Asher's Blog

A society that admires wealth but refuses to ask how it was created will eventually teach its people to pursue possession rather than production.

That is why “wealth without work,” one of the seven social sins published and popularised by Mahatma Gandhi, remains such a powerful warning. Gandhi included the list in Young India in 1925, and although the ideas are almost a century old, they speak directly to the kind of society we are building today. We celebrate expensive houses, convoys, private jets and public displays of money, but we are often reluctant to ask the question that matters most: what useful work produced this wealth?

I have written before that a society cannot outgrow its definition of success. If we define success only by what someone owns, without considering how the person acquired it, we create a culture in which the appearance of wealth matters more than the creation of value. Once that happens, young people begin to study the wrong examples. They do not ask what problem a wealthy person solved, what institution the person built, how many people became more productive because of the person’s work, or whether the wealth can be explained by a credible story. They simply see the outcome and begin to search for the fastest route to imitate it.

That is how wealth without work becomes more than an individual moral failure. It becomes a social operating system.

The dignity of productive work

When I was young, we sang a song in school about the dignity of labour. Its lesson was very simple: a lazy person cannot eat, a person who refuses to work will remain poor, and there is dignity in applying yourself until your effort produces an outcome. At that age, work was often described in physical terms. You imagined somebody farming, carrying something, building with their hands or sweating under the sun.

There is nothing undignified about physical labour. The person who lays a brick, drives a bus, cleans an office, works on a farm or repairs a machine is doing work that society needs, and that person deserves respect and fair compensation. However, productive work is much broader than physical exertion. It includes the engineer who designs a safer bridge, the teacher who helps a child understand mathematics, the entrepreneur who organises people and capital around a useful problem, the nurse who keeps a patient alive, the civil servant who simplifies a public process, and the scientist whose research makes an entire industry more efficient.

Work, in its most important sense, is the disciplined application of human ability to the creation of value.

This distinction matters because people can be extremely busy without being productive. A person may work for fourteen hours every day and still produce very little, not because the person is lazy, but because the work is being done without adequate tools, education, capital, infrastructure or organisation. If a farmer uses methods that limit the size of land that can be cultivated, while another farmer has irrigation, machinery, improved inputs, storage and access to market information, both may work hard, but their economic outcomes will be radically different.

We should therefore be careful not to turn “dignity in labour” into a romantic celebration of suffering. Sweat is not the goal. The goal is useful output, and one of the duties of a serious society is to ensure that human effort is multiplied by knowledge, technology and well-designed systems.

The World Bank’s Human Capital Project makes this connection directly: health, knowledge, skills and resilience determine how productive people can become. In the same way, the International Labour Organization treats productive employment as more than simply keeping people occupied; the quality, security and value of the work matter. A country cannot call itself successful merely because its people are busy. It must ask whether their work is creating enough value to improve their lives and strengthen the society around them.

Manual work is not the problem; low productivity is

When a large proportion of a population remains trapped in low-productivity work, the community will struggle to become prosperous, even if its people are among the hardest-working people in the world. This is an important distinction for Africa because Africans are not poor because they are unwilling to work. I have seen people leave home before sunrise, spend hours in traffic, work throughout the day, return late at night and repeat the same process for years. The problem is not an absence of effort. The problem is that too much of that effort is spent fighting systems that should have made the work easier.

Think about the productive hours lost because electricity is unreliable, roads are bad, internet connections fail, public transportation is disorganised and basic government processes remain manual. Think about the small business owner who must generate private electricity, provide private security, transport goods across damaged roads and spend valuable time resolving issues that functioning institutions should have prevented. That entrepreneur may be working extremely hard, yet a significant part of the work is merely compensating for public failure.

The difference between a rich society and a poor one is therefore not simply that one works while the other does not. It is that one has built systems that allow an hour of work to produce far more value. Education improves the worker’s judgement; technology increases speed and precision; infrastructure reduces waste; capital supplies better tools; and institutions make outcomes more predictable. Productivity is what happens when all these things reinforce one another.

If we want to build wealth across Nigeria and Africa, we must stop congratulating people merely for enduring unnecessary hardship and begin to remove the conditions that make their work less productive. The dignity of labour should include the dignity of being given the tools to do excellent work.

