One thing my father taught me about generosity

One thing about most parents is that you can’t play games with them, especially when they’re the disciplinary type. My father was a teacher and a strict discipliner. He was the type that he believed in the dictum that he said, spare the stick and spoil the child. So I couldn’t really play ball, ride a bike, jump and laugh with my father.

By a twist of fate, when I finished college, my father fell ill and never fully recovered until he passed away. But one day before he died, my dad surprised me. He said, Paul, sit down, let me teach you about generosity.

But before I share with you what my father taught me, here is a summary about my father. My father was a teacher. He was not just an ordinary teacher, he was a principal. After bank managers, teachers were the most respected people in society at the time. My father had what was known as Higher Elementary in those days, that was in the early fifties. Higher Elementary was probably the equivalent of a West African Examinations Council Certificate. But there is a big difference. My dad was taught by the “white man” (the British). They instilled in him a sense of duty, hard work and community. There were hardly any other teachers of his caliber that I knew of.

My father excelled in agriculture and won awards. His barn was filled with a variety of yams, pumpkins, and other crops. Whenever farm shows were held in the catchment, district, or division, my father invariably came out on top. I vividly remember some of the displays of him being bigger, taller and fatter than me. Some were so large that they had to be transported by hand-pushed trucks. Teachers from surrounding schools flocked to learn from the wizard, my father.

My father was straight as an arrow when it came to integrity. All the relief materials during the civil war, amounting to thousands of tons (or millions of Naira if you like), were entrusted to my father. Interestingly, even when we were starving, he never took a pin, not even a can of sardines, home. I guess he thought we weren’t refugees. So I hated it for that reason. However, when I hear government people talk about corruption today, I remember my father with pride.

My father was generous to a fault. Needless to say, he trained all of his brothers. They called him major. None called him by his first name. In church matters, he never came second. He made the largest donation of a hundred guineas (the equivalent of about a million dollars in today’s money) when my town’s Catholic cathedral was erected in the early 1960s. For the church’s donation, the Catholic pontiff, Pope John XXIII granted him a papal certificate.

He awarded numerous scholarships to indigent students wherever he went. However, my father never planned the recognition. One thing bothered me. My father never went to college, unlike most of his peers, contemporaries, and even his youngsters. One day I called my father to homework. I asked him why he didn’t go to college and mentioned the names of his contemporaries and youths who went. The answer my father gave me stunned me and set off alarm bells in my head, mind and heart.

My father said he never went to college because he was never nominated by the church. It was incredible! This was a man who received a papal award for his contribution to the growth of the church. My grandfather had previously donated the land where the church is built. So why didn’t the church nominate him to go to college? I asked my father. My father dropped a bomb. He said that the church does not like people who tell the truth. Since then, I have upheld my father’s statement about the Catholic Church as evangelical truth.

By a stroke of luck, I got a job with one of the country’s federal agencies after graduating from college. The agency was created by the World Bank in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Federal Government of Nigeria. It was one of the best-run federal agencies in the country. The pay was one of the best, much better than commercial banks back then. I was in my game. I had been hurt. I picked up where my father left off when it came to generosity.

I made sure the whole clan was fed. I made sure to put all my cousins ​​on my payroll. I extended a helping hand to my brothers. At the height of my innocence, my father set me aside one day and taught me a lesson. He told me, almost in passing, “If they gave medals for all acts of generosity, there would be no room on my chest for medals.” My father never said another word on the subject until he breathed his last. At about the same time I read a quote from Machiavelli, which said: “If you earn a reputation for generosity, you will come to injury.”