Praises Amaiyo

If you were not born into wealth, If you never inherited huge money, If you never won millions from a lottery, If you are not into entertainment, If you are not into high paying tech, If you are not an elite sportsperson, If your parents are not rich and you are from an average/struggling family in Nigeria before you travelled abroad; Chasing generational wealth as a primary priority being a first-generation immigrant from Nigeria, whose family back home is not wealthy, is very unrealistic. Let me explain. If you left Nigeria as the first person in your family to escape that economic hellhole, what we call japa, we are actually economic refugees. You will most likely be working in an average salary job that won’t pay too much money after tax deductions. You will have many monthly bills to pay (rent, light/energy, WiFi, internet, phone, water, council, transport/car loan, food, etc); and many times, you may also have school fees debt to repay, you may have your parents to support and your siblings to fund. So if what I just described is your reality, and it is infact the reality for many of us immigrants, please how is generational wealth your primary priority? How can it be? The average person in the uk working full time will make £1,500-£2,500 monthly after tax. By the time you pay all the bills I listed above and try to send something home, again I ask you, where is this fantasy of “generational wealth” going to come from? Don’t get me wrong: It’s okay to want generational wealth for your children and your children’s children after them. But what I am saying is that, you may not be the wealthy one now, but you can kickstart the process that two or three generations down the line, will be wealthy. But don’t get obsessed trying to be wealthy and feel like a failure when you don’t. Find consolation in knowing you have made a decision that puts your children in a far better starting point in life than your own parents did for you. Let me tell you a story: There was an Indian man who migrated from Pakistan to Kenya in 1937. He had a son who migrated to the uk, studied medicine, met and married an Indian woman pharmacist in uk who also migrated to uk from Tanzania. His son, the doctor in uk, made huge sacrifices to send his own son (the man’s grandson) to oxford university. The grandson graduated first class. Many years down the line, in 2022, that Indian man’s grandson became the British first ever Asian prime minister. This is the true life story of the last uk prime minister Rishi Sunak. Nobody knows his father or his grandfather. But it was their hard-work, sacrifices, courage to always seek a better life even if it meant making the tough choice to travel to a new country; this is what eventually resulted in the generational success that Rishi Sunak is today. I think a lot of us Nigerians tend to worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. The idea of “building wealth” from a place of average earnings is an unrealistic notion that will only cause personal disappointment and innate resentment at oneself- even though you are absolutely doing well for yourself. The obsession of comparison with others - who you don’t know what families they are from and what work they actually do- can make you lose sight of how far you have come in your own journey and how much you have accomplished in your own story. Your journey. Your story. Your success. This is what matters. This is what is important. Not what someone else, or anybody else, thinks about it. You know yourself. You know your journey. You know your story. Be proud of how far you’ve come. Don’t ever allow anybody make you feel like a nobody in your own story, a story where you have successfully made yourself something out of almost nothing. Remember: Life is in phases and in stages. And as long as your today is better than your yesterday, you are still in the game, you can still win and your story is not over yet.