Newsletter 2010

On the occasion of a provincial agricultural show on 14 August 2010, a senior Zimbabwe government official claimed that agriculture is the backbone of the Zimbabwean economy. Further on in his speech he urged the government to subsidize farmers.
If the backbone of the national economy needs subsidy, then we are probably in worse trouble than we realized! If a breadwinner needs charity, is he still a breadwinner?

Agriculture is not the only sector where myths abound. In industry, business model inertia rules supreme. There is a lot of hollow optimism based upon fallacies. There are many industries and even mines chasing long outdated business models and hoping against hope to recapture some peak capacity they once achieved back in the mists of history. The scaring thing is that sometimes I wonder whether my business model is not out-of-date too!

Fortunately, in spite of the general doldrums, there are pockets of incipient trade winds. By far the brightest ray of hope so far was the official adoption of real money, US dollars in February 2009. Business is so much more meaningful with real money. There is now plenty of motivation to take on even small jobs that were not worthwhile two years ago. In hindsight, we never fully realized just how much our wallets were haemorrhaging at the hands of a hopelessly mismanaged local currency and the parasites that came with the territory.

Businesses with appropriate models are blossoming. The newer supermarkets are a case in point. As far as choice of merchandise is concerned, we have never had it so good. The other day I saw even Sharon fruit straight from Israel at a local supermarket! Not many people here know Sharon fruit so the shop had a merchandiser handy explaining to customers what it was.

The amazing choice we now enjoy is but a symptom of more profound underlying transformation. In spite of political rhetoric extolling the virtues of sovereignty and territorial integrity, the evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. In 1922, a referendum was held in Southern Rhodesia to decide whether to become a province of the Union of South Africa or go for responsible government. They opted for responsible government. I am sooooo glad they did. South African apartheid was a lot more severe than the Rhodesian version.

In an amusing twist of fate, present day Zimbabwe is now a de facto province of South Africa. The milk in my fridge was packed in Stellenbosch, South Africa. My local supermarket

is indistinguishable from South African ones. For more serious shopping, we go to Johannesburg, South Africa. To travel abroad, we generally go through Johannesburg. The visa requirement for travel to South Africa has been scrapped. When Zimbabwean political power struggles get too noisy, South Africa’s President Zuma drops in every now and then to read the riot act to the feuding “provincial governors.” Having run our own national currency aground, the South African rand is now one of a number of foreign currencies adopted to constitute legal tender in Zimbabwe.

Since independence, we have not been faithful with the little we had. I am reminded of the Bible verse, “ ‘Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents.’ ” Mat25:28. Given enough rope, bad managers eventually work themselves into a corner.

Personally I am not quite there yet. My business is not exactly blossoming but it has come a long way this year. If nothing goes wrong with my current order book, then I might even afford a holiday next year, at last. More importantly, business assets now exceed liabilities. Two years ago I had plenty of liabilities and virtually no assets left in the business. Fortunately my business model as well as my personal life entailed only minimal baggage, so I managed to weather the economic meltdown. God has been good to me in that respect.

One lesson I have learnt vividly is that it is not only the book assets that matter to a business. Loss of human resources to emigration left me in the lurch at one point.
In hindsight, adversity led to better things. Emigration of a key electronics subcontractor forced my hand to upgrade the Gwatamatic controls from an embedded system to a programmable logic controller (PLC)

A PLC is the industrial equivalent of a PC. It is more expensive than an embedded system but extremely robust and versatile. It is the versatility that I am finding most exciting. It promises to open far reaching doors well beyond the Gwatamatic. Sometimes we need a crisis before change can have a chance.

To make the most of the new opportunities, I went on a PLC programming crash course earlier in the year. My tutor Osborn

is arguably the foremost PLC authority in Zimbabwe. What is not arguable is that he is an extremely bright man. In fact in the Cambridge Syndicate Ordinary Level School Examinations of November 1987, he came out the top student in the whole of Zimbabwe. It is quite a privilege to learn under someone like that.

The theory behind PID controllers (a key control subsystem incorporated in a PLC) can be extremely mathematical. So I have enrolled for more core mathematics modules in my UNISA studies for the year 2011. If all goes according to plan, I might complete my maths degree in the year 2012 instead of 2025!

My nephew Adrian completed his mathematics degree this year, much to my envy. But then again, he was studying full time. In fact it was a bumper year for the family. Three grandchildren graduated from university this year and we had a family party the other day in their honour.

They are from left to right; Fungai (business studies), Adrian (operations research and statistics) and Nyasha (medicine). Not bad considering my father was the first literate person on the paternal branch of our family tree. His link to literacy was remarkably tenuous. Evangelist Shamuyarira, (father to Nathan Shamuyarira) established a school in our ward in the thirties. He would go round the villages trying to persuade children to come to the school. The children’s parents did not know what school was, so they were skeptical. Furthermore the evangelist was preaching Christianity, which was contrary to the prevailing animistic religion. So they would advise their children to run away into the bush when they saw him approaching.
After a series of frustrating attempts, evangelist Shamuyarira eventually came up with a winning formula. He would now bring a wind-up gramophone to the villages. The novelty of it was enough to entice the children to break cover and edge in cautiously to investigate. Before long the children were dancing to vintage music! That way he won their trust and successfully got them to school. My father was one of the children. That was our tenuous bridge to literacy.

The next bridge I could do with is a bridge to wealth. In his annual letter of the year 2007,
Warren Buffet advised his audience never to rely on one source of income. That advice
struck a chord with me. Accordingly I am now putting more commercial
emphasis on my subsidiary inventions. The following have now been commercialized:
the tsotsomatic (a domestic size portable solid fuel cooking apparatus);

the steamatic (a cooking platform that converts an ordinary saucepan into a steamer);

the kotomatic (an avocado harvesting implement).

They are all small beer relative to the Gwatamatic but they do help the overall cash flows.

The braaimatic (a vectored braai (barbecue stand)) made its debut this year but it is still all but under wraps for now because I am considering patenting it first. Suffice it to say it had its maiden run at Derrick and Sara’s braai party on 23 October 2010. I hope I did not annoy you too much Sara.

Unexpected fame came my way this year. During the year I was invited to be a guest speaker on intellectual property protection (patents, trademarks, copyright that type of thing) at three high profile events as well as radio and television interviews. The most daunting one was the Law Society Summer School. I was invited to lecture lawyers on intellectual property law. I was well aware that those guys have spent years studying law full time while the scraps of intellectual property law that I know were picked up informally. How could I lecture to them?! In the end I decided to turn the assignment into my kind of fight and spoke on intellectual property from an inventor’s point of view. To my relief, they seemed to find value in that facet of it!

As a fugitive, I have to change my contact details from time to time. In the New Year I expect to progressively decommission my zol email address and migrate towards gmail.
From now on please use this address for me: gwataw@gmail.com

I wish you a wonderful Christmas and a good New Year.

Dr Lee, I presume?

Just like Elvis, David Livingstone has been sighted a number of times. Reincarnations of David Livingstone continue to crop up in the various phases of my life.

Growing up in the rural Marondera district of Zimbabwe, the first white man I recall seeing was Peter Fry. He was a graduate student from the University of Cambridge, UK who came to live among us while he worked on his thesis towards a PhD in anthropology.
Separation of the races in the Rhodesia of that day was viciously enforced. Furthermore, many people in our neighbourhood did not know what anthropology was. So the purpose of his presence among us became the subject of considerable speculation. You can read more about it at: http://assets.cambridge.org/97805210/40754/excerpt/9780521040754_excerpt.pdf . It is quite a readable article even if you are not into anthropology. In a sense, Peter Fry was the “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” of that time.

Later in my life I was a kind of Dr Livingstone in reverse when I travelled to Finland. I was probably the first black man that some of the children there ever saw. My hosts were visibly embarrassed by the children’s blatant curiosity, especially in the sauna.

More recently, I overheard a white friend Stan ask: “What do you call a white man on First Street, Harare?”( First Street is the “Oxford Street” of Harare, or at least used to be.)
The answer was, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” There is a profound irony in there. I am told that as recently as the seventies, Blacks were not allowed on First Street after sunset, in a dilute analogue of South Africa’s apartheid pass laws. Mr Ian Smith, the last premier of Rhodesia, would turn in his grave if he knew the species that inhabit First Street and its environs today. There are street children sniffing solvents, vendors selling mazhanje, masau and tsubvu (wild fruit),
consumers spitting mazhanje, masau and tsubvu pips onto the pavement, and beggars’ toddlers relieving themselves on the pavement.