Wealth is not sinful, but its source matters

It is also important to clarify what “wealth without work” does not mean. It does not mean that every person must earn money only through a salary, physical effort or the number of hours personally worked. An investor may receive returns because capital was placed at risk. A founder may continue to own shares in a company because years of work created an institution that can operate without the founder’s daily involvement. A writer may earn royalties because an idea continues to serve readers. A pensioner may receive income from assets accumulated over decades, while children may inherit wealth created and responsibly preserved by their parents.

These forms of wealth are not automatically illegitimate. Ownership, investment, intellectual property and inheritance can all be connected to work, risk, patience and stewardship. The real question is whether the wealth represents value that was created or value that was merely captured.

Mariana Mazzucato develops this distinction in The Value of Everything, where she challenges societies to reconsider who creates value, who extracts it and why the two are so often confused. It is possible to make money without making anything better. A person can profit through corruption, privileged access, artificial scarcity, manipulation, monopoly abuse or the diversion of public resources. In such situations, the bank balance may grow, but the society becomes poorer because one person’s gain was produced by weakening the system on which everyone depends.

That is wealth without work: not wealth without visible sweat, but wealth disconnected from contribution.

This is why the source of wealth must become part of how we evaluate successful people. If someone’s fortune cannot be explained by the businesses they built, the investments they made, the risks they carried, the ideas they developed, the people they served or the value they helped to create, society should not suspend its curiosity simply because the person is rich. Transparency is not envy, and asking for a credible story is not an attack on success. It is how a healthy culture distinguishes builders from extractors.

When extraction becomes the ambition

One of the most disturbing expressions of wealth without work in Africa is the spectacle of a political leader constructing a mansion worth an extraordinary amount of money in a community surrounded by poverty. The building may be beautiful, the gates may be imposing and the compound may communicate power, but the contrast tells a terrible story. Around that private monument are schools without adequate facilities, young people without meaningful work, hospitals without equipment and roads that make commerce more expensive.

What exactly has been built?

A large house may employ people during construction and require workers to maintain it, but it is not a substitute for a productive institution. It does not create a durable engine through which thousands of people can develop skills, earn incomes, support suppliers and build assets of their own. If the source of the money is public office, privileged access or unexplained influence, then the mansion is not evidence of success. It is evidence that a society allowed private accumulation to take priority over public prosperity.

What makes this particularly damaging is the lesson it teaches. A young person observing such a society may conclude that the fastest route to wealth is not to master a discipline, solve a difficult problem or build a useful company, but to get close to power. Politics then becomes attractive primarily as an instrument of extraction, while productive work begins to look foolish. The intelligent student is encouraged to seek access instead of expertise, and the ambitious entrepreneur is tempted to pursue contracts through relationships rather than compete through innovation.

Over time, this changes the quality of talent entering every institution. If the greatest rewards go to those who capture rather than create value, the society will produce more people trained in capture.

Education is where productive work begins

This is why I believe the work of a nation begins in its education system, long before people enter offices, factories or markets. Education is not merely a social benefit or a route to a certificate; it is the process through which a society prepares human beings to do more valuable work. When education is poor, the economy eventually reflects it. When education rewards memorisation without understanding, students learn to repeat rather than solve. When it rewards certificates without competence, people become skilled at presenting credentials instead of producing results.

We need to educate for an outcome.

That outcome should include foundational literacy and numeracy, but it must go further. Children should learn how to reason, communicate, collaborate, use technology, understand cause and effect, test an idea, recover from failure and connect knowledge to real problems. Technical and vocational education should not be treated as an inferior alternative for people who could not enter a university. A competent electrician, machinist, welder, software developer, laboratory technician or agricultural specialist may create more immediate value than someone with a degree that has never been converted into useful capability.

The quality of education matters more than the ceremony of education. A country can increase school enrolment, build universities and graduate millions of people, yet still fail to become more productive if those institutions do not improve what people are capable of doing. The World Bank’s work on learning poverty is a useful reminder that years spent in school cannot be treated as equivalent to learning. If a child passes through school without being able to read with understanding, reason with numbers or acquire new skills independently, we have recorded attendance without building the foundation for productive work.

Developed countries did not become productive by accident. They made deliberate investments in mass education, research, industrial capability, public health, infrastructure and institutions that enabled specialised work. China’s transformation, for example, was not merely the result of a large population willing to labour. It involved decades of expanding education, building infrastructure, acquiring technical knowledge, developing manufacturing capacity and steadily moving workers into more productive activities. The lesson is not that every African country must copy China, Europe or the United States. The lesson is that productive capacity has to be built deliberately.

