One thing my father taught me about generosity

One thing about most parents is that you can’t play with them, especially when they’re the disciplinarian type. My father was a teacher and a strict disciplinarian. He was the type that he believed in the dictate that he said, spare the rod and spoil the child. So I didn’t really get to play ball, ride my bike, jump and laugh with my dad.

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, this is a summary about my father. My father was a teacher. He was not just an ordinary teacher, he was a director. 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 prizes. His barn was filled with a variety of yams, pumpkins, and other crops. Whenever agricultural shows were held in the catchment area, 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 magician, my father.

My father was as 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 will), were entrusted to my father. Strangely, 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 him for that reason. However, when I hear people in the government 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. No one called him by his first name. In church matters, he never came second. He made the largest donation of one hundred guineas (the equivalent of about a million dollars in today’s money) when the Catholic cathedral in my town 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 destitute 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 youth. One day I called my father to homework. I asked him why he didn’t go to university and mentioned the names of his contemporaries and young people who went. The answer my father gave me left me stunned and set off alarm bells in my head, mind and heart.

My father said that 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 the church doesn’t like people who tell the truth. Since then, I have upheld my father’s assertion of 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 the commercial banks back then. I was on my game. they had hurt me. 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 pushed 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 place on my chest for medals.” My father never said a word on the subject again until he breathed his last from him. Around the same time I read a quote from Machiavelli, which said: “if you earn a reputation for generosity, you will come to wrong.”