Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

Why most black people are not wealthy

by Ramdath Jagessar


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Photo : Ramdath Jagessar

It seems to be true that blacks in Trinidad are not wealthy, when compared to the Indians, the Syrians, Chinese, French creoles and even the Portuguese all around them.

Now it is true blacks have the vast majority of the jobs paid for by the state, the well paid, permanent, cost of living indexed government jobs for life, but is that wealth?

No, sir, good salary is not wealth, unless a portion of it is saved and used to acquire wealth in other areas than government jobs. Even blacks in the oil industry, the highest paying jobs in the country, are not considered to be wealthy.

Wealth comes from private enterprise where the possible profits are not limited like salary jobs. Wealth comes from setting up your own business companies, even from farming and fishing where accumulation of wealth is possible.

Wealth is acquiring useful education that puts you into well paying jobs, or becoming an independent professional whose salary is not fixed.

To cut it short, wealth comes from taking materials or skills and adding value to the materials, or applying the skills in ways that are not limited to monthly or fortnightly salaries.

The real issue with black people is that they are not applying the paths to wealth in any serious way,  and are stuck in the salary road that makes you comfortable at best, but never wealthy.

A bigger issue is simply that blacks are so stupid they refuse to learn from their own experiences, and even worse, they refuse to learn from the experiences of others in the same environment when it comes to acquiring wealth.

Take the case of the Syrians, whom all agree have managed to become very wealthy in a remarkably short period of some 60 years, starting with no financial assets at all.  We all remember the Syrians from the fifties of the last century, WALKING from house to house with bolts of cloth to sell, later moving to bicycles and hand carts, opening little pathetic hardwares and tiny small businesses.

We knew them, went to school with them, and saw them moving up with lightning speed. Today the Syrians own massive businesses, are known as enterprising business people and educated professionals, and are said to have acquired fabulous property holdings and foreign currency.

What have black people learned from the success of their Syrian fellow citizens? Nothing in my book!  All black people could say is that the Syrians are corrupt, they are selling drugs, they are crooked business people - and that is worse than a bad joke. Why haven't black people imitated the Syrians in becoming very wealthy, without necessarily being corrupt, crooked drug dealers?

No big brainwork is needed to see that the Syrians work really hard, they save money, they don't believe in conspicuous consumption, they work to build up the family as a unit, they preserve their conservative culture, their family life, their way of sacrifice for the long term, their determination to educate themselves, their strategy of helping each other and their community, all the good stuff that black people don't have and have never had in Trinidad.

Even black people working for the Syrians in close contact with them daily appear to have learned nothing. They work for the Syrians their whole lives, then retire and collect a pension! As I said, they have learned nothing.

And by the way, the very qualities the Syrians have used in their rise upwards seem to be the same qualities many Indians have used to empower ourselves and acquire wealth over the last 100 years or so.  Yes, yes, black people have sat in school benches next to us Indians, have played cricket and football with us, have gone to university with us, but no they have not started businesses with us, have not become lawyers and doctors and computer professionals with us.

We Indians don't have to go to a party every Saturday night, our men don't all need to have a deputy, we don't have to spend all our income before the next payday, we don't leave fatherless children all round the block, our mothers sit down by the table each night to make sure the kids do their homework, we don't like the idea of living off credit cards and hire purchase. If we can't afford something we don't buy it, we plan for the rest of the year and next year too, not just until month end.   

But we don't tell those things to black people because they don't listen. They believe they have a better lifestyle than us, a better money style too than us cheapo Indians.

Black people know everything important already, so why do they have to learn anything from anybody?


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