First Street is essentially the epicenter of general decay that pervades Harare’s Central Business District. Even Africa Unity Square (formerly Cecil Square) has not been spared.
Last year a friend was distressed when he found me sitting in there. I was early for a meeting in a nearby building, so I sat on a park bench for a while. The friend was cutting across the park on his way to a nearby bank. When he saw me he asked if everything was alright in a concerned voice. That is when I looked around me and realized I had predominantly vagrants and riot police for company! The riot police are gone now but the decay remains inexorable.


There are at least four road junctions in Harare that work a lot better when there are power blackouts, i.e. when the traffic lights are out. These are at the corners of Seventh St and N Mandela Ave; Fourth St and R. Manyika Ave; Fourth St and J Moyo Ave; R Mugabe Rd and Chiremba Rd. As soon as lights are restored, traffic tailbacks usually start building up again. These are examples of badly tuned utilities that eventually emasculate potentially good systems.

Another example is the medicines control infrastructure in Zimbabwe. While the Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe’s headquarters looks deceptively intact,
actual control is out of control! The retail pharmacists are so desperate for business that they have pulled out all the stops to promote sales. That includes not insisting on doctors’ prescriptions. There is a silver lining here though. Some pharmacists used to be overzealous. In my running days I found that an anti-inflammatory drug called piroxicam would fix pulled muscle pain very easily. However if I sustained injury over a weekend, I would have to wait until the Monday to get a prescription first. So when I travelled to India I made the most of an opportunity to stock up on piroxicam without a prescription. Now I can buy it anytime I want without having to find passage to India!

South African pharmacists are a lot worse. On one occasion I was travelling to a malaria zone from South Africa. So I popped into Dischem Roodepoort for malaria prevention tablets. They wouldn’t sell them to me without a prescription! They suggested I go to consult a doctor across the complex for R300 in order to get a prescription to buy tablets worth R10! Fortunately I eventually found a small village pharmacy that was more than eager to get my business without erecting any barriers.

In my life I have endured considerable tyranny at the hands of overzealous pharmacists. So I am not entirely sorry to see the drug control system in Zimbabwe collapse. It is like watching a bully’s castle getting breached. It is cause for discreet celebration if not outright gloating.

A motif that reverberates through most of the decline in Zimbabwe is devolution. Devolution is topical in political debates but it is already a reality in many domains. For example the national electricity supply grid has been devolved to private generators; municipal water supplies have been devolved to private boreholes in people’s gardens; railways, pipelines and other public transport systems have been devolved to notorious minibuses
and menacing lorries. The transfer of heavy freight from railways to the roads has done to our road network what myxomatosis did to rabbits. Even the government has got in on the act, acquiring a huge fleet of buses
for ferrying civil servants to and from work. The buses run in the morning and again in the evening. For the rest of the day the huge investment is lying idle. The state school system is giving way to a plethora of fragmented private colleges. Central municipal rubbish dumps have bee
n replaced by informal dumps on road verges all over the city.
The smell has also been devolved all over the city. As usual there is nothing new under the sun. Similar trends have already run their course in other African countries that attained independence before Zimbabwe. For example the railways of Zambia collapsed long back. So now the output of the Zambian Copperbelt is conveyed by road through Zimbabwe to South African sea ports. Copper cathodes are extremely heavy. This can only compound the sorry state of our road network.

Banks have been devolved to people’s pillows. Once-vibrant banking halls are now eerie ghost towns. It is easy to understand why. Depositors endured untold suffering trying to access their life savings two years ago.
Most of them lost out badly. For as long as the villains from two years ago remain empowered, potential depositors will remain wary. Investor confidence is often debated as if it applies only to foreign investors. I think local investor confidence has to be restored first before we can ever hope to attract foreign investors. For now, funds remain buried in mattresses and inaccessible to the business sector.

