every weekend I discovered that my money was missing. By Monday morning, I won’t find my money and this continued for about six or seven weeks. I became distressed and started challenging all the girls. Then one day, my driver, Baba Morouf said: “Oga, today we must solve this problem.” I asked how? He said: “There is somebody in Shomolu who will tell us who is stealing the money.”
So we set out for Shomolu, in company of a good friend and two girls, to seek out the Baba who will solve the problem. Baba Morouf, my driver, was leading me! We got to the place, a small house, small door, and small room, totally dark, and there was this little man coughing, barely audible, who brought out two leaves. Baba Morouf said he has brought his Oga, with problems. The man sat on his bed shaking the two leaves, a man who can’t even help himself and solve his own problems.
I looked at myself, highly educated with four degrees, a Chartered Accountant, bending to a man who can barely talk. This is how we go about looking for power, looking for anointing, looking for all sorts of things to solve the problem that our brain can solve. The Black man needs to change his thinking and character.