ON DEBT: The Ledger We Never Signed

ON DEBT; The Ledger We Never Signed

by Tim Akano

We like to imagine ourselves self-made, as though a person arrives in the world the way a stone arrives in a field — solitary, uncaused, owing nothing to the ground it lands on. This is the most flattering lie a human being can tell himself, and also the most dangerous, because a man who believes he owes nothing will eventually behave as though he owes nothing, and the world has a way of sending the bill anyway.
Life was never meant to be transactional. It is a permanent partnership with Mother Nature — not a contract we can exit once the terms grow inconvenient. And we are all born into that partnership in debt. Not the kind that appears on a bank statement, but the older, deeper kind — the debt of having been made possible by something other than ourselves. We owe the earth. We owe our parents. We owe the friend who answered the phone at two in the morning. We owe the classmate who shared notes we never returned, the community that raised us before we could raise ourselves, the nation that gave our ambitions somewhere to stand.

The earth is the oldest creditor of all. It is the vault from which we have withdrawn every resource we call wealth — timber, oil, ore, water — on the quiet assumption that the vault refills itself for free. It does not. The forest that scrubs our air and hands us both oxygen and medicine is not a service; it is a loan, and loans accrue interest whether or not the borrower reads the terms. When the chain of give-and-take breaks, the earth does not send a polite reminder. It sends floods where there was farmland, fire where there was forest. Disaster is not nature’s cruelty. It is nature’s arithmetic, catching up.

Nations carry the same ledger. America was built on a debt few of its founders spoke of aloud — a continent taken from people who were, in the taking, nearly erased. Something in the founders seemed to sense that a country built on so vast an unspoken debt could not survive as a fortress for the few, so they made, however imperfectly, a promise that the land would belong to anyone willing to build on it. It was closer to restitution than generosity: if the debt to the land’s first people could never be repaid in full, perhaps it could be honored by becoming a home for everyone else the world had discarded.
That promise is the second wing of the American eagle — freedom, the pursuit of happiness on borrowed soil. The first wing is the migrant: Sergey Brin from Russia to help build Google, Jensen Huang from Taiwan to build Nvidia, Elon Musk from South Africa to help build what he built. A nation of immigrants is, quite literally, flying on the labor of people it once had to be persuaded to let in. Any policy that treats the stranger at the border as a threat rather than a wing is a default on the very debt that built the house. Ground a bird’s wings long enough, however righteous the cage looks from inside, and it forgets how to fly at all.

And now a new frontier of debt has opened, one we have barely begun to name. The same builders who owe their fortune to a planet’s soil and a nation’s welcome are now preparing to leave both behind — not merely to explore, but to seek a second address, a second leisure, a second permanence, in a dark that was never allocated to man in the first place. I ask the question no shareholder meeting seems to ask: what repayment is being made for that journey? Where is the risk assessment for a species learning to leave before it has learned to steward what it already has? Will the compound interest on this new debt come due as a climate crisis we financed twice — once by extracting the earth, and again by funding the exit from it?
To be a capitalist is not, by itself, a sin. But every prize has a price, and a trillion dollars built without a repayment plan for the planet it was built from is not genius, it is deferred bankruptcy — the kind unchecked capitalism has a way of handing not to the man who deferred it, but to the civilization that let him.

But most debts are not owed to institutions or to orbits. They are owed to people who will not send an invoice, because they were never keeping score — which is exactly why we forget them first. If your parents are alive, you owe them a debt payable only in daily gratitude, not deathbed eulogy. If a friend once talked you back from the edge of your own darkest season, that debt does not expire because the season passed. We owe the unborn, too, whatever balance we leave in this ledger when we go. We owe the ocean, the forest’s quieter twin, still absorbing what we refuse to carry ourselves.
This is a debt with no maturity date. It runs for as long as breath does. So let this be less an essay than an instruction: call the old friend today. Call the parent while their voice still answers. Tell the classmate you remember what they did. Servicing a debt of gratitude costs nothing but pride, and pride is the one currency none of us can actually spend.
We did not choose to be born owing. But we do choose, every single day, whether to default.

*I am, myself, proof of the argument — a man built almost entirely out of debts I did not choose and have spent a lifetime trying to service. To everyone still adding to that ledger: I see the entry. I am paying it forward*

— Tim Akano is a Public Intellectual and Geopolitical Risks Analyst, writes from Lagos.
Founder, Almajiri-to-Tech Foundation
Founder, One Africa Initiatives Academy
Founder, Tim Akano Foundation
Founder/CEO: New Horizons Africa Group
*www.timakano.com*
*timakano1@gmail.com*