ARE YOU HUMBLE?

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
Saint Augustine

Humility is one of the cardinal principles to be observed on the road to prosperity. It has been defined as the quality of being courteously respectful of others. Of late, the following expressions have been taken to mean humility; “Yes sir Massa, boss, and the rest”. But humility entails more than this superficial affectations.

In Proverbs 22:4, the Bible says that “humility and the fear of the Lord bringest wealth and honor and life”. Most often, our ambitions and aspirations imprisons our conscience. The resultant is abuse of other people, chronic aggressiveness, arrogance, disrespect, and others. Respecting people for who they are, believing in their potential to excel and celebrating their success, no matter how little it may be, is a prerequisite for a humble life.

Humility doesn’t mean sycophancy. Many people who have made such correlation have become perpetual boot-lickers of certain arrogant and disrespectful individuals. Humility should be a holistic syndrome which should manifest physically and spiritually, which is characterized by constructive criticisms, selflessness, clean speech and non-judgementality. In James 4:11-12, the Bible says that “Don't criticize and speak evil about each other, dear brothers. If you do, you will be fighting against God's law of loving one another, declaring it is wrong. But your job is not to decide whether this law is right or wrong, but to obey it. Only he who made the law can rightly judge among us. He alone decides to save us or destroy. So what right do you have to judge or criticize others unnecessarily? (Last word and emphasis mine).

If humility is exercised in the home, school, workplaces, and other spheres of our life, strife and vile agitations would be buried.

AND GOD SAID, “LET AFRICANS READ, AND ….”

Is it true that Africans, for that matter Ghanaians have allergy for books? Is the saying “to hide something from an African, put it into a book” credible? Let me narrow it down, how many books do we read in a month, or a year? And how many of us even read our Bibles and Qurans?

A particular school of thought has it that the under-developed nature of Africans can be reduced to the fact they refuse to read to broaden their horizon. Therefore, our ideas are sadly shallow and limited to our immediate surroundings. This phenomenon is clearly demonstrated in our educational institutions. A teacher would give a particular example in a class, and during exams, the class would repeat that same example.

Reading alone isn’t the key to emancipation from cerebral malnutrition and intellectual poverty. I’m saying this because transformation in one’s life depends on what you read, how you critic what you read, how you apply what you read and even the relevance of what you read. Reading certain unnecessary stuff like porn magazine is a complete waste of time and effort! It is God’s admonition that you read things that would enable to make meaningful input in the development of society.

I hope sharing this with you would challenge us to ‘repent’ from our anti-book possession. Let’s equip ourselves mentally for the challenges ahead. God bless us all.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY SHOULD BE LEGALLY COMPULSORY

Social responsibility refers to a set of obligations a business establishment or an individual owes to the environment in which it operates. This ethical ideology enable entities to build rapport with the communities in which it operates and also offer appreciable compensation for the adverse effect its operation would bring to the community.

Some school of thought would express that higher returns on investment would morally compel entities to channel a chunk of it into their social responsibility. That’s true but on a scale of hundred, I would give twenty (20) to that childish thought. Corporate social responsibility is not about satisfying communities with bread crumbs, it is a matter of having the interest of the community in the first place, respecting the dignity and culture of the inhabitants, and designing ameliorating packages that would tackle relevant and sensitive situations in the community. To effectively realize this, social responsibility should be legally compulsory.

To start with, introducing legal instruments into social responsibility would ensure sanity and effective compliance to environmental standards. This calls for a well-resourced body to monitor the activities of entities, especially entities whose operations pose a greater threat to the society. This brings oil and gas, waste-management, mining, telecommunications, and lumbering businesses into mind. Failure to monitor firms of this kind makes the society susceptible to a lot of severe environmental hazards such as desertification, ozone layer depletion, land destruction, etc.

Also, it must be noted that social responsibility is more than doing something that would be beneficial to the society. If left voluntary, entities would channel resources into areas that would not only be cost effective to them, but also irrelevant to the needs of the people. For instance, imagine a company providing TV sets to a highly illiterate community. That’s why it is prudent for legal mechanisms to be instituted. A testimony of the effectiveness of making social responsibility legally compulsory is the BP oil spill. Not only did the environment agencies ensure that the BP executives clear the mess they created, but also an executive fiat came in to see to it that proper compensation packages are made to the affected communities.

To conclude, the Government of Ghana recognized the essence of this long ago and established the Environmental Protection Agency to protect, co-manage and enhance the environment of Ghana. This is a manifestation of the argument I’ve been making.