Prayer cannot replace that work. Natural resources cannot replace it. A youthful population cannot replace it. These things may be advantages, but without education and organisation, an advantage remains only a possibility.

The work of leadership is to multiply other people’s work

The highest form of productive work is not necessarily what one person can accomplish alone. It is the ability to build a system through which many people can do meaningful work and become more capable over time. This is one reason entrepreneurship matters so much. A good business does more than enrich its founder; it organises talent, capital, technology and customer demand in a way that allows value to be created repeatedly.

When a business employs a thousand people productively, develops its managers, pays suppliers, trains young professionals, serves customers reliably and reinvests part of its earnings, it creates a network of consequences that extends well beyond its financial statements. Employees support families, suppliers grow, skills move into other organisations, taxes fund public services, and people who learned inside the company may eventually start businesses of their own. This is wealth produced through work, and because it expands the productive capacity of others, it can outlive the person who began it.

This should reshape how we think about legacy. If I have access to billions and use the money only to construct a private monument, I may leave a building behind, but I have not necessarily left a future. If I use those resources to build an enduring institution that employs thousands of people, develops expertise, solves a real problem and creates opportunities for people I may never meet, then my wealth has become part of society’s productive infrastructure.

The best legacy is not simply that people remember your name. It is that they can do more because you lived.

Business leaders therefore have to think beyond personal consumption. How many capable leaders are we raising? How many employees are becoming owners? How many suppliers are becoming stronger because of our demand? How much knowledge is the organisation producing? If the founder disappears, does the institution continue to create value? These questions reveal whether wealth is being used as a trophy or treated as a responsibility.

We must change what we celebrate

No society can eliminate wealth without work while continuing to celebrate it. Laws matter, institutions matter and enforcement matters, but culture also determines what people believe is worth pursuing. If religious bodies, universities, professional associations, media organisations and respected community leaders honour wealth without examining its source, they lend their credibility to extraction.

We should not assume that every wealthy person is corrupt, just as we should not assume that every poor person is virtuous. The point is not to resent wealth; the point is to develop a more intelligent standard for honouring it. We should celebrate the manufacturer who steadily improves quality and employs people, the technologist who solves a difficult local problem, the teacher whose students become excellent, the public official who makes an institution more trustworthy, and the investor who supplies patient capital to productive businesses.

We should also teach young people that there is no shame in starting small, learning a trade, working for someone else, building competence or allowing a reputation to compound over time. The desire to look wealthy before becoming productive is one of the traps created by a culture of unexplained success. It pushes people into debt, fraud, empty branding and shortcuts because they are trying to display the harvest before planting anything.

There is dignity in learning slowly enough to become useful. There is dignity in keeping your word, serving customers, improving a process, paying employees, developing expertise and doing work whose value can be explained. There is also dignity in wealth when that wealth is the accumulated evidence of service, discipline, risk and sound stewardship.

Wealth should leave society more capable

The warning contained in “wealth without work” is not that wealth itself is dangerous. Wealth is necessary to build factories, fund research, expand companies, improve communities and take risks that create the future. The danger arises when wealth is separated from responsibility and when society begins to admire accumulation without demanding contribution.

Africa needs wealthy people, but we need wealth that can tell a credible story. We need wealth created by solving problems, increasing productivity, building institutions and expanding opportunity. We need businesspeople whose success produces other successful people, political leaders whose years in office leave public systems stronger, and educators whose work increases what an entire generation is capable of imagining and doing.

If we want that future, we must restore productive work to the centre of our definition of success. We must educate people not merely to possess certificates, but to think and build. We must give workers the tools, infrastructure and institutions that multiply their effort. We must question wealth whose source cannot be reconciled with visible contribution, and we must stop treating public extraction as private achievement.

The question we ask about a wealthy person should not end with, “How much does this person own?” We should also ask, “What became better because this person worked, invested, led or built?”

When the answer is clear, wealth deserves respect. When the answer is thousands of people doing more meaningful work, institutions that continue to create value and communities that have become more capable, that is not merely personal success. It is legacy.

But when the wealth stands alone—surrounded by weak institutions, unexplained by productive effort and incapable of improving the lives around it—it is exactly what Gandhi warned us about: wealth without work, and a society paying the price for it.