One of the biggest problems plaguing western Africa is an obsession with making money. They fail to recognize that the concept of making money is linked to productivity. They fail to see that your true wealth is the value you create. So, everybody wants to lay their hands on money without giving any thought to the productivity requirements of such riches. If you desire to become wealthy, you must understand that your productivity is your wealth. Money is just a system that allows us to transfer our wealth. Your money does not mean anything without the productivity to match it. Poverty is not a money problem, it is a productivity problem.
After the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced their plans to redesign the currency of their country, something very odd began to happen. Old banknotes, as old as twenty years old, began to resurface. Justifying the decision of the CBN to undertake the exercise. Among the challenges that influenced the decision, the CBN lamented “significant hoarding” of banknotes, claiming that N2.73 trillion out of the N3.23 trillion in circulation as of September 2022 was outside the vaults of commercial banks across the country. The reason banknotes are hoarded in Nigeria is due to greed. This greed is fueled by a lack of understanding about how wealth creation works. Hoarding banknotes stresses the monetary system. The government is forced to print more money, without any increase in productivity. The end result is a multiplication of poverty in the land.
Hoarding ten million worth of your country’s currency is not wealth. True wealth is owning an asset or part of an asset that generates ten million in value. The reason people hoard money is because they think it guarantees their future, but it doesn’t. There is no multimillionaire or billionaire that became rich by hoarding money. Money in itself has no value. It is a worthless piece of paper. The true value of money is when it is used to transfer productivity within an economy. You must decide today, right now, that you will not become a part of the problem. You will focus on increasing your productivity. The goal is to create wealth by owning things that generate economic value. Anything else is sentiment and will lead to poverty.
