We spend so much money buying imported fish, when our own yards have space to build an earth fish pond that can keep fish to feed us throughout the year.
There will come a time when your body will require fish, but your pocket cannot afford it. Look around your plot or your yard and find a space where you can dig a sizable fish pond and keep your fish there, whether tilapia or catfish. When the body starts demanding foodstuffs we cannot afford to buy, you will find that your investment in your yard has paid dividends.
Behind your house, or any other place out there, a 10 by 15 metres fish pond, or even a 5 by 10 metres fish pond, is enough. On top of it, or near it, build a kraal for chickens or rabbits, whose manure can help feed the fish underneath.
You will be able to eat chicken, rabbits and fish, and your diet will be balanced. It is not time to waste space by planting lawn and kapinga, and spend hard-earned money buying things you are able to raise yourself. You can have a three-pack kraal for rabbits, chickens and guinea fowl, and then keep your fish.
Move around many supermarkets and you will see that most of the fish we are buying is from neighbouring countries, when almost all of us staying in towns have places within our plots where we can keep poultry, fish or rabbits.
Some of the leftovers that fill up our bins can turn into feed for our poultry and fish. Within 6 months you can start harvesting, and you can learn to have staggered harvesting by harvesting only what is required at that particular time. Don’t buy everything, when some of those things can be locally produced. Produce what you can eat, and eat what you can produce. It feels good eating what you produced, because you are assured of its quality.
Is that possible? Yes! Use your garden boys and maids, use some of the extended family members who simply add up to your monthly budgets, to look after these investments. After a few months, you will thank me.
Sometimes during weekends we invite people behind our houses, put chairs there and enjoy braais. Those are the same places where you can put up a fish pond, poultry and rabbit kraals.
What matters in life is not how many hours you chat with your friends in such places behind your houses, but how you turn those idle places into usefulness.
Turn those idle places into usefulness and enjoy your life before God calls you to a resting place which, as a sheikh describes it, is 1 by 2 metres radius and 6 feet down.
Remember, it is not the size of your plot that matters, but the size of your brain.
About the Author:
Apart from being Leader of the Opposition, Hon. Simplex Chithyola Banda finds time to author a book advising people to use practical solutions to move from poverty to prosperity using simple solutions that bring about big changes and make life better.
In LIFE AFTER POLITICS: The Practical Guide for Prospective Candidates and Serving Politicians, he turns from politics to the general public with a simple but powerful message: you already have what you need to create wealth.
Having watched once-powerful Ministers sell their cars to pay school fees, former MPs drink from morning to evening because they had nothing else to do, and families lose houses to banks, he decided he would not be that man — and he does not want you to be that man either.
With practical, real-life examples, he shows how an iPhone 16 Pro Max worth over $1,500 (MWK 2,626,500) could have been 5 cows, growing to 8 cows or more in 3 years, or 20 goats in two years, while K3 million spent boozing in one weekend is like eating 6 cows in one weekend. His advice is clear: do not eat your capital, invest it.
Think local and act global. No one will be famous by what he has eaten and drunk, but by what he has built over the years. Start small and grow big. Look at what you have and turn it into a capital
