Balancing the Angles

I was once invited to speak at an event, one of the other speakers at the same event was a self-made billionaire who spoke of his days as an apprentice under an uncle who maltreated him and gave him 100 Naira to start off his own business after nine years of serving his uncle.

He told the story of how he cried all night because he served this uncle with all his heart and made millions for his uncle in the eighties when he was an apprentice.
He said he swore that he would be richer than that uncle and began working at it until he eventually broke out of poverty into wealth.
I loved the story.
It was one of those "Give me a lemon and I will make Lemonade out of it" motivational speeches.

Two weeks after the event I was at another meeting somewhere in Mushin, Lagos.
This meeting was held in the house of a former ambassador of Nigeria.
The ambassador's last daughter, who was based in America, was getting married to another Nigerian business tycoon who is based in America.
I was invited to minister at the event because I share a Christian fellowship with the couple.
Guess who walked in right in the middle of my sermon?
The billionaire from the previous event!
He came in and walked over to the ambassador, he prostrated and the ambassador embraced him as a son would embrace a father.

When I was done with my sermon, the ambassador stood up and told us the story of how his brother died young and left behind a widow and three sons.

He told the story of how he adopted the three sons and wanted all of them to get an education but the first son of his late brother insisted he wanted to go into apprenticeship.
He said he took the young man under his wings and poured himself into him for nine years.
He said he invested in him with everything he had and held nothing back.
He said when he got married and his wife began to maltreat the young man by asking her to fetch water and do other menial tasks in the house which were derogatory to the well-being of his nephew, he decided the young man should go into business by himself and made arrangements with a friend to mentor him through the process.

He said he gave the friend one million naira to buy goods and he told his nephew to go and work with the friend and consider the goods as his start-off capital then he gave him one hundred naira as pocket money from which he must feed himself so that he would not spend out of his seed money on business.

He said his nephew didn't like the idea at all, his nephew felt he had served for nine years and should be given the one million naira cash as his seed capital directly.
He said his nephew took it badly and left the house for many days in protest but there were aspects of the business his nephew didn't know especially regarding the importation of goods and other logistics.
He said he was being appointed as an ambassador by this time and he knew if his nephew was going to succeed and not be at the mercy of middlemen, his nephew had to learn from those who understood the trade on a large scale.
It paid off!
His nephew eventually calmed down and spent two years under the tutelage of his friend, by this time his one million Naira seed had grown to five million and he was able to open his own shop.
Several years down the line, the nephew had become a billionaire and a giant in the shipping and logistics business.

PS: It is always prudent to hear the two sides of a story.
When you only hear one side and you cannot have access to the other side because you don't have a relationship with the other person or because the other person refused to share their side of the story, don't jump to any conclusion.
Joseph would have seen Potiphar's wife as the devil when she was telling lies against him.
He would have seen his brothers as demons when they were selling him off to the Ishmaelites.
He would have cried bitterly and asked God why he had been forsaken.
He came to this conclusion himself at the end of his story.
"Nothing happened to me by chance, what you lot did with the intention of harming me turned out to be actions taken in favour of everybody in the long run. If you didn't do what you did, I wouldn't be here".

-GSW-