Religious people—at least, in the Islamic tradition—whenever praying for wealth from their Creator often phrase their prayer as asking for ‘righteous wealth.’ The idea is that there is ‘non-righteous wealth,’ that which is earned through illicit, dangerous engagements, deceit, or theft. Religious folks abhor the idea of accumulation by dispossession.
While it is true that many religious people steal, and have been convicted of these crimes, and many fake people—in both state and the pulpit—use religion as cover for theft, I need to clarify that my interest here is in the principle of righteously-acquired wealth.
Then came the super-rich—or those who aspire to be super rich. That is with billions of shillings/yuans (we have moved on) in their accounts; monies they may never consume in their lifetimes, and is often, only acquired dangerously. How do they become content with dispossessing others for their singular benefit?
There is a famous leftist slogan, common in the USA, which goes like, “You do not make a billion dollars, you TAKE a billion dollars.” The idea is that there is no one smart and decent enough to make a billion dollars without depriving others.
Arguably picked from the socialist-communist handbook, as a piece of grand abstraction, the slogan is problematic: history is full of rich men and women with integrity who made their fortunes without stealing from others.
Kings, queens and businesspeople of the “pre-modern” time had immense fortune, either from natural endowments in their ground (such as folks in the Middle East and parts of South East Asia) or from ‘mutually negotiated relationships’ with their subjects and business partners. Malian King Mansa Musa, the richest man to have ever lived, is not known to have deprived anyone on his way to making his $400 billion fortune.
Why do rich people of the “modern time” steal? And by rich people, I do not mean the man in your neighbourhood who owns a supermarket at the end of the street (like my friend, John Musila from Bubulo who owns two supermarkets in Namisindwa.
This one is like us, just a good man). Neither do I mean decent folks such as athletes or artistes. Those are all right. By rich, I mean men (and very few women) in the news; the people covered in both the Crime sections, or the People and Power sections of newspapers, oftentimes called tycoons.
I mean friends of government enjoying contracts on different items, or the many oil and gold thieves working with their governments to steal from poor African countries. Or in our crudest case as we know them in Africa, politicians—and the friends and relatives of politicians. Why do these people steal from the poor?
In my assessment, it is not greed or their impoverished childhoods (many decent folks are born in poverty). Greed is the symptom of a rather bigger condition. I have two related explanations. The first explanation is material-structural, and the second is cultural, sociological.
What is undeniable is that the rich people of the modern times—from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet to all of them (I have no local examples of these folks, but a name could pass) make their money through dispossessing others. They do not make a billion-dollars; they take a billion dollars.
Why does this come so natural to them? Firstly, this is the history of capitalism; it is the history of our modern present. Stealing. With the invention of private property in the English countryside, those who became rich fought and killed millions of peasant farmers to occupy their land.
It is in this period that the quest for labour to exploit on these farms becomes more urgent and the trans-Atlantic slave trade
is born. Colonialism followed because European peoples and their governments had to steal more to survive.
In some telling examples, Britain alone stole $45 trillion from India (the US economy is $25 trillion), and Europe, between 1960 and 2010 stole $152 trillion from Africa (only through unequal exchange). But they are still stealing.
That is the structure of the world. Wherever capitalism reigns, theft is the order of the day. Only magnitudes and techniques vary, but you cannot separate so-called “free markets” from stealing.
At a cultural, more personal level, we are living the scourge of the Enlightenment period. The age claimed to have liberated man from chains of religion and tradition. Consider, for example, the fact that pre-modern people (or even decent religious folks) talk about death many times.
With this, they remind themselves that since they are alive for a short period, there is no need to deprive others. On the contrary, in our so-called modern time, we are obsessed with living forever. Thus, health, exercise and our bodies matter more than our legacies.
Do you think Museveni and co. talk about death in their circles?
So, enabled by the network and structures of theft, at the sight of any opportunity, a hitherto decent person of the modern time, quickly transforms into a thief. This is the story of many village folks, with good “pre-modern” sensibilities, joining our modern man, a capitalist-connected man, Bwana Museveni.
yusufkajura@gmail.com
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.
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