Time For Change Is Near: Do Not Despair Despite The Current Debilitating Challenges!
Columns
Bernard Busani
I have been missing in action as they say. I had taken time off to reflect on the many challenges facing us a nation and as individuals.
Some of my followers were worried that I may have been gagged. No, I am sound. It is gratifying that many people have found some encouragement and enlightenment in my contributions. Many of our people believe that a better future is in store for the nation despite the many man-made debilitating challenges facing the nation.
I am therefore encouraged to continue to engage and contribute in my small way to the national discourse. I love my country very much; I want only the best for this beautiful country. I will therefore continue to challenge the wrongs I see in our country and provide meaningful suggestions for the future. There is need to inspire hope for the poor, the youth, the unemployed; the disadvantaged in our society. Let me say boldly that God who so loved us will never allow this country to fail.
I must assure you that God is quietly building a new crop of leadership that will take this country to new heights of development where the national cake will be shared equitably by all our people; where merit will displace cronyism and sycophancy; where our young people will be given opportunities and assisted to grow to achieve their full potential; where our older people will be equipped with skills and opportunities to improve their lives and will decidedly reject the mentally impoverishing handouts we see daily being paraded on BTV masterminded by the first citizen.
All our mines will be re opened and will produce at full capacity and will employ more of our citizens. New mines will also be opened and successful mineral beneficiation will take place in this country. This country will indeed become a true shining example of people centred development in Africa. Do not despair!
I have been observing closely and hoping to see change of mindset in the current leadership; the leadership we have entrusted with the stewardship of our country and its natural resources. What I see is a continued spirited movement towards a national disaster of unprecedented proportions, clearly driven by naked greed, self interest and self entitlement. This must stop.
The ruling class has become so reckless and so comfortable in the knowledge that many Batswana are now very poor and unemployed; desperately vulnerable and trapped into a gullibility rut where they want all of us to be, the end game being total control of our minds.
Because of the hunger; in some cases ignorance imposed on our people; in other cases naked greed, all created deliberately through the manipulative propaganda propagated through BTV, the daily news and Radio Botswana, we see Batswana still voting for the BDP in large numbers as seen in the recent bye elections; we see many people from the opposition defecting to the BDP despite the many blunders and many national disasters created by the reckless management of our economy by the same ruling party. This is not surprising, but those who truly love this country should now be concerned and do something before our country is brought down to its knees economically.
The list of the blunders perpetuated by this government is endless, legendary and quite frankly shocking, especially since 2008; Morupule B that is now being sold for a song after spending billions of Pulas only to fail to achieve energy sufficiency that was promised by 2012; the aborted Palapye glass factory; the aborted metal refinery plant in Francistown, the many projects including airports, stadia, schools, roads etc that were completed years behind schedules with unacceptable cost overruns and suspect quality; the mines that closed, some reduced their production levels; the latest disaster that is meant to deliver the final fatal blow to Phikwe and declare it a ghost town; by the way, where is the Lobatse leather park, no body is talking about it these days, has it also joined the list of the failed projects?
Despite all these glaring failures people are still joining BDP and voting for a party that has obviously failed the leadership test in so many obvious ways. The reason is that people are hungry and desperate. They need the crumbs from BDP tables to survive. All you need to do, to keep a slave calling you master is to provide basic food and some modicum of shelter, but one day and only one day that slave will wake up and violently turn against you.
In passing, this week we will are seeing America voting for a new leadership in a contest that was long, open, vigorous and transparent to allow all Americans to carefully assess the candidates and choose freely. The whole world has been watching as American brings in a new leadership of their choice. For me the American choice represents a shift in our geopolitical landscape.
How I wish we could one day talk of true democracy in our country, like we have witnessed in America and in Britain recently where the leaders can be exposed in order for the nation to know exactly what they stand for; where the nation knows that it has the power to appoint the leadership and to remove same leadership if it fails to deliver and where the leadership respects the true will of the people. We long to see our country becoming ‘a shining example of democracy’ in Africa.
Why we should not despair
I was asked by students doing mining related courses whether they should continue doing mining related degrees in the wake of the many mine closures and reduced production in some of our mines. I told them to continue and that the future is bright and very bright. Our country is very rich in mineral resources and many other natural resources; these will require Batswana with requisite qualifications and experience to exploit them for the good of the nation. Remember our mineral wealth was hidden from the imperialists and only revealed to us after our independence in 1966.
This was no accident, the current closures and reductions are a way of preserving our minerals for the true benefit of our people and future generations. The current leadership has failed to diligently manage these resources and therefore there is need to shut them and preserve them for future generations. God is simply taking these resources from the current wasteful leadership, so do not be afraid.
Copper and nickel
Despite the depressed market, the world cannot survive without copper and nickel. It is a known fact that commodity prices will always go up and down in a cyclical manner following world changing developmental demands. So producers know that they have to plan for such shocks in the system. It is that simple. It is clear that the prices are now climbing up albeit slowly as the world stocks reduce and new demand for metals increase. Where else in the world have copper and nickel mines closed due to the reduced demand?
I am not away of any serious mining venture that would have done that, yes I hear of mines managing down their costs in a sustainable manner, reducing overheads, stockpiling, reducing working time, training their staff to be ready for the upturn, yes that is how prudent leaders manage. There was no reason why any of our copper mines should have been closed; we did not run out of ore, it was failure to manage costs and failure to mine optimally.
In mining the ore body and what is known as the overburden or country rock is never uniform; always challenging. The miner must have an approved plan that looks at long and short term mining requirements. These plans must consider all the factors including adequate access to the ore bodies, ore grades, treatability, losses, overall production costs and profitability. These plans must be approved, reviewed and monitored on an on going basis by the department of mines on behalf of the nation as these resources belong to the nation.
We seem to think that once we have provided a mining license all that is left is to wait for the royalties; that is negating your responsibility as a steward. There is a definite void in the leadership of our national resources that need to be closed. With this kind of leadership, the only viable option is to shut these resources until you have selfless leadership with requisite skills to reopen the mines and appoint rightful custodians.
Our diamond mines
We have the largest diamond fields in the world. We host ‘the richest mine in the whole world’ Jwaneng mine. I can tell you now that our richest mine has been throwing value since its inception. It is a home of some of the finest and largest stones in the world. The large stones are not being recovered, but crushed into small pieces losing incredible value. We have small but valuable stones called fines that are thrown away because they dilute our dollar per carat value. These are national assets being wasted.
A younger independent miner Lucara has shown that large stones can be preserved and recovered almost intact. Why it is that Debswana with its huge financial muscles cannot do the same at its mines, is it not because of the shackles imposed by De Beers on Debswana. While we close Damtshaa and reduce production at our diamond mines because of the so called reduced demand preached by De Beers, the same De Beers opens Gahcho Kue diamond mine in Canada in 2016. All diamond mines in the world are running at full production and producers are looking for more diamond resources. Are we not being treated like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed with cow dug? What garbage is this?
Diamond beneficiation
The diamond beneficiation that should have taken our diamond business and country to an enviably high level is failing. The reason being given is low levels of labour productivity and lack of requisite skills. As a country that has spent so much on education and have even created a whole parastatal for improving labour productivity we should be ashamed to admit that our beneficiation efforts are faltering because of these manageable factors. It goes to show that our education and productivity efforts are ill founded. If other countries can take our diamonds and create such value in beneficiation for their people and we sit back and fold our arms and blame our labour force, then our national leaders are fast asleep and dangerously incompetent.
Leadership
It is clear; the current leadership has failed the country. We clearly need new leadership that will adequately equip our people to manage these mines including beneficiation. Education without requisite skills development is useless and must be rejected. Despite almost forty years of mining, we still do not have the requisite skills to manage and run our mines; we rely on others for a lot of our technical skills.
With good leaders we should now be exporting these skills. Our people are as good as any in the world and can be trained to do anything any other nationality can do and even do it better. Recently, BPC has acquired a German national to manage our national power corporation; we have not raised a single Motswana over so many years to do that; the new Khoemacau copper mine in Maun is looking for a managing director, despite years of mining we should not be surprised to be told that they is no Motswana identified to take up that position; we will import as is customary from countries who value their people and have trained them for such opportunities; we still have an Australian as general manager at one of our diamond mines and many other senior technical people in these mines why? Leadership failure!
By now, if we were a proud nation as we sometimes brag, we should be having a pool of nationals who can do these jobs ‘in their sleep’ planted all over the world in rich exchange programmes. Until we have a new leadership that is far sighted, our many opportunities and prospects will remain dim, bleak and closed.
We need leaders that have clear national development priorities; leaders that will equip all our people for the many opportunities that are clearly available in this country but closed by greed and self interest resident in the current leadership. All Batswana who love their country must now stand up and go to all the schools, to their villages and educate our people on the need for change and demonstrate why this country cannot move forward with this kind of leadership.
People must know that despite the money, the beers, the blankets, the promises that are splashed at elections and public gatherings they must know that when they are at the ballot box they are alone and must chose change and shame the devil.
All our mines will be reopened, beneficiation will be done in this country and we shall have a world class developmental programme that will make our people proud owners of their resources.
E-mail: bernard.busani@gmail.com Tel: 71751440
Columns
THE KEY TO HAPPINESS
Speaking at a mental health breakfast seminar last week I emphasised to the HR managerial audience that you cannot yoga your way out of a toxic work culture. What I meant by that was that as HR practitioners we must avoid tending to look at the soft options to address mental health issues, distractions such as yoga and meditation. That’s like looking for your lost bunch of keys, then opening the front door with the spare under the mat. You’ve solved the immediate problem, but all the other keys are still missing. Don’t get me wrong; mindfulness practices, yoga exercise and taking time to smell the roses all have their place in mental wellness but it’s a bit like hacking away at the blight-ridden leaves of the tree instead of getting to the root cause of the problem.
Another point I stressed was that mental health at work shouldn’t be looked at from the individual lens – yet that’s what we do. We have counselling of employees, wellness webinars or talks but if you really want to sort out the mental health crisis that we face in our organisations you HAVE to view this more systemically and that means looking at the system and that starts with the leaders and managers.
Now. shining a light on management may not be welcomed by many. But leaders control the flow of work and set the goals and expectations that others need to live up to. Unrealistic expectations, excessive workloads and tight deadlines increase stress and force people to work longer hours … some of the things which contribute to poor mental health. Actually, we know from research exactly what contributes to a poor working environment – discrimination and inequality, excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity – all of which pose a risk to mental health. The list goes on and is pretty exhaustive but here are the major ones: under-use of skills or being under-skilled for work; excessive workloads or work pace, understaffing; long, unsocial or inflexible hours; lack of control over job design or workload; organizational culture that enables negative behaviours; limited support from colleagues or authoritarian supervision; discrimination and exclusion; unclear job role; under- or over-promotion; job insecurity.
And to my point no amount of yoga is going to change that.
We can use the word ‘toxic’ to describe dysfunctional work environments and if our workplaces are toxic we have to look at the people who set the tone. Harder et al. (2014) define a toxic work environment as an environment that negatively impacts the viability of an organization. They specify: “It is reasonable to conclude that an organization can be considered toxic if it is ineffective as well as destructive to its employees”.
Micromanagement and/or failure to reward or recognize performance are the most obvious signs of toxic managers. These managers can be controlling, inflexible, rigid, close-minded, and lacking in self-awareness. And let’s face it managers like those I have just described are plentiful. Generally, however there is often a failure by higher management to address toxic leaders when they are considered to be high performing. This kind of situation can be one of the leading causes of unhappiness in teams. I have coached countless employees who talk about managers with bullying ways which everyone knows about, yet action is never taken. It’s problematic when we overlook unhealthy dynamics and behaviours because of high productivity or talent as it sends a clear message that the behaviour is acceptable and that others on the team will not be supported by leadership.
And how is the HR Manager viewed when they raise the unacceptable behaviour with the CEO – they are accused of not being a team player, looking for problems or failing to understand business dynamics and the need to get things done. Toxic management is a systemic problem caused when companies create cultures around high-performance and metrics vs. long-term, sustainable, healthy growth. In such instances the day-to-day dysfunction is often ignored for the sake of speed and output. While short-term gains are rewarded, executives fail to see the long-term impact of protecting a toxic, but high-performing, team or employee. Beyond this, managers promote unhealthy workplace behaviour when they recognize and reward high performers for going above and beyond, even when that means rewarding the road to burnout by praising a lack of professional boundaries (like working during their vacation and after hours).
