Watch out your anger

By John Kariuki

Patrick Mungania a city employee has been impatient to a fault. He loathed sitting at meetings,  more so at school and would skip them. He could never stand queues at petrol stations and would drive half way across the city to places he would be served promptly.

Before the advent of the Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), Mungania would subscribe to costly bank accounts whose special card holders used to be exempted from queuing up. Rather than waste time in public hospitals, Mungania had signed up with a private health provider where  paid a premium price at every visit.

“Gradually, I developed a habit of getting angry when things did not work out fast and especially where I was paying,” says Mungania.

Mungania’s turning point was when he was summoned to school over his child’s indiscipline. “I realised that they would waste my day before reading the accusations leveled against my son and instead withdrew him in a huff,” he says.

His son would land in trouble in two more schools and Mungania would solve the matter in anger.

When he summed up the costs of his son’s education, he was surprised. “ I realised my son and I were the only constants in our school-hopping adventure and I had never addressed the real problem,” he says.

Swallowing  the pride and anger, Mungania sought the help of a counselor who addressed his son’s underlying issues.   “This episode opened my eyes to other areas where I had been too rash in my decisions and consequently lost a lot of money,” he tells Shillings& Sense.

With the increasing sophistication of many Kenyans, we are slowly becoming a nation of impatient people.

People have gone the Mungania way. From public offices to places of worship, modern Kenyans loathe any “time wastage.”  Witness the frequent quarrels at matatu termini, cash registers and service paying offices when the queues don’t move fast enough.

“We have been here for a lifetime,” seems to be new mantra. But people often leave such queues in a huff, only to seek the same services later when the pay-by dates have expired, attracting hefty fines.

Anger does not augur well with wealth accumulation because its first casualty is one’s network of friends and associates.

They will always flee from embarrassing outburst and thoughtless decisions.  Without a network, one is unlikely to know which properties and businesses are about to be sold or where he or she can get the best deals.  Veronica Ngesa, an ICT professional, says she has been demanding her money’s worth rather too enthusiastically.

stringent requirements

But she has realised sometimes it is cheaper to flow with the tide and relax ones stringent requirements. “I have been going out with my friends to restaurants and I have always insisted we walk out when the waiters were too slow in serving us,” says Ms Ngesa.

She adds, this habit has been giving her a sense of control over her money. “But when I critically reviewed the cost of such angry walkouts, I become a little moderate,” she says.

 “I calculated the fuel cost in driving to alternative restaurants and their proximity to where I live and decided that waiting for meals a little longer in nearby joints was to my advantage,” she explains to Shillings& Sense.

As one of the few people in her extended family to be blessed with a stable job, Ngesa has been loaning her relatives money.

“But it would take years for most of them to repay it,” she says. At one family gathering, she was a little worked up and gave the biggest defaulters a piece on her of her mind. “I told them to their faces that I had written off what they owed because it would an eternity for them to clear it going the current speed,” she says.

Upon returning to her work, her people talked! Word went round that in a fit of anger she had written off all the debts that her kin owed her.

“After some time, even the most dependable of my kin stopped repaying the small monies I had lent them citing this ‘general amnesty’ that I had declared,” says Ngesa.

And as her kin expected, she went into another fit of anger and wrote off the loans to the new defaulters. “But in retrospect, I now see the conspiracy that they had hatched to lure me into a hasty a costly decision of writing off all their debts to me,” she says.

Ngesa advises people never to publicly write off personal loans to them by friends and family but to handle each case on its own merit.

 “Even if a person is unlikely to repay you in full, keep on demanding and accept any payments however little fro as long as the loan lasts,” she advises.

“The worst that happen is when friends and family learn one has a quick temper and writes off personal loans easily. They will borrow a huge amount and sacrifice the friendship by not paying,” she cautions.

Impatient people do not want to learn how to manage their finances.

They don’t have the time to listen to others and they hardly learn from their previous money mistakes.

Learning how to manage one’s finances requires patience and sobriety. 

It is a nurturing journey in which one’s money education matures as his or her wealth grows. Mastering one’s finances means mastering one’s anger and impulsiveness. Everything that a person does is ultimately related to his or her money.