GREED AND LAZINESS AS THE ENABLERS OF PERSONAL, COMMUNAL, SOCIETAL AND NATIONAL FUTURES. By KEMKA S. IBEJI

Art by Ugonna Ibeji 

Greed and laziness are the two main enhancers of crimes, poverty and being cheated. This is the current problem that threatens the future of our society today and indirectly endangering the development of our youths who are the future and hope of tomorrow. This is also found, even more dangerously, in our political class.

One may be asking how greed and laziness are killing the future, destroying the youths and threatening development in our society. They enhance crimes by making one to want what he or she does not deserve. This inevitably leads to crime of all kinds. It also makes them to assume that those who have succeeded in the past were merely lucky and never put in anything. They also make people lack self worth and reduces self esteem. And when these happen, human dignity will quickly start to diminish. The greedy and lazy do not want to take a stand because they do not want to offend anyone even if they are wrong. They do not speak the truth. They do not want to take any decision or action and will avoid making choice because they are always afraid of taking responsibility. With all these, they float, they steal, they are unreliable, untrustworthy and irresponsible. At the edge of their failure, they take up crime to preserve self or life. This is a natural progression.

Greed and laziness aid your way into poverty because they will always lead you astray. Greed disorients you from being focused, creates unhealthy habits and competitions, increases propensities to steal and unfailingly disorganise people. Laziness makes you imagine unreasonable things and hold them tenaciously as the true way to go, keeps you busy in idleness, takes away creativity from you like greed and gives you hope in hopeless realms. Both greed and laziness lead to failure in life. They always keep their victims busy, committed, engaged and active for a lifetime. For those they leave, they usually abandon them when the time is gone and over. Except such people are dragged out, redeemed or eventually forced out from greed and laziness by a mentor, a helper or mental education. Even the very successful people, when captured by greed and laziness, they begin to go back and down.

Greed and laziness also makes their victims vulnerable to fraudsters, cheats, criminals and the likes. Greed and laziness are able to do this because they are bad killers of good thinking. Greed and laziness are best described as bad and wrong emotions. When you remember that logic which is the science of good reasoning admonishes avoidance of emotions, then you will begin to appreciate how dangerous bad emotions will be. If therefore greed and laziness are really bad emotions, one will fairly understand how they operate by separating people from thinking and reasoning very well. When your strength of reasoning is killed or gravely diminished, you will definitely become vulnerable to wrong ideas and anything will begin to go in your judgment. Things that naturally ought to be unreasonable, unthinking and foolish will start to be accepted, admired and admitted by you. Even things that are brazenly and clearly unimaginable and fruitless will be very attractive to you once you are engulfed by these bad emotions.

Now one could figure out why things are going bad in our society today in Nigeria and Africa. When both men and women, leaders and followers, religious leaders and their congregation, actors and their audience, young and old, teachers and students, government and the people are greedy and lazy. No wonder the level of embezzlement, lack of infrastructure, death of our educational system, growth, enlargement, avarice, and flamboyance of the religious and political idlers are blossoming. When one believes that a politician who is ready to buys his way into office will work. When people believe that getting water, oil and other religious stuff from the pastor, reverend, priest, imam, the church or mosque will make him or her be successful than knowledge, work and taking the right actions.

How else do you explain it when political leaders like governors and Presidents are merely complaining and giving excuses for their failures than getting down to work? They now take all the time and resources of the commonwealth to give reasons why they fail or will fail than putting down their feet and working out solutions for which they were allowed into power. The new trend is for politicians to hire and pay their fellows like the cheap, greedy and lazy youths who take over the media and especially the social media defending failures and inefficiencies. These are the works of greed and laziness.

Until we chase away greed and laziness from our society, we may keep attacking the wrong problems in the land.

KEMKA S. IBEJI

Is a Thinker