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The biggest investment you’ll ever make – bigger than your most successful business, bigger than your retirement fund and bigger than your house – is in your children.
If you make a bad investment, say in a pyramid scheme, you’ll lose your money, but you’ll probably laugh at your stupidity five years later. On the other hand, a mistake you make with your children is most likely to last for 90 years.
Funny, we never think about that, except for people like Mnguni, who retired a few years ago. His payout was big enough to buy him a small heaven and an aeroplane to fly from one cloud nine to another. Instead, he thought about his grandchildren. His view, he said, was that any waste of money by the current generation was theft from the future generations, thus denying them the opportunity to live a better life.
At the moment, we black South Africans have not recovered from severe short termism. For years, life was uncertain. As Steve Biko once said in the dock: “Township life alone makes it a miracle for anyone to live up to adulthood.”
We’ve always lived like the hunted. If it was not the gangsters, it was the police or, as some would believe, the witches and the tokoloshe.
It’s time to free ourselves from the shackles of the now, look beyond our stomachs and immediate desires, and think about the future we will never see. Rebuilding a nation means redoing it from the foundations, and this requires us to love ourselves, our people and their future.
The historical scarcity of resources in our community has bred infinite bragging, and an endless need for applause and appreciation. This is perhaps the root cause for the debilitating, bottomless gluttony and corruption, because the car is never big enough, the hotels are never plush enough, and the holidays never expensive enough.
Social media has made things worse, helping people scale every boundary wall of decency. It has sanitised voyeurism – making it acceptable to peer into someone else’s bedroom or stare at what is on their plates while regressing to our prehuman state of mind.
If you want to get good returns on your investment, always follow your money.
So attend your children’s school meetings with as much interest as you do in your stokvel. Open their books and scrutinise them as thoroughly as you scrutinise your clothing accounts, and if you spend more on your car than on their education, then you have completely lost the plot.
Like Mnguni suggests, success must cascade down the family tree. According to legend, the Makhubus, Makhuvas and the Mngomas were traditional doctors to the kings. We must continue with this tradition. Mothers of Vho-Maines and children of other such clans must instruct their children to study medicine.
The Moagis – the builders – must enable their children to enter the construction trade as architects and civil engineers, and play other roles that will ensure the building of the modern African civilisation.
The Tlous, Ndous and Ndlovus should be the gentle giants that protect our national heritage. Their children should study the science of national parks management and tourism, which have been two of the fastest-growing sectors in the country in the past 20 years.
The world has become a dangerous place, so the Ndabezithas, whose surname means “the bad news to our enemies”, must study military science to protect us, and must go to the world’s best military academies such as West Point in the US, Sandhurst in the UK and PLA National Defence University in Beijing.
There is nothing nepotistic about clans and bloodlines entering the same profession. It paves the way for the younger ones, making it easier to succeed.
Professor William O’Hara, the author of the book Centuries of Success, reminds us that before there was the multinational corporation, there was the family business. It was there before the industrial revolution, and will remain long after the digital age has dissipated. For instance, the oldest known wedding venue, which is a castle nestled in a vineyard in France, the Château de Goulaine, has been in the same family for more than 1 000 years.
Great families that have a lasting legacy are not obsessed with having the best funeral policy – as the adverts on TV try to convince us they do. Instead, they have developed robust knowledge systems that teach their children the ins and outs of their trade, and how to preserve their wealth for future generations.
Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency
