J. N. N. Ng’ang’a – Meditations for the week of 15th – 21st October 2011 - Corporate Ethical Commitments – Part Three

J. N. N. Ng’ang’a – Meditations for the week of 15th – 21st October 2011 Corporate Ethical Commitments – Part Three Day 1 Deuteronomy 24:15 Pay him his wages each day before sunset, because he is poor and is counting on it. Otherwise he may cry to the LORD against you, and you will be guilty of sin. Paying reasonable wages Continuing with the issue of ethical organization paying reasonable wages, we agreed minimum wages covers even un-skilled labour. There doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of skilled and un-skilled employees. I assume if anybody is trained, then that person is described as skilled. So when an Ayah is a form four graduate, and she has never been trained, (except looking after her own younger brother, she has never looked after anybody else’s child), is she skilled or not skilled? If one is trained, in what type of school, what type of certification? Was the place they were trained recognized by Department of Industrial Training (DIT)? If somebody has worked for you for six months, does that make them trained? If skilled there is a salary for city, and there is salary for rural. The Kenyan newspaper simply told us the new minimum wage is eight thousand shillings. However we clearly know the fact that the minimum wage does not include house allowance. So you can’t start deducing from it all the food she ate, or the housing. The salary is for somebody you are employing for the first time. If somebody has done a year in your place, there must be an increment, isn’t it? So that one should not be paying just the minimum because minimum means the person is now beginning to work. It is my prayer and hope that even as you think about the people you employ you will seek to treat them with integrity however unskilled they are. When it comes to minimum, then it is easy….the figure has been given by the Government. But most employees are above this. When you employ a graduate from the University of Nairobi, what is the minimum that a person of integrity, an employer of integrity should pay? I recently was talking about careers in petroleum industry, to one person who left the university recently and wants to join the oil industry. He asked me …. What is the reasonable beginning salary for somebody working for a petroleum company? Knowing that I have worked in oil industry for many years, he thought I could answer. I told him I had no answer at all. Now there are about fifty seven oil companies in Kenya, most of the oil companies do not even have one percent market share. The top 3 take something like sixty percent of the whole market. All the other fifty five are sharing the difference. Some of them have zero point zero one % of the markets. They cannot exist on their own, if it were not for government’s involvement, because the government is the one that has facilitated them to be there, to encourage competition. So what that means is you can be called distribution manager whose market share is zero point zero two, and the other one is called distribution manager of a company with 30% market share. Can your salaries compare? In fact even the CEO of this small one cannot earn the salary of even a sales rep of the bigger one. So there is no such a thing as an oil industry salary. You cannot say I am being paid little. What are the standards? My recommendation is check which industry you belong to because you are competing for manpower in that industry. Then within that competition, what’s a reasonable salary for what size of market share? If you don’t pay a reasonable salary and people have similar skills, they will leave you for the competitor, isn’t it? So if really you are a good employer you must ensure you pay at the industry rate. You do what is called salary survey within the industry and so you can talk about reasonable salary across board, within industry. And of course we used Government as the minimum payer hence the private sector had better pay higher. But now the Government salaries have gone so high that many people are now leaving private sector to join Government. So you no longer can say because you work for private sector you necessarily earn more than government. So reasonable salary levels is not a very a easy subject to deal with any more. What I also have discovered is that everybody believes they are badly paid. I have never met someone, who admitted he was well paid. That’s why, in order to be ethical, you need to check, what the going rate within your industry is, then make sure you are not below it. Day 2 Malachi 3:5 “So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me,” When I became distribution manager at the beginning of 1990s, one of fresh graduates from Christian unions which I frequented said, ‘I am desperate for a job. I feel terrible that I still have to get pocket money from my parents’. I said, ‘there isn’t a vacancy for a graduate but I do know that in our Nairobi depot, we are requiring somebody to help us with filing. But given that you are a graduate, that’s not really a job for you. He responded, ‘no, no, Brother Ng’ang’a please help me. Anything that can stop me relying on other people’s pocket money, I am willing to do. I asked, ‘are you sure? Do you know the filing job; even a form four is too educated? The tasks are to take invoices, you put them in a file, and you lock it. It is something simple. You don’t have to have been to high school’. His argument was ‘the money we are going to pay me as a casual was bigger than the salary the government was paying some teachers’. So he went to the depot and started working. He is a Christian, he is a graduate, even the depot manager is happy that he is doing a good job. But you know what? As soon as he arrived he found somebody from his university who had now gotten a job earlier to fill a vacancy as a marketing rep. And sales people are given cars because you can’t work in the job without a car. For them the car is called a tool of trade. So as soon as you are employed the company gives you a car on loan and of course you use your mileage to pay back. And then the salary is of course not double, but triple or four times what this guy is earning. And you were in the same class. They are now working together. Remember he is in the office filing. This sales rep comes saying, there is a customer who has missed a document, can you get it for me? The clerk wonders, how do I get orders from my former classmate. And remember this person, may not be cleverer than him. One day, the young man doing clerical duties rings me and tells me, “Mr. Ng’ang’a how are you? People here are telling me that they can’t believe that Ng’ang’a, a Christian, could have employed me, a graduate in the type of job that I am doing’. So I said, ‘and what are you telling them?’ He is not saying I am underpaid, he is saying, people are saying he is under paid. How can a manager who is born again surely put you in such a job. His reply, “You know to be honest, this type of job is not for graduate By the way this job was not the problem, it was the salary, it is so little, the money I am earning is so little, I can understand what they are saying’ . I asked him, ‘young man, what do you think is the appropriate value of that job? Employers don’t pay qualifications of people, they pay for tasks done. In other words you don’t look at a person and say, you worth twenty thousand, but you are only worth two thousand. The normal procedure for this is called job evaluation.HR will study the task and its complexity in order to agree the type of manpower you require and its competencies. There is a system in HR to do job evaluation so that you arrive at a certain value and given that value, that’s how you set the salary level. Salaries are gauged on complexities of the job. So you don’t pay a person, you pay the job he is doing. So that even if you have a PhD, if you do messenger work, what you get there is a salary for messenger. You will not get the salary of a professor when you are doing the job of the messenger because it is not a person paid; it is a job that he is doing that is paid. So I asked the boy, do you want a donation from your employer? If you are doing a job whose value is x, do you want the company to donate to you additional money? Are you begging? Be honest. What exactly do you want? It is true the sales rep is earning a lot of money but then his job is meeting senior people and negotiating with them. The complexity of the job deserves what he is getting. Do you remember what we agreed when you came to my office? I told you this is not a job for you. And you told me you still wanted to do it. I gave you the job but also allowed you to resign without notice as soon as you found a better job. That the day you will have a better job, please don’t report to the depot…I will explain to the depot manager myself. So why are you now complaining? If you found a better alternative, why would you be there?’ I allowed him to choose whether to leave or stay Day 3 Matthew 20:8-10 8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’9 “The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius I initially thought the issue of employing over qualified staff on low job was a small matter. Another time we were in a management meeting and one of the others managers brought up the issue. I think the matter had gone up the grape vine… that Ng’ang’a was employing graduates to do very junior jobs. Actually all I had employed were casuals since permanent staff was employed by the HR for the various departments, so the issue came up in management about why it is bad to give a job to somebody overqualified. I told them. “I am very clear in my mind. This is a person who needs pocket money. He is literally idle at home totally unable to secure any job. Do I refuse him this casual job just because he is over qualified? How can you punish somebody for being educated? The man can do the job in question to the employer’s satisfaction, and he will not be paid any more than the less educated competitor for the job. I am not giving him a long term job; it is just a contract for his pocket money as he continues job hunting. So why should I refuse him the job just because he is overqualified?’ Some people however felt that it may be seen as exploiting the youth and any way they may even fail to perform well because they are not motivated by the same money that would motivate another less qualified. We debated the matter until finally a decision was taken… let’s not take people in jobs where they are over qualified. In my heart I didn’t quite agree with it but that’s what finally was agreed and I followed it thereafter. The fear people have is that if you give a job requiring a form four, to a graduate, he will come and do it, but within 2 months will be dissatisfied, he may even end up stealing from you. So please leave it for the form four. You can see it is a complicated debate, isn’t it? But it comes from that misunderstanding of thinking that you are being paid a salary for your qualification. It is the job you do being paid. So it is the task you do that determines your salary. So even if you are very qualified, and the vacancy available at that time is this lower one, and you willingly apply, you are interviewed and you are even found overqualified but you are given the job, do you think they will give you more money because of your qualifications? Secondly, note that your first class honors degree will not lead to faster promotions. Certificates help you to enter, what happens after that depends on performance. You just keep saying, ‘you know I have an MBA. I am the only person in this department with an MBA’. Your MBA is totally irrelevant after joining the organization. It only did its job of helping you enter. Remember there were a B.com and an MBA in the interview. You entered because you had an MBA and the other one had only got a B. Com. Once you are inside, it is performance that counts. That’s one of the things I found very interesting as a manager. I evaluated the people who came to work in my division. I know this guy has first class honours, he had a pass but did very well in the interview. Both of them were employed. Within no time we note the guy with first class honours cannot produce results as shown by his score card. There are things clearly that are measured by a score card. So in the first year the pass degree holder is on gets twenty percent salary increase, the other one gets only what we call cost of living increase. e.g. 5%. So already within the first year, the salaries are different by fifteen percent. And he had a pass and you hade first class honours. Except HR who has the file, even your boss might not know how well you did in school. They might never need to see the certificates, so they look at the way you perform, not aware you had an MBA when you entered. Thus you need to know that at entry the certificate is important, what happens after that is depends on how you perform. … I am saying all this to communicate that I understand the commitment to pay reasonable wages is important but complicated. But we were saying that an ethical employer will not pay employees less than he should. Day 4 Ecclesiastes 4:9 Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: An organization that is ethical will seek synergies to impact the broader society We next want to say that an employer, an organization, that is ethical will seek synergies to impact the broader society. You may not influence the whole nation not to operate unethically but you can at least aim to impact your competitors, in your industry? In other words, it is not enough for you to be an organization of integrity; you must be committed to use available opportunities to influence the rest of your type of industry to be ethical, responsible citizens of the country. So you should look for synergy, ways of working with others in your industry, to impact the whole industry. There are areas you must compete, but there are other areas where if you work with others in a similar area, you are likely to help industry. We are saying, work with rather than against others in your sector to benefit society. For example, we currently have fifty seven oil companies in Kenya, who really have cut throat competition, really outdoing each other but there are areas they have agreed to work together. That’s why they have Petroleum Institute of East Africa, where they have agreed to come together for common good to themselves and society. Like the time when there was the Sachangwan petroleum tanker fire that killed over 100, they all contributed money into a kitty to put adverts on the T V to educate “wananchi” about oil tanker accidents. And that way they were working together to help the country without necessarily gaining as for business. We are saying that if you have integrity, you will be that type of a person who is going to help organize them to do well. If you are in a neighborhood and they are trying to create a security system so that everybody can benefit, you will not be that person who refuses to pay your contributions because you are looking for ways of working together with others in the neighborhood, together with others in the society to create benefit for society. Similarly, if you find an organization where the industry is working together in order to benefit society and it says, “me I don’t have that kind of money, I am not going to be involved.” It will not be regarded as an organization of integrity. Day 5 James 5:4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty Develop employees and grow their competence Next, an organization with integrity develops employees and grows their competence. In other words employer regards employees as stakeholders who must fully benefit from the business. So you think in terms of giving them not just a salary, but also that because they work in the organization, each is left a better person than the way they came in. I left campus in the seventies. East Africa Industries, which is currently called Unilever had a commitment, to develop marketing professional for the East Africa market. They used to come to university to identify possible employees. I was told they would employ more than required employees, with the assumption that after two years, they would have gone through a training program, and could leave and work for other companies who did not have a training program. This was an impressive CSR project from the biggest consumer goods company. They offered me the 1st job interview after campus. When we went for the interview they told us, we will take about twenty of you, but only five of you will be remain here after two years. That means after we give you training, some of you should look for a job somewhere else. I don’t know how many organizations do that kind of thing, where you are totally committed to developing people and you measure your success as an organization by how well you have helped people. After ten years with you they are much more competent to do bigger jobs or to start bigger organizations .The country will be the richer because of an increase in experienced business professionals. If you have integrity, you will not want somebody to go out of your employment after five years to do the same job they could have done when they entered. Just as a point of digression, recently I have given a series on men. One Sunday I was talking to them about man as a husband and the next I was talking to them about man as a leader. I was telling them that one of the critical things about man old enough to marry, is the fact that he is given a girl to marry who is at the age of may be twenty five, so that by the time the girl is thirty five, ten years later, he must ask himself, what major has he made to that girl? Okay the shape may have changed with the birth of children from a figure eight, to near drum shape, but that is not the progression I am talking about. I was telling them, if you truly are a responsible man, that woman in ten years must be a better woman. There are things she can do she could not before. So the commitment of a man is to develop that girl until even her mother cannot recognize her because of the