Department stores have been devolved to a plethora of Chinese shops across Harare. The other week I got a sudden realization of how much the Chinese have made inroads into Zimbabwe when I got this till slip at a Harare shop.
I understand historically the Chinese did not have the freedom to leave China. Now that the lid has been lifted they are everywhere. Meanwhile the debate as to whether the new Chinese immigrants in Zimbabwe are a net asset or liability rages on. Personally I think they could be a net asset. One factor that has hampered them is endorsement by some unpopular elements in the Zimbabwe Government. In a desperate bid to spite Western governments, the elements have incessantly espoused the so called “Look East Policy” that favours the Chinese (but curiously does not seem to include the Japanese). This has no doubt been a kiss of death for the innocent Chinese immigrants who have no interest in political bickering but are just seeking a new life. Fortunately they are resilient and astute enough to forge ahead in spite of this setback.

I see the Chinese immigrants helping our welfare both in the short term as well as in the long term. The have already raised the bar in the retail sector, to the benefit of the consumer. Their shops may not be the best laid-out but their prices are no doubt the best in town. Sometimes I wonder how they make any money at all! They bring even heavy goods like crockery and sanitary ware all the way from China and still land them in Harare infinitely cheaper than local producers. As expected the local producers are crying foul and canvassing the government to erect trade barriers. For the best part of my life, Rhodesian and Zimbabwean governments alike raped their citizens in order to protect or even subsidize inefficient local industries. It is like a breath of fresh air to have that era behind us. It took a horrendous crisis to give this change a chance, so I hope protectionism never comes back. Industries are supposed to serve the people not the other way round. Inefficient businesses should be allowed to die.

Not long ago, the Chinese were a novelty in this part of the world. The few that were here probably greeted one another as, “Dr Lee, I presume?” Not anymore. They are coming in fast and furious. They appear to be integrating into Zimbabwean life with relative speed and ease. They have settled in Borrowdale (an up-market suburb of Harare) as well as Chitungwiza (a dormitory town) and the continuum in between. It is only a question of time before intermarriage kicks in. Even that won’t be such a bad thing. Culture may kick against it for a while but in the end biology always wins. The population of Zimbabwe a hundred years ago was less than a million. We have now made twelve million from that limited gene pool. So we are probably inbred already. Therefore any significant injection of new genes can only be good for the country.

I am now on the board of the Harare Inner City Partnership,
a partnership between businesses and the municipality seeking to encourage inner city regeneration.
Maybe if we are successful, plenty of Dr Livingstones and other decision drivers will be attracted back to the central business district of Harare again. There is so much to do and so little done. The insight I have gained in the little we have done has left me aspiring to join the ranks of municipal councillors as opposed to members of parliament (MPs).
It may be more glamorous to be an MP but there is infinitely more opportunity to make a difference at local government level. This discovery is likely to have far reaching influence on my future political thrust.

For now my immediate worry is exams. I am taking computer science, a subsidiary subject, this year. I expect to be back to core mathematics next year. I am due to finish my exams in a couple of weeks’ time. Then life can begin again. You won’t see me for the dust after then.

Update 21 April 2010

Contents:
1. A step backwards.
2. Success at last.
3. Back from the world of the dead

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”, Sherlock Holmes says to Watson,
"For years past I have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again …… I have felt the presence of this force, ………….. For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it,"

In the affairs of Zimbabwe we have had more than our fair share of similar deep organizing gnomes. No sooner do we look like we are on the road to recovery than a gnome throws yet another spanner in the works.

There are many ways of generating electricity. Thermal, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and wave power plants are all different routes to the same electricity. Some ways are faster than others, some are cheaper than others and some have worse side effects than others.

So it is with struggles for political independence. There are many possible routes to the same end. Throughout history and throughout the world colonial empires have waxed and waned. In a sense Africa is a microcosm of that wider phenomenon. African countries have attained political independence in a variety of ways, some peaceful and others not so peaceful.

Zimbabwe took the armed struggle route. We made our bed and we must now lie in it. It is like choosing the nuclear power route. It is aggressive and quick. However if it is not well managed, the cost of its legacy could eventually exceed the value of the intended utility. I believe our lot at any point in history is largely the grand total resultant of choices we have made as well as choices we failed to make.

