23/08/2026
How to be poor.
Poverty is not just the absence of money. I’m sure you have heard that from a lot of people, but what exactly is it?
If you ask me that, here is what my answer would be:
It is the dangerous tradition of repeating the same mistakes every generation and baptizing them as “a way of life.”
It is the farmer who plants the same crop every year with the same poor method, watches the same insects destroy his harvest, and still expects a miracle.
It is the young man who spends his last savings on a phone, not to build a business, but to take pictures inside borrowed cars, just to impress people who don’t care.
It is the family that borrows money to throw an elaborate burial, weddings, birthday parties, inviting musicians, hiring canopies, killing cows, yet cannot raise that same money to send their children to school or a place to acquire a skill.
It is the graduate who waves a certificate like a trophy and refuses to learn a digital or vocational skill because he believes certificate will speak for him. And when no job comes, he blames the government while scrolling social media all day looking for those like him instead of those to learn from.
It’s the boy who borrows to buy an expensive car and struggles all year to pay that debt while borrowing more to service the car and his luxury. He lives on the edge not because he’s building a business but because he must “belong.”
It is the trader who makes daily sales but spends every profit on food and drinks with unfriendly friends without ever saving or reinvesting a kobo.
It is the young woman who prays for a rich husband but never invests in herself, because marriage is her business plan.
It is the man who earns little but insists on marrying four wives and raising ten children he cannot feed.
It is the politician’s community that claps when he donates rice during elections, forgetting he stole the budget meant to build them hospitals and schools.
It is the cultural belief that every festive period must be celebrated with new clothes, even if it means pawning your dignity for debt or bleeding your savings and business just to be one of the talk-of-the-towns.
The painful reality is this:
Poverty is not inherited. Poverty is repeated.
It is not the color of your skin, nor the soil of your village. It’s the culture of your decisions.
And until someone in the family wakes up and dares to break the cycle by thinking differently, acting differently, investing differently, the poverty of your grandfather will become the poverty of your father, and the poverty of your father will become your inheritance.
Poverty is not a curse. Poverty is a stubborn culture. And only those who rebel against it ever escape.
———
From the coconut head small boy that you should not take advice from.
-KAA
