My household is one in a constant battle for time. Time to sit down and relax, time to spend together and the last couple of weeks time to cook a plate of food during the week. I am sure that my family is not the only one bogged down by life and its crazy calendar. However this article is not aimed to be about me, just to bring into context the huge enjoyment when I for the first time in ages was able to watch Carte Blanche. What I saw was, in one simple term, WOW?
Story number two was about yet another pyramid scheme, no it was not run from spectacular offices in Sandton, but rather a small Karoo town Grahamstown. When one conjures mental pictures of this little town, or any small town for that matter, the last thing one expects is a master conman that was able to, allegedly, defraud pensioners, the disabled and widows out of R 60 Million. One is more likely to have mental pictures of dorper sheep happily grazing, no traffic jams and banks without long boring ques. But the truth is life has again achieved in giving us a solid jolt in our system.
I recently read an Afrikaans article by a colleague of mine “Spyt kom altyd te laat” (Regret always comes to late), and in viewing this Carte Blanche expose I clearly saw what was meant by this article and our nation’s ability to be gullible on a scale that one expects in fantasy novels. Why is it that we as a people trust glossy brochures, flashy vehicle’s and big houses blindly? Why is it that we are more than happy to part with our hard earned money on a simple meeting with a friendly face? Why do we never conduct due diligence's? Last question: Why are we totally utterly shocked when we lost our money, when our investment strategy characteristics have more in common with a gambling bug than sound investing?
I think it is actually a simple thing that motivates us. We read about people like Bill Gates, The Facebook dude, Steve Jobs (Apple) and our own Mark Shuttleworth. These are all people that have become sinfully rich in what is perceived to be an incredibly short time. What do all of these people have in common? They are innovators! They were 10 steps ahead of the curve and saw a future that most of us did not even imagine, the innovative thinking created them a stupendous amount of wealth. In contrast most of us are not innovators, we are mere mortals. Our desire is merely that life would throw us an opportunity, we merely want in. We would be more than happy to have just put R 10,000 in the initial Microsoft Shares and to just GET IN.
Therefore we get extremely excited when a “clever and passionate” entrepreneur arrives at our normal homes offering us an In. We get blinded by massive profits, success stories and being the envy of our friends earning massive dividends from no work effort at all.
I am not advocating pessimism, please do not misunderstand me, but I am advocating logic. Both in this new scheme and the Sharemax debacle one very logical question was clearly not asked. How can you develop property and afford to make monthly interest payments. How can you build something, expenses only and still have an income to pay investors? Sanity should always prevail.
The other item that was shocking to me was that the simplest of deed searches showed that the brochure lied, the brochure stated that the property was owned by Amatenda, the deed search showed differently. So the second question should be, why do we never ask for external advice. Is it because we fear the result? Is it because we regard the marketer sitting in our lounge as an advisor? For a simple R 2000-00 a decent investigator could have done a deed search and found that the whole Amatenda document was a scam, would you not rather “loose” R 2,000-00 or face financial destruction and emotional epidurals.
In conclusion and the words of Gareth Cliff. “No one wants a job, most people hate their jobs. We just want the money”. We sometimes act like sheep calmly walking to an abattoir of financial slaughter, just because we do not want to insult the promoter of a scheme. No true, honest business man minds having a due diligence done on them, so the one that you insult by asking the questions should be the one you should run from.
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