South African motivational speaker and author, Gayton McKenzie, appears to have encountered yet another of life’s baffling fixes, [out of prison though], and now he is asking himself if he even needed to have taken to crime at all in the first place. McKenzie did time at the Grootvlei Prison in South Africa’s Free State province for bank robbery, but a heroic deed with three other prisoners spared him the remaining eight years of the 15-year jail term. And visiting Ghana for the first time as a member of a sports and education foundation team at the request of former Asante Kotoko and King Faisal CEO, Herbert Mensah, McKenzie dug deep into his person Friday evening and intoned that Ghanaians have put him to shame. His reason? Gayton told myjoyonline.com that since arriving in Ghana on Wednesday, he has seen “absolute poverty here”, “un-be-lie-vably pessimistic people,” “a proud but hopeless people,” and “a forgotten nation.” “But one thing that stood out for me in Ghana is the pride that the people have even in their suffering. It is the honesty. They put me to shame because I said that I committed crime because I was poor, but I’ve seen people that are 100 percent poorer than I ever was but they are not committing crimes here.” And the touching lesson, he says, urges him on to want to hit the streets all day to encourage people to shun crime and live their dreams, great, positive dreams of course; an agenda he has been spreading for five years since being set free from prison. And prison - McKenzie has a ‘better’ name for it; HELL, and if you dreamed of doing anything that has a jail sentence potential, he says to tell you DON’T! Because you may not survive and return to even a wretched life again. “All I want to tell people is; here is a man that came from hell and I’m here today to come and tell you it’s burning there. They don’t need to make my mistakes to learn from my mistakes,” confesses the 6ft-plus, strongly built author of Choice who had previously found hunger and greed reason enough to resign his fate to violent crime. When asked what at all could motivate a man to attempt ‘sins’ such as robbing security-conscious and heavily guarded banks, McKenzie gave what appeared to be his well-rehearsed maxim; “A hungry stomach believes no rules. A greedy stomach respects no rules. I was both. Hungry and greedy and I tell you my brother, if you are hungry and greedy, there is nothing that you will see as a danger to life, that is why I robbed banks, just the lure of good money.” Certainly McKenzie cannot be proud of his violent past and he is not, but he insists he is a fulfilled man today for what ends he is putting his energies. “I am not an angel as I sit here, but I am a fulfilled person and greatly blessed by God. I have no regrets, my only regret is that I will not be able to reach out to every prisoner before I die.” For this reason McKenzie urges all hands on deck, “Because people have this tendency of saying I do not have a child in prison. I don’t have a family member in prison. Yea, today you might not have a child in prison, today you might not have a family member in prison, but tomorrow, your child might go to prison, or your family member, or still yourself can end up in prison.” “I’ve seen two million school children in my five years. I have seen thousands of corporates. I’ve seen thousands of drug addicts. I’ve seen thousands of apprentice criminals and I’ve helped many of them, and I stand in front of you, my brother, to tell you that the only reason why I could help them was because I was helped. So help your neighbour, be your brother’s keeper because today you’re giving help, tomorrow you might need help.”