better person she has progressed to be. If she came to you and she could not cook ugali properly, you could even take her for a course. When she visits her mother’s home, she makes ugali, and mother says, what happened? When you were in my house, your ugali, used to be like soil. What happened? What have you done to develop the person who reports to you from what they were to what they are? Many, many marriages, Believe in PHD— “Pull Her Down”….as soon as you marry you start going down. One woman came to speak to me afterwards, and asked, so what do you do with a husband who is a blocker, not allowing you to move upwards. In Kenya because of men being blockers, most women who become anything big, are not married. Am I right? You just go to who is who in Kenya, you might not hear of a husband. They used to have but they have dumped them. Because it sounds like for a Kenyan man, for a woman to progress, they must dump the man. There is no other way they will ever go forward. This is not a biblical world view. God created a man to help the woman to rise. Similarly God makes you an entrepreneur so that you benefit those who work for you. So what we are saying is, even for an organization, there must be a commitment to develop staff, the salary is not enough. I still remember somebody about twenty years ago who came to me for advice. He had a job with a small organization which was paying more money, there was also opportunity in Kenya Power & Lighting and it was paying less. Where should he go? I told him I wouldn’t have any difficulty knowing where to go. You go to Kenya Power & Lighting because the have a manpower development program. For the first two years, they have a training programme for engineers. If you go to this small one, you will be a manager from day one. That’s why they are paying you more money to cover your supervision tasks. But in the process there will be no development, you have reached your end. Can you imagine what you will be after two years of training, moving from department to department? If I were you I would go to Kenya Power & Lighting. Twenty years later, he is one of the senior managers in Kenya Power & Lighting. Kenya Power & Lighting is committed to developing its own manpower. So what we are saying is, an organization with integrity, may not do it as Kenya Power & Lighting, but there must be something they do to develop staff. It may include but not limited to paying school fees for MBA. It may be you create a programme where somebody begins this job, then does it for two years, then they are moved elsewhere for two years, and then moved to another place for two years. Even if they are not getting any promotion, their skills and CV is getting richer, isn’t it? So that’s what we are saying. I keep encouraging young men, every three years ask for opportunities for growth transfer even if no promotion chances are available. Look for opportunity to do something that is more difficult, because having done something for three years; you know how to do it. If you go to the other one, although the salary is exactly the same, it will develop your muscle. So by the time you actually move upward, you are very skilled. So I am not talking about necessarily being taken for a course. I am talking about creating opportunity for staff to gain competences, not just degrees, not certificates but competences so that at the end one can say, I can do this, I can do that. Developing employees and growing their competence should be a commitment of any man of integrity. Why? The better they are the better the organization will be. A few of them may still leave you but those who remain will be the richer. Number two, a few of them will leave but you will not miss them because even the ones below were already developed. This is the dividing line between an organization that has integrity and an organization without integrity, which just exploits staff. Day 6 Exodus 20 12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. Respect the dignity of the individual and the right of employees to freedom of association. Any organization that feels because they have employed you they can make personal life decisions for you has no integrity. The supervisors says, I saw you interested in that girl, can’t you see that’s not your type?’ Remember, you are just my employer, you don’t decide whom I marry. That is what cults do. So you must give staff independence. Any organization that becomes cultic is not an organization of integrity because God created every man with capacity to decide for him/her self. So as a supervisor, when I talk to you, I should not talk like I can order you because I am the boss. I can make a suggestion but I must give you the freedom to refuse it, especially when it is an area outside work. When it comes to your job description, you must certainly work as agreed with your boss. Other matters, an organization must be very careful about them. That’s why for example you cannot have activities every weekend. That way making sure your female staff cannot get a boyfriend outside the organization. You need to be allowed time here and time out so that you have the freedom, as to who you associate with. But of course there is a bigger issue of whether we are talking about preventing employees from joining trade unions. But more importantly an organization of integrity does not control the mind of its employees. But the truth is, if you are in a good organization, chances are if you have an issue that is disturbing you, you are likely to ask your boss, or you will ask somebody older within the organization for advice. But it is your choice, not a command. In the nineteen seventies there was something called the pyramid practiced by very radical Christian's. The pyramid is meant as a discipleship process in the Christian circles. It meant that every born again person must have what was called a cover. God does not deal with you directly. You know Catholicism can come in many forms, and this sounds like it but among Pentecostals. You could not do anything without your cover giving you permission. The way it