The neat queues at supermarkets and other business ventures fascinate me. We make orderly queues to spend money.
We rarely complain about prices; we are not even sure if the prices on the shelves are the...
same ones we pay at the till. We just buy goods and feel good about it. Only that the goodness is brief; material things only satisfy for a short period of time.
Occasionally, but rarely for hustlers, we even fly out to other countries to shop. Shopping is the easiest thing to do. You may not even have money to spend, you can borrow formally or informally. A huge debt industry exists to help us spend money we don’t have.
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Even in the informal sector where prices can be negotiated, it’s still a simple transaction: agree on price, pay and go. Add the use of mobile money platforms, and spending has never been easier. Today you can even shop online and have your product delivered to your house. Paying for services like power or water is even easier.
Contrast all that ease of spending with the hustles we go through to earn that money, from waking up early to being rained on, facing run-ins with regulators like kanjo, going hungry, getting conned, and a myriad of other problems.
Why is it so easy to spend money? Why can’t earning it be as easy? Even children who have never earned a coin know how to spend. It’s the way we are socialised and even schooled. We spend lots of time focusing on consumption, spending.
We spend little time learning how money is made, the stuff of entrepreneurship. It does not matter whether it’s at household level or national levels, there's too much emphasis on spending. Even our counties lament they get too little money, not about how that money is generated.
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This disconnect has even spawned corruption where you can cut corners, cheat to get money to spend. Do the corrupt ever wonder how the money they steal is made? The hustlers more than the formally employed know about how money is made. One wishes more knew.
That would make a big difference to our economy. Hustlers know how to make money, not from textbooks but from hard reality. Policymakers at all levels should endeavour to ensure that making money is as easy as spending it.
The biggest difference between developed and developing countries is the focus on both earning and spending. Developed countries focus on both.
We focus too much on spending, leaving earning as a mystery or making it very difficult. Seen hawkers or Jua Kali artisans doing their work? We should focus on both ends of the economic spectrum. Both earning and spending are economic realities that we must live with.
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