Prime
The culture of wealth inheritance and its role in transformation
Author: Raymond Mugisha. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- At personal level though, let no child get lost in the sense of entitlement to what their parents own, and similarly, let no parent lose the honor of leaving their children a good inheritance, if the parent can afford one.
It is my belief that no child should feel entitled towards their parent’s property or wealth. It is equally my belief that parents should leave an inheritance for their children, if the parents have met with luck and been able to accrue any wealth to their name. The problem that appears to be escalating in our society these days is that there seems to be a growing number of cases in which children consider that their parents are indebted to them in material terms.
These children, who are always adults actually, feel that they are entitled to the control and ownership of what their parents have accumulated. The scenario seems to cut across the educated as well as the uneducated population in our society. Even when parents prepare their children through education or otherwise, to stand on their own, this situation can still play out.
There have been examples of strange cases in which ageing parents are barred by their children from falling back on their properties, for example when they need to sell property to be able meet medical bills, which their children cannot clear on their behalf. Also cases of direct contentions between parents and children, regarding property and wealth accumulated by the parents are not few. Such contentions sometimes extend to legal battles.
The above scenarios are unfortunate. They indicate a section of the younger generation lacking ambition and the capacity to push themselves to their dreams. It is a recipe for socioeconomic retrogression. It is highly likely that inheritors of parents’ wealth under such illusions of entitlement may only waste what they inherit, or at best add nothing to it.
That said, it is also important to look at the bigger picture and appreciate that transmitting wealth across generations is necessary for economic transformation, of families and thus of societies and nations. It is common in our society to find parents who insist that their children should be able to pave their own paths and find their bearings on their own.
These parents appear to hold the belief that offering a higher pedestal to their children, than where they themselves started out in life, is a case of spoiling the children and is bound to make failures out of the said children. While it may be true in some instances, that people who start out on their own may develop skills, attitudes and approaches to life that offer better promise, it is not progressive to have everyone always start from zero.
If everyone must always commence from the starting point, it will be difficult to register commendable growth in wealth in families, and by implication in the nations to which families that promote this approach belong. There should be a system in which children are groomed to take over from their parents and bring new energy, modern technology and newer methods into family enterprise so that there is successive growth from generation to generation.
Otherwise, if whatever a parent is doing should stagnate or getting erased when they die, under the guise that children should create their own independent success stories, then the economy will stagnate. Societies and cultures which groom their children to take over and grow what their parents started will then import their investments into our society. The children whose parents had already made an economic mark amongst us may find themselves having to seek the employ of foreign capital owners running key sectors of our economy.
The cyclic model, which catapults every generation to the starting line, should be discouraged. We should encourage our socio-cultural system around wealth to be a relay race. Parents should be motivated to pass on the batons of economic pursuit to their children, and children should be challenged to outdo their parents and expand what has been passed on to them.
There are already many examples of cultures from which we can learn the importance of this approach. Ugandans of Indian origin and other Indians trading in Uganda, for example, do it well. We need no reminders about how much their businesses flourish. The few that have documented the stories of their family businesses offer useful lessons for us.
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Even our African traditions appear to have been such that children naturally inherited family wealth and property, although this may have been gender-chauvinistic in design. Some of the safety nets around the arrangement were that there was a solid cultural system through which parent-children relations were maintained to facilitate harmony.
There can be modern methods to sustain harmony today. At personal level though, let no child get lost in the sense of entitlement to what their parents own, and similarly, let no parent lose the honor of leaving their children a good inheritance, if the parent can afford one.
Raymond is a Chartered Risk Analyst and risk management consultant
