We live in a society of neglected fishermen
Its like attempting to help a hungry town by supplying fish to the hungry while avoiding donating nets, education and fishing boats to the town’s struggling fishermen.
You see, if you donate to the fishermen, they’ll provide more than enough fishes to the town and even sell to neighbouring town thereby making the town self sufficient. They won’t need further donations.
Growing children in the town will aspire to be fishermen.
When people in our society today want to give to business owners they give it as an investment that must be paid back in cash or kind with all due legal documents signed.
Whatever happened to donating and not asking for anything in return?
That one is a sin?
Your friend is struggling to come through in her business of selling rice, then you take a huge some of money to go donate bags of rice to some motherless babies’ home that you can’t even track how much people have donated to them in the past month and what they have done with all the money.
Same goes for that begged in the streets, you can’t keep any account of how much they have collected for the day, the month, the year, they’ll just collect yours to add to it all.
Matter of fact, most beggars on the streets are far richer than you.
They usually stay at busy spots by the city. You pass by and drop N500 for the beggar. That looks little But then 10,000 to 100,000 people pass by, can you count how many other people have dropped N500 after you?
Guess what? You’ll still see them at that spot the following day, week, year, no matter how much they collect.
No accountability.
But the society we live in today has made it a taboo for us to give money to our friends, class mates, hood mates, business mates that are struggling to survive. I am not talking about lending them money or or investing in them for which they have to pay back. What happened to cold calling them one morning
“hey bro, I see what you are doing I want to donate to it to encourage your game, if there is any other thing you think I can afford to do for you, please let me know”
No rewards in heaven for that kind of giving right? No, there sure is. The giving specified by most holy books is giving to the poor and the NEEDY.
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Funny enough, your friend struggling through business falls perfectly into these two categories — they are poor because they don’t have enough money to break even in their business and they are needy because they need that money.
Giving bags of rice to that needy home won’t solve any problem for the society because no matter how many bags of rice you give to that motherless babie’s home they’d still be there tomorrow.
What happened to donating to that young lady in the city that is championing the fight against rape, which turns out to be one of the reasons there are children in the orphanage home?
What of donating to that young man sensitizing people against HIV which kills some parents rendering their children orphans?
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They are doing a great job housing the orphans, but then in as much as you are giving to them, the poor in the streets etc, remember the poor fishermen in your phone’s contact list.
What if that woman that sells pepper by the street corner? No one donates to her. She has not eaten since morning but no one cares because she is not out there in the streets begging or up there in the pulpit begging.
Most of us give to the pastors because we have the impression that they are giving it to the poor in the streets, but the church suffers the same problem with the poor in the streets — they don’t expose their accounting records to the congregation.
No one knows exactly how much the church collected the week before as compared to how much they helped the needy with.
All we see is a 15,000 seater church with over 2 service per Sunday and 2 mid week services show up with 20 bags of rice to give to the needy. Once in 3 months. How much did the church spend in worker’s salaries?
How much did they spend in church maintenance?
How much did they receive in individual donations from members?
How much did people pay in tithe? (10% of the income of 15,000 people X 2 services)
No one knows.
This runs into hundreds of millions of naira per month, but all we see is pastor show up once in 6 months and dashes a 1.5 million naira car to one member.
Look, if we want this society to move forward, we have to help our fisher men by ourselves.
Donate to the poor, donate to the needy, but remember friend, donate to your fishermen too.
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