The challenge for HR Managers is getting managers to be honest with themselves and their teams about the current work environment. Honesty is difficult, I’m afraid, especially with leaders who are overly sensitive, emotional, or cannot set healthy boundaries. But here’s the rub – no growth or change can occur if denial and defensiveness are used to protect egos. Being honest about these issues helps garner trust among employees, who already know the truth about what day-to-day dynamics are like at work. They will likely be grateful that cultural issues will finally be addressed. Conversely, if they aren’t addressed, retention failure is the cost of protecting egos of those in management.
Toxic workplace culture comes at a huge price: even before the Great Resignation, turnover related to toxic workplaces cost US employers almost $50 billion yearly! I wonder what it’s costing us here.
QUOTE
We can use the word ‘toxic’ to describe dysfunctional work environments and if our workplaces are toxic we have to look at the people who set the tone. Harder et al. (2014) define a toxic work environment as an environment that negatively impacts the viability of an organization. They specify: “It is reasonable to conclude that an organization can be considered toxic if it is ineffective as well as destructive to its employees”.
Columns
Heartache for Kelly Fisher
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o date, Princess Diana, General Atiku, had destroyed one marriage, come close to ruining another one in the offing, and now was poised to wreck yet another marriage that was already in the making. This was between Dodi Fayed and the American model Kelly Fisher.
If there was one common denominator about Diana and Dodi besides their having been born with a silver spoon in their mouths, General, it was that both were divorcees. Dodi’s matrimonial saga, however, was less problematic and acrimonious and lasted an infinitesimal 8 months. This was with yet another American model and film actress going by the name Susanne Gregard.
Dodi met Susanne in 1986, when she was only 26 years old. Like most glamourous women, she proved not to be that easy a catch and to readily incline her towards positively and expeditiously responding to his rather gallant advances, Dodi booked her as a model for the Fayed’s London mega store Harrods, where he had her travel every weekend by Concorde. They married at a rather private ceremony at Dodi’s Colorado residence in 1987 on New Year’s Day, without the blessings, bizarrely, of his all-powerful father. By September the same year, the marriage was, for reasons that were not publicised but likely due to the fact that his father had not sanctioned it, kaput.
It would take ten more years for Dodi to propose marriage to another woman, who happened to be Kelly Fisher this time around.
DODI HITCHES KELLY FISHER
Kelly and Dodi, General, met in Paris in July 1996, when Kelly was only 29 years old. In a sort of whirlwind romance, the duo fell in love, becoming a concretised item in December and formally getting engaged in February 1997.
Of course the relationship was not only about mutual love: the material element was a significant, if not vital, factor. Kelly was to give up her modelling job just so she could spend a lot more time with the new man in her life and for that she was to be handed out a compensatory reward amounting to $500,000. The engagement ring for one, which was a diamond and sapphire affair, set back Dodi in the order of $230,000. Once they had wedded, on August 9 that very year as per plan, they were to live in a $7 million 5-acre Malibu Beach mansion in California, which Dodi’s father had bought him for that and an entrepreneurial purpose. They were already even talking about embarking on making a family from the get-go: according to Kelly, Dodi wanted two boys at the very least.
Kelly naturally had the unambiguous blessings of her father-in-law as there was utterly nothing Dodi could do without the green light from the old man. When Mohamed Al Fayed was contemplating buying the Jonikal, the luxurious yacht, he invited Dodi and Kelly to inspect it too and hear their take on it.
If there was a tell-tale red flag about Dodi ab initio, General, it had to do with a $200,000 cheque he issued to Kelly as part payment of the pledged $500,000 and which was dishonoured by the bank. Throughout their 13-month-long romance, Dodi made good on only $60,000 of the promised sum. But love, as they say, General, is blind and Kelly did not care a jot about her beau’s financial indiscretions. It was enough that he was potentially a very wealthy man anyway being heir to his father’s humongous fortune.