Since independence thirty years ago, we have been saddled with gnomes crafting unsustainable populist policies in areas where different professions would have been more appropriate. The recent collapse of the Zimbabwean economy can be traced to such roots.

Earlier this year we received yet another dose of the same, in the form of the controversial Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment (General) Regulations, 2010 gazetted on 29 January 2010. It is a particularly rabid form of affirmative action that proposes to expropriate 51% of some companies’ issued share capital. To add to the intrigue, some of the people believed to have crafted it are businessmen in their own right. A friend was wondering how they would feel if we went and seized 51% of THEIR businesses. There are many theories to explain this apparent contradiction. Probably the most plausible is that there are parasites in the system whose welfare depends on spoils of chaos. So it is in their personal interests to stoke up confusion.

Curiously the authorities hastily called public hearings on the new regulations. The hearings were an absolute waste of time and money, not least because they were convened AFTER the regulations had already been gazetted. I attended one of the hearing sessions

only to see what happens next.

Personally I have been opposed to affirmative action even in the best of times. I think it is an insult to its intended beneficiaries. It is an implicit way of saying, “You won’t come anywhere unless we give you a head start in the race.” I would be most offended if I discovered that I was ever awarded a privilege purely on the basis of skin colour. In the eighties I worked for a Harare firm of accountants. In those days black partners were few and far between. However that did not stop my fellow articled clerks attempting to classify the few black partners there were. They used two broad categories: Those who made it into partnership on merit and those who appeared to have made it on black-advancement tickets. In their cruel way, the young clerks pronounced their verdict on the whole idea of affirmative action. Unfortunately over the years the young clerks appear to have lost their mettle. The once wanton kittens have now made apathetic sober cats. They are hopelessly reticent when destructive legislation is wheeled in. I think the Zimbabwean populace in general has been thoroughly browbeaten over the years.

Analysts have dwelt at length on the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment (General) Regulations’ effects on foreign investors. However they seem to have overlooked its effects on local investors. Local investors are probably even more jittery because they know the breed of characters they are dealing with. For example the recent Star Africa rights issue flopped spectacularly. It was more than 70% undersubscribed. Sure, the market is facing liquidity constraints but security of investment is bound to have played a role there too. The only significant foreign shareholder in Star Africa is believed to be the UK’s Tate & Lyle group holding 23% of the issued share capital.

Some years back I had a strange journeyman assisting me at work. He confided in me that he only ever stole from white men. However before long my tools disappeared.
The moral of the story is that a predator is a threat to everyone even if its favourite prey may be only zebra.

Now for the good news: Seven years ago I invented the Gochamatic, a helical grill that overcomes the limitations of planar grills. Though it was designed with roasting green maize cobs in mind, it can generally handle many foods that have cylindrical symmetry. Seven years ago my grasp of temperature control systems was limited. So I never got the temperature right, until 14 March 2010.

With the business trials of recent years, the silver lining is that I have learnt many survival skills. I have learnt to fix the car, and more.

For some work where I used to hire electricians, I have learnt to do it myself. In particular, I have gained considerable experience wiring industrial boiling pans.
So on 13 March 2010, I had a sneaking suspicion that it would now be a piece of cake to build and tune a Gochamatic temperature control system (using a binary search algorithm).
So I retrieved the Gochamatic prototype from the store room where it was gathering dust and rust.
By 14 March 2010, it was already running. I got the critical temperature after only a few tries. Once that happened, it worked like a dream. So it could be on the market in the next few years.

The Zimbabwe Open golf tournament teed off today, after nine years in the wilderness. I am not a golfer but I am excited because my brother is the chairman of the committee that resuscitated it. It was first played in 1984 and was part of what was known as the Safari Tour, a collection of events in Africa that were played by professionals based on the European Tour. Since the Zimbabwe Open’s cancellation prior to the 2002 edition due to economic instability in Zimbabwe leading to the withdrawal of sponsors, there have been many unsuccessful attempts to resurrect it. At last it has happened, this time as part of The Sunshine Tour. So if you go to the Royal Harare Golf Club and tell them you know me, they might let you onto the green.