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PressRoom
Guest
Families are awesome and valuable. They are incredible supports come what may, but unfortunately this has been replaced with dependence – that is fast tearing families apart.
From a nuclear family of six, with extended relations, I have so many stories of this, and understand how exactly this works in various families. It is not unusual. It is a situation of one person who is successful, and if they happen to come from a poor family or have relatives with extreme financial hardships, they become the bank rollers for these relatives. In fact, they are sucked dry to the bone – to the point where they feel their families and loved ones would even have the skins off their bodies, if they could.
As a writer with a knowledge of our cultural set up, particularly for poor families whose bread-winner (usually the father) dies early, the other members are left shattered, and struggle their way through until there is another bread-winner. In many cases, the eldest child or whoever is successful in that household takes up the responsibility and cares for the mother and younger ones.
Image: informationng.com
This is no bad thing, and indisputably families – your people – are an integral part of one’s life. They should be taken care of to the best of one’s abilities, but should not be dependent on one individual for the entire family’s survival.
We've had cases of children denouncing their families – not because of hatred but because his/her fortune had been taken advantaged of, and had to do that to get a life. The story of Emmanuel Adebayor and his family is still fresh in our memories – a story of a successful child, who did his best to save his family from hard times, but was taken advantage of until he had to burst out.
Adebayor said he woke from a nap in his own house in France to find his brothers holding a knife to his throat, demanding money they felt he should give them. He had earlier made some cash sacrifices to save both his elder and younger siblings from hardship, and to help them have a life of their own. The Togolese striker accuses Rotimi, his younger brother, of stealing shirts signed by the late Marc-Vivien Foe and Zinedine Zidane, among other things, over the years. He refutes the accusation that he stole phones from a football academy in France, which Adebayor said he paid for, and said he funded Rotimi and a friend’s trip to Dubai to try to make a career, only for him to return after four days.
Adebayor's story is not strange. We all have such around us. It typifies how dependence kills our families. Need to say that some family members are parasites. They depend heavily on whoever is the bread-winner in their family, and fail to take responsibility for their own lives.
In some extreme situations, when such bread-winners die, the family members gang up around his wealth and decide how it should be shared. Except with strong legal intervention in the distribution of wealth, such family members leave the deceased’s immediate family to suffer. They always claim that their ‘son’ laboured so hard for them to enjoy, because after all, blood is thicker than water.
What should be the most important single concern in our society today is personal responsibility. Societal systems that encourage dependency destroy the capacity of individuals to achieve their own goals. It is not possible for someone else to be responsible for others.
Societal structures that encourage dependence harm the very society itself. One of the pillars of a sane society is personal responsibility. In order to be productive, individuals must think for themselves, pursue their truths as they know them, and earn their happiness. Independent thinkers who are innovative, creative, and personally responsible make human flourishing possible. Not pests.
From a nuclear family of six, with extended relations, I have so many stories of this, and understand how exactly this works in various families. It is not unusual. It is a situation of one person who is successful, and if they happen to come from a poor family or have relatives with extreme financial hardships, they become the bank rollers for these relatives. In fact, they are sucked dry to the bone – to the point where they feel their families and loved ones would even have the skins off their bodies, if they could.
As a writer with a knowledge of our cultural set up, particularly for poor families whose bread-winner (usually the father) dies early, the other members are left shattered, and struggle their way through until there is another bread-winner. In many cases, the eldest child or whoever is successful in that household takes up the responsibility and cares for the mother and younger ones.
Image: informationng.com
This is no bad thing, and indisputably families – your people – are an integral part of one’s life. They should be taken care of to the best of one’s abilities, but should not be dependent on one individual for the entire family’s survival.
We've had cases of children denouncing their families – not because of hatred but because his/her fortune had been taken advantaged of, and had to do that to get a life. The story of Emmanuel Adebayor and his family is still fresh in our memories – a story of a successful child, who did his best to save his family from hard times, but was taken advantage of until he had to burst out.
Adebayor said he woke from a nap in his own house in France to find his brothers holding a knife to his throat, demanding money they felt he should give them. He had earlier made some cash sacrifices to save both his elder and younger siblings from hardship, and to help them have a life of their own. The Togolese striker accuses Rotimi, his younger brother, of stealing shirts signed by the late Marc-Vivien Foe and Zinedine Zidane, among other things, over the years. He refutes the accusation that he stole phones from a football academy in France, which Adebayor said he paid for, and said he funded Rotimi and a friend’s trip to Dubai to try to make a career, only for him to return after four days.
Adebayor's story is not strange. We all have such around us. It typifies how dependence kills our families. Need to say that some family members are parasites. They depend heavily on whoever is the bread-winner in their family, and fail to take responsibility for their own lives.
In some extreme situations, when such bread-winners die, the family members gang up around his wealth and decide how it should be shared. Except with strong legal intervention in the distribution of wealth, such family members leave the deceased’s immediate family to suffer. They always claim that their ‘son’ laboured so hard for them to enjoy, because after all, blood is thicker than water.
What should be the most important single concern in our society today is personal responsibility. Societal systems that encourage dependency destroy the capacity of individuals to achieve their own goals. It is not possible for someone else to be responsible for others.
Societal structures that encourage dependence harm the very society itself. One of the pillars of a sane society is personal responsibility. In order to be productive, individuals must think for themselves, pursue their truths as they know them, and earn their happiness. Independent thinkers who are innovative, creative, and personally responsible make human flourishing possible. Not pests.