KELLY CONSIGNED TO “BOAT CAGE”
In that summer of the year 1997, General, Dodi and Kelly were to while away quality time on the French Rivierra as well as the Jonikal after Paris. Then Dodi’s dad weighed in and put a damper on this prospect in a telephone call to Dodi on July 14. “Dodi said he was going to London and he’d be back and then we were going to San Tropez,” Kelly told the interviewer in a later TV programme. “That evening he didn’t call me and I finally got him on his portable phone. I said, ‘Dodi where are you?’ and he said he was in London. I said, ‘Ok, I’ll call you right back at your apartment’. He said, ‘No, no, don’t call me back’. So I said, ‘Dodi where are you?’ and he admitted he was in the south of France. His father had asked him to come down and not bring me, I know now.”
Since Dodi could no longer hide from Kelly and she on her part just could not desist from badgering him, he had no option but to dispatch a private Fayed jet to pick her up so that she join him forthwith in St. Tropez. This was on July 16.
Arriving in St. Tropez, Kelly, General, did not lodge at the Fayed’s seaside villa as was her expectation but was somewhat stashed in the Fayed’s maritime fleet, first in the Sakara, and later in the Cujo, which was moored only yards from the Fayed villa. It was in the Cujo Kelly spent the next two nights with Dodi. “She (Kelly) felt there was something strange going on as Dodi spent large parts of the day at the family’s villa, Castel St. Helene, but asked her to stay on the boat,” writes Martyn Gregory in The Diana Conspiracy Exposed. “Dodi was sleeping with Kelly at night and was courting Diana by day. His deception was assisted by Kelly Fisher’s modelling assignment on 18-20 July in Nice. The Fayed’s were happy to lend her the Cujo and its crew for three days to take her there.”
Dodi’s behaviour clearly was curious, General. “Dodi would say, ‘I’m going to the house and I’ll be back in half an hour’,” Kelly told Gregory. “And he’d come back three or four hours later. I was furious. I’m sitting on the boat, stuck. And he was having lunch with everyone. So he had me in my little boat cage, and I now know he was seducing Diana. So he had me, and then he would go and try and seduce her, and then he’d come back the next day and it would happen again. I was livid by this point, and I just didn’t understand what was going on. When he was with me, he was so wonderful. He said he loved me, and we talked to my mother, and we were talking about moving into the house in California.”
But as is typical of the rather romantically gullible tenderer sex, General, Kelly rationalised her man’s stratagems. “I just thought they maybe didn’t want a commoner around the Princess … Dodi kept leaving me behind with the excuse that the Princess didn’t like to meet new people.” During one of those nights, General, Dodi even had unprotected sexual relations with Kelly whilst cooing in her ear that, “I love you so much and I want you to have my baby.”
KELLY USHERED ONTO THE JONIKAL AT LONG LAST
On July 20, General, Diana returned to England and it was only then that Dodi allowed Kelly to come aboard the Jonikal. According to Debbie Gribble, who was the Jonikal’s chief stewardess, Kelly was kind of grumpy. “I had no idea at the time who she was, but I felt she acted very spoiled,” she says in Trevor Rees-Jones’ The Bodyguard’s Story. “I remember vividly that she snapped, ‘I want to eat right now. I don’t want a drink, I just want to eat now’. It was quite obvious that she was upset, angry or annoyed about something.”
Kelly’s irascible manner of course was understandable, General, given the games Dodi had been playing with her since she pitched up in St. Tropez. Granted, what happened to Kelly was very much antithetical to Dodi’s typically well-mannered nature, but the fact of the matter was that she simply was peripheral to the larger agenda, of which Dodi’s father was the one calling the shots.
On July 23, Dodi and Kelly flew to Paris, where they parted as Kelly had some engagements lined up in Los Angeles. Dodi promised to join her there on August 4 to celebrate with her her parents’ marriage anniversary. Dodi, however, General, did not make good on his promise: though he did candidly own up to the fact that he was at that point in time again with Diana, he also fibbed that he was not alone with her but was partying with her along with Elton John and George Michael. But in a August 6 phone call, he did undertake to Kelly that he would be joining her in LA in a few days’ time. In the event, anyway, General, Kelly continued to ready herself for her big day, which was slated for August 9 – until she saw “The Kiss”.
