I don’t get this whole money markets business. I see it on the news all the time, stock brokers pacing up and down trading floors, anxiously looking at message boards to see which shares have gained or plummeted.

To tell you the truth, I really don’t understand or care much about stocks, bonds and that kind of thing. Perhaps I should since these are issues that impact global economies.

For a while now, there’s been this doom and gloom about Greece defaulting on its debt and how that will affect the Euro. And I’m thinking, why don’t they just print a couple more billion Euros and pay off all those loans that are giving people sleepless nights?

It’s not that simple, I know and we have to think of things like inflation.

Which takes me to the Swedes and Chinese who invented (paper) money. They had good intentions of course but as with everything, money has countless thorns.

Many times, I think the world would be a better place if we didn’t have to deal with all these money issues.

As the common saying goes, money is the root of evil. Good people the world over have done horrible things for money. It tempts and corrupts you and before you know it, you’ve sold your soul.

With money, there are two sides to the coin. Those who have a lot and who by the way want more since there’s no such thing as one having enough money, and the majority of us who have little or nothing and spend the better part of our lives trying to get some, often with very little success.

No matter what we do, these inequalities are never going to go away. I was just reading up on news from Gambia highlighting a typical rich-poor scenario. A president who probably wants for nothing, throwing biscuits at his people!

Apparently, he does this many times and so when word gets out that he’ll be visiting a certain area, people line the roads and soon enough, start scrambling for his biscuits.

That’s how one of the speeding cars in his motorcade ended up hitting a couple of children before veering off and colliding with another vehicle, leaving 8 dead.

What’s more unsettling is the fact that this is not the first time this has happened and I don’t know what’s worse. Yahya Jammeh who throws biscuits in the belief that this in itself will feed his hungry countrymen and earn him votes at the next election, or the electorate who vote for the president because he gives them biscuits.

I’m also irked by these long presidential motorcades. Guaranteed presidents are no ordinary folks but an eight-car convoy (perhaps more for some), often preceded by motorbikes is simply overkill, especially in these tough economic times.

Tough times that led to the deaths of hundreds in neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania. In Tanzania, the ferry operator who most likely is a millionaire many times over, probably doesn’t know or even care that his vessels are often overloaded. At the end of the day, he gets his money and life goes on.

Every now and then, one of the ferries capsizes and as happened last week, 200 or so people drown. That’s just a hiccup and soon, people forget until the next tragedy. Some kilometres away in neighbouring Kenya, 79 people in one of the densely populated slums right in the heart of Nairobi are burnt to death. With as many as 112 hospitalized with extensive burns, that number is likely to rise.

It’s easy to say the victims brought it on themselves, after all, haven’t we all been cautioned against siphoning fuel from overturned tankers and leaking pipelines? But we have to remember that these are desperate people who want nothing more than to survive.

When you’re not sure where your next meal will come from, you can’t afford the luxury of worrying about the consequences of your actions.

To be continued…
nsophie77@yahoo.com