You can be rich without all that money. Try as much as you can to go to bed thinking of a happy mental energy moment and get up thinking how to channel that productive spirit every day. It does not mean you will face pleasurable moments every day but make a happy satisfying time to counter-balance difficult tasks ahead. In other words, put a smile on your face to bed and when you wake up. Life gets shorter every day and little or major life events will test you.

Mental Energy is love and desire like basic need after food and shelter; but these are instinctual. They may change or not last, so cannot be reliable every time. Most depend on prayers to gods that never fails, sun or goodwill that made a difference to others or deliverance when we repent from our evil ways (born again) or the day Chi/Osha saved us or inspiration for our tombstones.

It is not those that face misfortune and calamity that lose; it is those that overcome most that win. What puts a smile on our face to bed most of the time is what changes we make in others after we have developed the capacity in ourselves not so much toys and gifts we spoil ourselves with. You can never have enough of those. The least we expect from those that have benefited from us the better because love and desire in return, to be closer can be disappointing.

Our greatest disappointment is accumulating everything and still wanting more because we cannot make do with whatever we have. Money is not enough if we spend more than we have, houses are not enough since we think we can sleep in two places and drive two or more luxury cars at the same time. More disturbing is wondering why the guy next door has more with only one head. Even looking up to African children for pension is a dwindling passé.

One of the factors nobody accepts is creed in our old age to make up for lost or wasted pension. It turns many into looters in a hurry to suddenly provide for their old age. In a country where we do not get regular salaries, we cannot expect regular pensions. Some die on pension queue.

As we get older or younger, most of the mistakes made are known, as the good decisions that helped us along. If we cannot learn from them and make good life onwards, we cannot expect a different result. Most people know where they are going barring misfortune or calamity by the age of thirty. It is harder to change circumstances in your forties or fifties. Those of us that have waited too long, to save for old age will be lucky not to die from exhaustion working too late.

So the question as always is if you are so smart, why are you not rich? The answer is, if you are so rich, why are you so stupid to lose all that money. While growing up in Nigeria, many of our friends with parents outside the city saved and send money home while we could not wait to go back to our parents and ask for more. Many of us were not paying rent or for food at home.

If young men and women are brought up learning to pay their ways: rent, food, transportation and sending money home, they must have cultivated an habit on how to conserve the same salary as ours and make it last. A friend cried that he never knew his father owed the bank so much on the house they lived in and the business they had, until his father passed away. As the first born he had to manage the business with a full time job. He was lucky he had skill for a job.

We all have Mental Energy, some waste or misdirect it. Believe it or not misfortune or calamity comes as part of life we all face it at some point. If you do not make it in your younger days, it is not impossible but harder to do or engage in corruption, 419, drugs and plastics as we get older. It is humiliating to see grandfather or grandmother caught at the airport smuggling drugs.

One behavior common to poor unhappy people is lack of care and preservation of what they have. While the rich keep their old rags and belongings accumulating more or less, the poor waste and dispose most of their belongings or leave them to rot while the rich keep and shine theirs. When they pass businesses and belongings to children or the poor, it never last as long as the wise would keep them. It is a behavior cultivated early in life that is hard to shake off.

So when we say empty vessels make the most sound, we mean the poor are either conspicuous spenders or can easily waste what they have. This leads to lack of satisfaction, unhappiness and gloom going to bed miserable and waking up in anger with your family. After all, if each is given a million, before the end of one year, some will become billionaires while those condemned to perpetual poverty will pass their millions to the billionaires by wastefulness and profligacy.

Deficient Mental Energy and Discipline have spilled into the social fabric and quest for political life known as “Do Or Die” and “Stomach Infrastructure”. It all started at home before it got outside the families. It used to be that those that were not trained at home would be trained outside. Today, those that were not trained at home are rewarded with political and national honors. Decent people avoid thugs and vagabonds making their way to the top.

Humble people in the communities are today’s silent majority. While it is true that there are those that have recoiled and joined them because they cannot beat them, many others just shy away from trouble. They avoid those they consider evil but they may not be able to avoid those that call themselves friends who in fact are enemies within homes. Until most decent people form a quorum and overthrow decadence in our communities, we shall bear the consequences.

Mental energy still uplifts most Africans in varieties of ways. We have to be careful when we label all Nigerians corrupt. Not all of us in Africa live in the city. Many hardworking people that thought they were set for life lost it all when Structural Adjustment turned all their savings into Zimbabwe dollars. So when we say anyone that has taken or given bribe is corrupt, majority of Nigerians are not in the position to take or give bribe.