THE KISS THAT NEVER WAS
“The Kiss”, General, first featured in London’s Sunday Mirror on August 10 under that very headline. In truth, General, it was not a definitive, point-blank kiss: it was a fuzzy image of Diana and Dodi embracing on the Jonikal. A friend of Kelly faxed her the newspaper pictures in the middle of the night and Kelly was at once stunned and convulsed with rage.
But although Kelly was shocked, General, she was not exactly surprised as two or three days prior, British tabloids had already begun rhapsodising on a brewing love affair between Dodi and Diana. That day, Kelly had picked up a phone to demand an immediate explanation from her fiancé. “I started calling him in London because at this time I was expecting his arrival in a day. I called his private line, but there was no answer. So then I called the secretary and asked to speak to him she wouldn’t put me on. So Mohamed got on and in so many horrible words told me to never call back again. I said, ‘He’s my fiancé, what are you talking about?’ He hung up on me and I called back and the secretary said don’t ever call here again, your calls are no longer to be put through. It was so horrible.”
Kelly did at long last manage to reach Dodi but he was quick to protest that, “I can’t talk to you on the phone. I will talk to you in LA.” Perhaps Dodi, General, just at that stage was unable to muster sufficient Dutch courage to thrash out the matter with Kelly but a more credible reason he would not talk had to do with his father’s obsessive bugging of every communication device Dodi used and every inch of every property he owned. The following is what David Icke has to say on the subject in his iconic book The Biggest Secret:
“Ironically, Diana used to have Kensington Palace swept for listening devices and now she was in the clutches of a man for whom bugging was an obsession. The Al Fayed villa in San Tropez was bugged, as were all Fayed properties. Everything Diana said could be heard. Bob Loftus, the former Head of Security at Harrods, said that the bugging there was ‘a very extensive operation’ and was also always under the direction of Al Fayed. Henry Porter, the London Editor of the magazine Vanity Fair, had spent two years investigating Al Fayed and he said they came across his almost obsessive use of eavesdropping devices to tape telephone calls, bug rooms, and film people.”
Through mutual friends, General, Porter warned Diana about Al Fayed’s background and activities ‘because we thought this was quite dangerous for her for obvious reasons’ but Diana apparently felt she could handle it and although she knew Al Fayed could ‘sometimes be a rogue’, he was no threat to her, she thought. “He is rather more than a rogue and rather more often than ‘sometimes,” she apparently told friends. “I know he’s naughty, but that’s all.” The TV programme Dispatches said they had written evidence that Al Fayed bugged the Ritz Hotel and given his background and the deals that are hatched at the Ritz, it would be uncharacteristic if he did not. Kelly Fisher said that the whole time she was on Fayed property, she just assumed everything was bugged. It was known, she said, and Dodi had told her the bugging was so pervasive.
KELLY SUES, ALBEIT VAINLY SO
To his credit, General, Dodi was sufficiently concerned about what had transpired in St. Tropez to fly to LA and do his utmost to appease Kelly but Kelly simply was not interested as to her it was obvious enough that Diana was the new woman in his life.
On August 14, Kelly held a press conference in LA, where she announced that she was taking legal action against Dodi for breach of matrimonial contract. Her asking compensation price was £340,000. Of course the suit, General, lapsed automatically with the demise of Dodi in that Paris underpass on August 31, 1997.
Although Kelly did produce evidence of her engagement to Dodi in the form of a pricey and spectacular engagement ring, General, Mohamed Al Fayed was adamant that she never was engaged to his son and that she was no more than a gold digger.
But it is all water under the bridge now, General: Kelly is happily married to a pilot and the couple has a daughter. Her hubby may not be half as rich as Dodi potentially was but she is fully fulfilled anyway. Happiness, General, comes in all shades and does not necessarily stem from a colossal bank balance or other such trappings of affluence.
Pic Cap
THE SHORT-LIVED TRIANGLE: For about a month or so, Dodi Al Fayed juggled Princess Diana and American model Kelly Fisher, who sported Dodi’s engagement ring. Of course one of the two had to give and naturally it could not be Diana, who entered the lists in the eleventh hour but was the more precious by virtue of her royal pedigree and surpassing international stature.
