Making The Days Count

I want to use this medium to extend my profound gratitude to all my friends, partners, and well-wishers from all over the world, who sent their goodwill messages and prayers to celebrate my 61st Birthday. I was not able to personally respond to each message on social media. I hope you understand my dilemma. I also received personal calls and gifts. I’m overwhelmed by your show of love.

As you have celebrated me, God will also cause people to celebrate you in Jesus name.

As you get older, I noticed that the days run faster, and years seem like months, and the months like weeks. Ironically, there are so many dreams and visions still waiting to be fulfilled. There is also so much demand on your time and resources.

When you hear that your classmates or schoolmates transit into glory, you sometimes worry why there is all the struggling to achieve set objectives? Then you hear of older people transit to glory, and you look at what they achieved in life, and you wonder if you can get to your objectives before that age bracket. Also, you hear of people still breaking records very late in life.

There are times you see people you could have ended up like, and you know you don’t really deserve to be who you are and where you are now. You feel you are not thankful enough; it could have been different. There were things that happened and those that did not happen that could have made the story different. 

As the days roll by, many things are not the way they used to mean to you. Sex, cars, clothes, food, and trips to foreign nations don’t seem to excite me as before. 

Many people desire that I contest for political office, I don’t have the appetite to be a President, Governor, Senator, or minister, not to talk of being a commissioner. I don’t want to continue the hustle and bustle anymore. 

The lockdown showed how physically and mentally tired I was. I could not read books and the Bible, or even pray as I used to do before. I spent today on my farm with my last child and third son. I have not spent such time with him since he left for Europe about seven years back. It’s been so nice having a child at home with us. 

I want to invest more in humanity and in the land. Young people and the soil are the most profitable businesses to invest in. I thank God I started very early as a Youth Sunday School Teacher about 30 years back. Nearly all those I taught are married now with children, and they are all over the continents of the world doing great exploits. I had a slogan of raising up the next generation. I will continue the drive to raise one million Africans who will be better than me in all ramifications. 

We plan to have a unique tertiary institution and finishing school for the next leaders of this country. Agriculture, ICT, Entrepreneurship training, and leadership training will be our focus. We will also have an Early Child Education center.

My appeal to young people is for them to make maximum use of their intellectual capacities; do a great deal of your hustling when you are before my age bracket. Read as much as you can read, pray as much as you can pray, invest as much as you can, and be as frugal as much you can be when you are younger. Make as many networks as you can make when you are younger. Avoid recklessness in food, fermented drinks, fashion, fantasies, females, fast life and flashy lifestyles. 

Pay the price when you have strength and time. Become a brand with time. Branding is building reputation, generating positive discussions around you, and producing results. As you get older, your money will work for you, people will work for you, more intellectually competent people will think for you, and you will oversee them.

Old age is expensive and can be excruciatingly painful without money and comfort. Old age is not the time to learn high jump or somersaulting. Old age is not the time to be shouting, “I receive!” 

Plant the trees, you want to sit under or eat their fruits when you are older, now. What I am doing now is the attempt to fulfill the scriptures that says, “A righteous man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, and a good name is better than riches”. 

Only evil men and women fear what people will say about them when they are dead. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones—William Shakespeare. And I will say the good they have done live in the hearts of men. 

Once more, thanks for your love. 

I want to thank those who are partnering with the production of this post and those who share the posts in different nations. 

God bless you.