became a pyramid is because at a lower level you have more people. You start in a fellowship with their leader as their cover. The fellowship leaders also have a cover, and their covers also have covers …., until you have a ‘pope’. That’s why it is a pyramid shape. Some groups agreed to sell tier houses and live a community at Karen in Nairobi. Finally the thing could not work and they lost their money. They had to begin again from scratch financially. Any organization, even a church, where the leader is determining your thoughts is not one with integrity. Since even the leader is fallen creature why does he think others cannot be right to correct him from wrong. It is a very risky thing. That’s one of the greatest marks of a cult, a leader in control. I normally tell young people, when you go to church and you hear a pastor keep saying, ‘my church, my church’, ask yourself, what am I doing in his church? Because the only church you should join is the church of Jesus Christ. So if it is his church, he is not wrong in controlling you. It is you who is wrong in joining him. Why did you go to someone with personal property? You saw on TV how even a big church like the crystal Cathedral; can go down under a family leadership, with others seeming unable to help. The famous reformed church seems to have been bought by a Catholic Church. A Muslim could have bought it since the bank just needed money. Bankrupt megachurch Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif. is changing faith traditions. The Roman Catholic Dioceses of Orange is purchasing the church’s 40-acre property with its towering glass building for $57.5 million in a deal approved by a bankruptcy court judge Thursday. The megachurch, founded by television evangelist Robert H. Schuller in 1955, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October last year to restructure its staggering debt. The founder’s son, Robert A. Schuller, took over the church until he was forced out, in part, by family members who reportedly disagreed with Schuller’s leadership. The younger Schuller, now chairman of FamilyNet media company, had the highest salary at the church when it went bankrupt at $196,478, the Orange County Register reported. The current congregants of Crystal Cathedral will have to find a new place of worship though dozens attended the six-hour hearing pleading to call off a sale of the property[1] Can you imagine that is the work of sixty years of the old man who founded it and is still alive? He was great blessing to millions around the world. What do you think went wrong? I guess it is the organizational structure and philosophy, not the message they sent out. You need to understand that when we are talking about an organization where one man is so revered he can control individuals, chances of withstanding challenges are reduced. We are saying that the organization must respect the dignity of the individual. That’s why there needs to be a contract that clearly states what is it the organization expects from the staff , and what the staff expect of the employer. Outside that, you must give people freedom to be themselves. They have a right to decide who to associate with outside the organization. An employee is not a slave but a willing stakeholder. He came willingly and can also leave willingly. He is not your son. Even for family structure, a son needs freedom to think if he is mature. I was telling fathers in the church, any father with a grown up son that he continues to control, he is a father outside God’s way because God does not expect grown up children to be controlled by their parents. Nowhere does the scripture say that a grown up son should obey his father. Yes the bible says even grown up children honour their fathers, but children are told to obey. By the time you become an employee, you are an adult, because according to the laws of this country, children are not allowed to be employees. So neither as a father nor as a boss are you allowed to control an adult. You must allow him to be independent. I used to work in Kisumu, and my wife was teaching in a high school, A-level economics. One of the other teachers said he knew me. She said, how? I said he was in the leadership of the CU at college in Nairobi where I was speaker frequently. But now he was not a Christian as far my wife could see. He explained that, after graduation, when he arrived home, he discovered the parents had already organized whom he was to marry, and the parents were not Christians. Remember he was a serious brother in the C.U (Christian Union) . So he told my wife, what could I do? This girl is not a Christian but is the one that my mother has told me to marry, so I obeyed. But the girl does not even want to go to church, so we no longer go to church. Now he started blaming it all on obeying the parents. This is really lack of biblical teaching, isn’t it? He was following tribal traditions, not Christianity. Like my mother died in her eighties, I am about sixty, in the African traditions; I am still supposed to obey her. But that’s not the bible. The bible teaches after, the age of twenty, a child is held accountable for all his decisions. Below the age of twenty, a child is not held accountable. How do I know? When people crossed the Red Sea and saw the mighty works of God, and then in the wilderness, some of them disobeyed, God held children innocent. Remember all of them disobeyed, but only the ones who were above twenty were held accountable. How could God do such miracles for them and they disobey? As a punishment none of the adults would reach Canaan except Joshua and Caleb. But anybody who was nineteen and a half or below when they crossed the Red Sea was allowed to go to Canaan. As long as you are a child, below twenty, you are supposed to obey your parents. So when your parents tell you to disobey, they are held accountable. But when you are above twenty, if your parents tell you to disobey, and you follow them, God ignores them and punishes you. You made up your own mind after listening to them. What my adult daughter does, she takes responsibility. I