NEXT WEEK: FURTHER BONDING BETWEEN DIANA AND DODI
Columns
EXTRAVAGANCE One of The Scourges in Society.
Extravagance in recent times has moved from being the practice of some rich and wealthy people of society in general and has regrettably, filtered to all levels of the society. Some of those who have the means are reckless and flaunt their wealth, and consequently, those of us who do not, borrow money to squander it in order to meet their families’ wants of luxuries and unnecessary items. Unfortunately this is a characteristic of human nature.
Adding to those feelings of inadequacy we have countless commercials to whet the consumer’s appetite/desire to buy whatever is advertised, and make him believe that if he does not have those products he will be unhappy, ineffective, worthless and out of tune with the fashion and trend of the times. This practice has reached a stage where many a bread winner resorts to taking loans (from cash loans or banks) with high rates of interest, putting himself in unnecessary debt to buy among other things, furniture, means of transport, dress, food and fancy accommodation, – just to win peoples’ admiration.
Islam and most religions discourage their followers towards wanton consumption. They encourage them to live a life of moderation and to dispense with luxury items so they will not be enslaved by them. Many people today blindly and irresponsibly abandon themselves to excesses and the squandering of wealth in order to ‘keep up with the Joneses’.
The Qur’aan makes it clear that allowing free rein to extravagance and exceeding the limits of moderation is an inherent characteristic in man. Allah says, “If Allah were to enlarge the provision for his servants, they would indeed transgress beyond all bounds.” [Holy Qur’aan 42: 27]
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said, “Observe the middle course whereby you will attain your objective (that is paradise).” – Moderation is the opposite of extravagance.
Every individual is meant to earn in a dignified manner and then spend in a very wise and careful manner. One should never try to impress upon others by living beyond one’s means. Extravagance is forbidden in Islam, Allah says, “Do not be extravagant; surely He does not love those who are extravagant!” [Holy Qur’aan 7: 31]
The Qur’aan regards wasteful buying of food, extravagant eating that sometimes leads to throwing away of leftovers as absolutely forbidden. Allah says, “Eat of the fruits in their season, but render the dues that are proper on the day that the harvest is gathered. And waste not by excess, for Allah loves not the wasters.” [Holy Qur’aan 6: 141]
Demonstrating wastefulness in dress, means of transport, furniture and any other thing is also forbidden. Allah says, “O children of Adam! Wear your apparel of adornment at every time and place of worship, and eat and drink but do not be extravagant; surely He does not love those who are extravagant!” [Holy Qur’aan 7: 31]
Yet extravagance and the squandering of wealth continue to grow in society, while there are many helpless and deprived peoples who have no food or shelter. Just look around you here in Botswana.
Have you noticed how people squander their wealth on ‘must have’ things like designer label clothes, fancy brand whiskey, fancy top of the range cars, fancy society parties or even costly weddings, just to make a statement? How can we prevent the squandering of such wealth?
How can one go on spending in a reckless manner possibly even on things that have been made forbidden while witnessing the suffering of fellow humans whereby thousands of people starve to death each year. Islam has not forbidden a person to acquire wealth, make it grow and make use of it. In fact Islam encourages one to do so. It is resorting to forbidden ways to acquiring and of squandering that wealth that Islam has clearly declared forbidden. On the Day of Judgment every individual will be asked about his wealth, where he obtained it and how he spent it.
In fact, those who do not have any conscience about their wasteful habits may one day be subjected to Allah’s punishment that may deprive them of such wealth overnight and impoverish them. Many a family has been brought to the brink of poverty after leading a life of affluence. Similarly, many nations have lived a life of extravagance and their people indulged in such excesses only to be later inflicted by trials and tribulations to such a point that they wished they would only have a little of what they used to possess!
With the festive season and the new year holidays having passed us, for many of us meant ‘one’ thing – spend, spend, spend. With the festivities and the celebrations over only then will the reality set in for many of us that we have overspent, deep in debt with nothing to show for it and that the following months are going to be challenging ones.
Therefore, we should not exceed the bounds when Almighty bestows His bounties upon us. Rather we should show gratefulness to Him by using His bestowments and favours in ways that prove our total obedience to Him and by observing moderation in spending. For this will be better for us in this life and the hereafter.