My name is James Murage Kweri from Nairobi, Kenya. I am born again by the grace of God. I am married and blessed with two sons, five and two years. I am a training consultant in a bank, a church leader, a community leader and an entrepreneur.
My book Born A Prince Lived A Slave is my first successful published work. I have served in various capacities in the past that prepared me to the writing journey having served in two editorial teams. The first one was in a Christian magazine that was done by a young evangelical team that was operating in the outskirts of Nairobi in the early 2000s. The second one was in Maseno University in 2006 when I was part of the students’ publication editorial team. My blue-print and passion is in knowledge development particularly in enterprise. God has graced me in this area and this book is a product of that grace. This book is not my personal story, it is my personal message, it is my assignment to share.
The average life expectancy of a woman in Okinawa in Japan is 90. It is 63 in Nairobi Kenya. The variance for men is lower by 6 years in both countries, meaning that the average life expectancy for a man in Kenya currently stands at 57 years. I was brought up in a Christian family and I knew life and death was in the hands of God. I shared this statistic in a corporate forum in Mombasa and the question I was asking is, ‘why would God allow men to die early in Kenya than in Japan? Yet statistics showed that more men in Kenya were Christians as compared to the Buddhists and Confucius followers in Japan. The night before I asked this question, God had ministered to me through Ecclesiastes 10:7, ‘I have seen slaves on horseback, while princes go on foot like slaves.’ I knew just from reading this verse that this was dangerous. Why would princes fall and become slaves?
That question would simmer in my heart and would continue expanding and expounding until it eventually became a book. The big message in this book is that men can choose to either be princes or slaves, it is a choice that is largely driven by the knowledge we have. The tragedy in this world is that many people spend all their time doing everything, except what they were created to do. They do not decode God’s message and plan for their lives. These people end up as slaves, yet they had a perfect opportunity to be princes. The book covers the choices men make in enterprise, marriage, prayer and religion, and how those choices end up influencing their destiny.
God has created us and the earth in perfect shape and blue- print. As God’s prime creation, he has charged us with the responsibility of knowledge, without which we perish. He expects the farmer to generate the right knowledge that enables them to effectively harness nature in their farms to flourish. When it rains, he expects the farmer to know what to do with the water from heaven. If the farmer does not know what to do with it, he misses an opportunity to do better. If the farmer plants one tree in his farm without knowledge, and forfeits another tree, what is the opportunity cost for that farmer. If a man lives his entire life without praying, what does that make him? What is the opportunity cost for a man who has been given free access to heaven, yet fails to utilize that opportunity. Or what is the cost for a man who lives his entire life, and forfeits the saving message of Christ? He ends up in eternal slavery yet he all along had an opportunity to become an eternal prince in God’s kingdom.
As a banker and a training consultant, I have come to cherish that God has designed us to thrive in some areas and not others. One of the most important question an individual should discover in life is what business or enterprise should I venture in? This question has a lot of foundation in the bible and Jews have done wonderful books on enterprise making and specialization. The reality however on the ground is that most people spend a lot of their times doing every other business except the business they were created to do. The next issue then becomes, what happens to a man who invests in the business that he was not created to invest in? He lives in struggle and slavery.
