The only non-monthend public holiday has brought what it always does – bankruptcy. For butcheries though, this is time to do roaring trade in bones.
Granted, there is the little annoyance for butchers of having to read the lips of yuppie customers who discreetly mouth, ‘Give me P2.50-worth of bones’, when they place an order. If they spoke in a loud enough voice, everyone else in the queue would know that they are broke as hell and they would lose their cool points.
Being loaded is a really good feeling, especially when you have just cashed a government cheque at Bank of Botswana and the teller gives you crisp notes that smell like wealth. The edges of these notes are so sharp that, depending on your immediate needs, you could use them in a physical fight or to skin a goat.
But money is not always easy to come by and throughout history, powerful people in society have always sought to discourage the poor from making money.
They even went to an extent of corrupting the Bible. Scripture says that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ but connivance between clergy and high society edited out ‘the love of’ to make the poor think that the pursuit of wealth is somehow sinful. The legacy of Jesus has also been invoked in this fraud.
However, to cast Jesus as poor in the mainstream socio-economic context, constitutes both a misinterpretation of Scripture and misapplication of logic. The notion of a poor Jesus ignores the fact that he did not follow the normal channels of commerce to acquire commodities. If he wanted red wine, Jesus did not have to stop off at a Liquorama bottle store in central Jerusalem. He had only to use his magical powers to turn water into wine.
Then there is this fanciful notion that ‘money doesn’t make you happy’ but if you take a straw poll, everyone would like to be rich and miserable, not poor and miserable.
All that notwithstanding, being broke is not a bad thing.
You have no payday stress because the budget refuses to balance. You neither get lend-me-money calls from fair-weather friends, relatives and neighbours nor reminders from debt-collection call centres.
Although it is not officially classified as a drug, money can have the same effect on the brain as alcohol, cocaine and other drugs.
There are people whose manner of walk is dramatically altered because they just came into money. Look out for this physical mannerism among the newly rich, newly employed, newly elected into political office as well as the recently promoted and recently paid.
Money induces shopaholism, a mental condition that afflicts both nation-states and individuals. One pathological trait related to shopaholism is the obsessive need to travel far and wide and blow that money. This is not exactly a good thing because each time you get in a vehicle, you are basically endangering your life. Someone with pulas falling out of his pocket would drive to Molepolole to buy the same beer brand available in Gaborone.
Before the government decided to cut student allowances, some of the beneficiaries indulged in all-the-way extravagance that entailed round-the-clock binging on exotic food, even more exotic alcoholic drinks and red-light-district delights from abroad.
In the case of the United States, such shopaholism has sent them around the world on friends-buying, war-causing sprees.
Some of them even went to outer space to collect sand particles on the moon, and still have a plan to pick this and that item from other planets. The poorest nation on earth could never do that.
While they do not classify money as a drug, governments around the world nonetheless have active programmes of fighting money-induced lunacy. They have set up mental hospitals and systems to limit access to money for a majority of the population. The latter explains the difficulty in getting a loan from financial institutions.
It is possible though to still get by in life with other people’s money and thus relieve yourself of the stress that having your own brings. In communities where there is still some semblance of corporate life, you can apply the following survival method. Send out the first born to borrow mealie meal from a neighbour; have the second-born ask for a ‘loan’ from your councillor to buy meat; and, have the first-born’s second-born raid a relative’s vegetable patch while s/he is away attending a funeral. In bars, there is the career lager-beggar who never worries about having to open an empty wallet the morning after and curse him/herself.