am just a consultant to her. At times she follows my advice, but sometimes she does the opposite thing. I accept it because I know I am not supposed to have power over her after she has become a grown up. But many fathers don’t accept it because we were born by parents who never allowed us to become adults. So we are parents who are not allowing others to mature. We want to think for them. But please check the scriptures. When the New Testament talks about parents being obeyed, it addresses it to children. If it had removed the word children and say, people obey your parents, then even at 60 you must only do what your parents tell you. However, even at the age of sixties and my mother in the eighties, I am not allowed to dishonour her because at whatever age, however old your parents are, you must never dishonour them. So sometimes they will tell you something and you disagree with them. The way you disagree will determine whether you are honouring them. You don’t tell them, ‘that’s nonsense mum’. How can you say that? That is not the way to talk to somebody you honour, isn’t it? You might have, like Nathan talking to king David, have to approach the issue from far. But you say it in such an honourable manner that the parents are happy with you although you said no. That’s what we are talking about. We are not suggesting that you should not listen to your boss but he should give you the freedom to disagree with him honorably. Allow individuals to be individuals. Also an employer must not take over the management of employees outside the job description or the work policy manual. And the manual itself must not say things it should not be saying. Respect the individual dignity of each employee. That means that if he wants to join a trade union you should not stop him. However if you are treating him well and he trusts you he might choose not to belong to one. Day 7 James 5:4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty Partner and outsource services from organizations that uphold the same ethical values and practices as the corporate The first time I heard the word outsourcing corruption, it was from Christian CEO. He said many big corporate organizations cannot be caught with any corruption because they never do it. All the activities that require any corruption are outsourced. For example clearing and forwarding, you don’t do it because you cannot get anything from the port without corruption. You employ a guy whom you know will do whatever is necessary to clear your imports. When you are asked, are you corrupt? No, never, check my accounts. But you know that the quotation of the clearing and forwarding agent included money to bribe. That’s why you did not give the lowest bid; you gave somebody you know can do the job properly. How do you do the job properly? -By paying bribes. That is called outsourcing corruption. Because although you are not the one giving the bribe, you are the one paying the briber, isn’t it? This is a very difficult issue. You must not only be a person of integrity but you must also not work with a person who has no integrity. If he is openly corrupt, and you contract him, then you also corrupt. He even comes and tells you, “Mombasa I have no difficulties clearing goods . If you are ever caught by the police, just talk to me. I deal with the very top’. How does he deal with the top? What does he actually do to deal with the top? He must be using something to influence them. And that’s the guy you are giving work? That is called outsourcing corruption. In other words you are the one who is corrupt, it is only you have given the job to another person to be corrupt on your own behalf. You cannot call yourself a person of integrity when you know very well the people you are paying are using your money to do corrupt things. However, after saying that, there are people that you are dealing with who may be corrupt, and you are not aware. Not even that, it is possible your own employee is corrupt. That’s why we must also talk about personal integrity rather than, organizational integrity. It is possible you can have organizational integrity without individual integrity. So it is possible for an organization to do its best to have integrity yet some employees or agents don’t have integrity. Although in a court of law the organization is held guilty, it is being held responsible for things the employees are doing that they have no means of finding out. But we are saying, you must investigate your staff and agents to discourage corruption. Like being in charge of operations I had a lot of contractors. So we actually created clauses where if you entered into a contract with us, you gave permission to audit you, so that I can find out how you run your own things. We go and check your books, check how you do your own things in order to be sure what you do will not make us responsible for evil things. So it is an issue that one needs to think about. You go to Gikomba low price market and you find an item which in town it is costing twenty thousand shillings, but costing only one thousand in Gikomba. You don’t ask yourself, how come you can buy the same item at one thousand shillings? Might he have stolen so that he can sell it at a thousand shillings? But my brother instead you buy and you come back saying, the Lord blessed me. It is true, you have bought it cheaply, but you need to ask yourself, might there be a possibility that things are being stolen in town, being sold in Gikomba and you are enjoying the cheap price. You are buying something from somebody who is not paying tax. You cannot claim to have integrity without paying a true cost of your supplies. It will reduce your profits but according to God’s word, when you live a life of integrity, you are assured of his blessings. And so the choice is, do you want to get money at any cost or do you want the blessings of God? So we must do due diligence of business partners to ensure they do not become corrupt on our behalf. Associate with people who have similar values even if it will cost your business more. Past meditations: www.johnnganga.org