It is that time of the year when most of us will be lining up at money transfer agencies to receive the handouts our family and friends from abroad are sending to us in the name of ‘money for chop Christmas;’ which got me thinking.
By the way, this is more of a note to self but I figured there might one or two things in it that you may want to know.
OK! So my elder brother has a way of messing with me (humans and their idiosyncrasies). He works in the investment arm of one those Wall Street banks. Every 2 months or so, he has these “sale targets” he has to meet, and when he does he gets a performance bonus.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. Every time he gets a bonus like this, he logs on to his Western Union account and sends me $50. Nothing more, nothing less. $50. Why? Two reasons. It’s a derisory amount and he cynically asks me to use it to buy pofpof. Secondly he feels like I will be ashamed to fill a Western Union form to receive 25,000FCFA, give or take, depending on the exchange rate. And I am.
I actually hate taking that amount. I always feel like the teller is judging me when typing on her computer. They are probably like “Wow, this good-looking, well-dressed guy must be really broke to wait in line for 25K. And whoever is sending it must be even more broke. The minimum we see is $100.”
So, I worked out a system. I never take money from the same place (lmao). And I never do so in my neighbourhood, and it’s always in the most obscure and empty agencies that I do my transactions. I’m touchy like that. Eff your judgements and don’t forget to use a condom.
I cringe every time he sends an unsolicited WhatsApp message with money transfer details. But afterwards I’m like, eff it. With that money I can pay my electricity and water bills and have some money left over to buy a bag of rice and groundnut oil.
But here is the issue. A couple of days ago, I read an interesting article on the internet. It said that my brother’s troublesome $50 was part of the $60 billion dollars that was sent every year to Africa by Africans in the diaspora. I felt a tremor in my legs when I heard that. So I called up a friend who works at the African Development Bank. How much does Africa get in foreign aid every year?
$50 billon, he said. I asked him how much of that money is actually used and how much embezzled? He scoffed and said “that is the million dollar puzzle.”
I daresay a quarter of that money is embezzled. But it shows that our parents and brothers and sisters abroad send more money to us than we get in foreign aid! What they send is actually 3% of Africa’s $2 trillion dollars GDP. Go figure!
Hey. You know that American guy in the Yahoo News comments section whose comment on any African news is ‘let’s stop sending them our aid’? Next time, tell him to stick that fact up his arse. But I digress.
$60 billion is a lot of money. It is 2.5 times the GDP of Cameroon. And if anything it shows two things. One: It shows that our government which specialises in accusing the diaspora in trying to destabilise the country has its proverbial head up its arse and has been doing nothing short of throwing the baby out with its flawed conception of what it thinks is the bathwater.
Two: We need to all sit together and come up with a plan of how to use that money more strategically. I am going to focus more on this part because as far the government and people like our minister of communication/National Vuvuzela is concerned there’s no point bothering about them.
We all (the young and conscious generation) need to start thinking more about using the financial manna (well, it’s not exactly free money) to put it into more sustainable investments that will make us grow, and perhaps pull up two or three or more people economically along with us.
Ask yourself this question; What is it that we receive money mostly for, from abroad? -- Health issues, School fees, Burial, Birthday parties and pocket money…Right?
For us back at home who receive transfer payments; While the first two above cannot be dealt with otherwise because of a poor system in place, the last three plus other reasons you may have thought of, can certainly be managed. For example, is it worth spending 10 million to bury someone, when we can do that for 5 million and use the balance to open up a business which might make more millions? Do I really need to celebrate that birthday party and splash up my Facebook timeline when I could have used that 500K that my boyfriend/girlfriend/sugar mommy sent me to invest in a business? – I know people in real life that have spent upwards of 300k on their birthday party, burrowing money to do so.
And to those abroad, you have to start thinking on the long-term impact of the lengths to which your transfer payments can go. I bet you if you sum up what you have sent back home over the last 5 years, you will be shocked at how far that money can go.
Now, I know it’s not always easy and people have REAL problems here and sometimes people abroad can’t do more than to send those $100 at the times when they send them. I also understand how difficult it is for many families and how those transfer payments are used up.
But we should all have some kind of reawakening. That $100 is a drop in a large bucket that could significantly change the face of Africa over the next 10 years if put to good use. Our brothers abroad need to understand how far those dollars can go economically, and we at home need to learn to turn every dollar we receive into a sustainable three and there are numerous occasions where we are able to do so, if only we pause and think.
For my part, I called my brother yesterday and told him to keep all the $50 he “annoys” me with in a piggy bank. He can send that to me at the end of the year. I’ll find a business where I can invest 300K in, and heaven knows there are many of them here in Cameroon.
- Wandji Wilfred