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.

Newsletter 2009

Contents:
1. There is life in the old dog yet.
2. A doctor in the house.
3. Baby Gwata arrived.
4. Participated in building a house of God.
5. Helped save forests
6. Participated in cholera prevention.
7. Discovered long lost relatives

In a moment of weakness a few years ago I enrolled for a degree in Mathematics with the University of South Africa. If I had known how much time and effort it demands I probably would never have started. This year I passed the Real Analysis module, easily one of the most difficult exams I have ever sat all my life. Real analysis is the mathematical study of infinite phenomena using the calculus. I was really pleased with my results. One of the tools we used extensively is called D’Alembert’s ratio test. It is used to test for convergence of infinite series. D’Alembert’s story is remarkable. Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert was abandoned as a newly-born infant. He was subsequently raised by surrogate parents and went on to become one of the leading French mathematicians of the eighteenth century. Looking at the street children of Harare,

I can’t help wondering how many potential D’Alemberts are going to waste.

It has been a good year for my family. My niece Nyasha Gwata passed her medical school finals this year. This represents a landmark for the family. She is the first doctor in the family. Prior to that the highest scholastic attainments in the family were masters degrees. It is not clear yet whether Nyasha will decide to come back to practise in Zimbabwe. Life in Zimbabwe is now infinitely better than last year but we are not out of the wood yet by a long way.

By far the biggest economic reform of the year was the official switch from Zimbabwe dollars to using US dollars. It is working like a dream. Apart from slaying hyperinflation, it provided incentive for formal business to come out of hibernation. Retailers and petrol stations in particular have restocked. It is such a pleasure to be able to drive up to the forecourt and fill up whenever you like. I know it is not profound but after last year’s ordeal,

we appreciate it more than most. It has all eased the pressure to emigrate. Previously one of the attractions of emigration was the opportunity to earn real money as opposed to Monopoly money(Zimbabwe dollars).

Currency reform is probably the biggest achievement of the new government of national unity (GNU). Significant achievements beyond that are unlikely because the government remains technically broke. So far there is nothing significant in the pipeline likely to change that. The GNU is drawn from only the biggest three political parties. Other political parties were not invited to the party. So my political career remains in the doldrums for now. However every dog has his day.

While life is much better for individual consumers, the same cannot be said of Zimbabwean businesses, particularly the big ones. Therein lies the rub. The new-found welfare of the consumer cannot be sustained without productivity at a national level. More than ninety percent of what we are consuming is coming from South Africa. Even the milk in my fridge right now has come from Stellenbosch, South Africa. Paradoxically, milk coming from 2000km away is landed at my local Spar cheaper than the locally produced equivalent coming from 4km away!

Many Zimbabwean corporations were born and/or bred in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia under sanctions (there were real sanctions then). The prime concern was to circumvent sanctions, not necessarily efficiently. After independence, the inefficiency of some companies and parastatals alike was compounded by the Marxist experiments of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Government subsidies were wheeled in to keep consumer prices down and prop up non-viable corporations. In the nineties I was in the milling industry and we used to receive such government subsidies. All in all Zimbabwean companies have been sheltered throughout most of their history.

Now the climate has changed in more ways than one. In practice, the Zimbabwean economy(or rather what remains of it) is now more liberalized than the South African economy. The floodgates have been swung open almost instantaneously. As expected, Zimbabwean companies are not coping with the global competition and many of them will not survive the shake-out. The last time I looked, of the listed companies that had published their annual results then, only two had made a profit. The dying dinosaurs are saddled with overheads they cannot afford to retain or retrench. Needless to say it is a dynamic dilemma, so it is only a question of time before something gives. We are likely to witness spectacular takeovers and mergers if not outright bankruptcies. If the resultant contraction weeds out second rate managers, then it won’t be such a bad thing after all. What this means is that there are bound to be immense business opportunities for the emerging small and agile companies. Unfortunately the opportunities remain elusive to me so far. I will probably only recognize them after others have taken them, in much the same way as I often recognize strengths in ladies after someone else has already married them. That reminds me of the joke of the year: Marriage is like going to an a la carte restaurant with friends. You order what you want but when you see what the next guy has got, you wish you had ordered that!

For now the Gwatamatic continues to support me but only just. The potential customers are so impoverished that “potential customer” is now a misnomer. Accordingly I have developed a truncated version of the Gwatamatic that gives 80% of the functionality for half the price of a full rig. It is called the Baby Gwata.

It is an idea that I conceived sometime back but the first one was only delivered last month

Since last year I have graduated from worrying about my next meal to worrying about my next investment. I also worry whenever I have to fix anything. While food prices have come down considerably, it remains inordinately expensive to fix things in Zimbabwe, whether it is fixing the car, the house or haemorrhoids. Even an ordinary car service remains quite pricey. Whenever I get my car serviced in South Africa it hardly ever exceeds US$100. A similar service in Zimbabwe costs anything up to US$500. There is no small irony in the fact that many of the motor mechs in South Africa are Zimbabweans.

With business slow, I found myself with more time on my hands than usual. So I took up a bit of voluntary work. On one of the projects I started off as a minor donor. Somewhere along the way I let my guard down and found myself the de facto project manager.

It was a project to put up a new church building for the Methodist Church near my rural home 80km south of Harare.

It took a year to build and was officially opened on 22 December 2009.

In hindsight, I am glad I participated. The project is bound to have more eternal value than any sadza machine I could build.

While the project’s primary purpose was to facilitate spiritual food, it also had to address culinary needs. The ladies requested a heavy duty wood fired cooking facility. So I set out to design something more fuel efficient than traditional methods. The result is the Dandamatic.

The grating at the bottom improves ventilation and hence facilitates complete combustion. In practice this means more heat and less smoke. The concentric rings serve a dual purpose. They focus the heat as well as provide variable diameter “hobs” for different sizes of saucepans up to a maximum diameter of 60cm. The Dandamatic had a successful maiden run on 22 December 2009 and fed the thousand-strong crowd that attended the official opening ceremony.

The other voluntary project I undertook was coordinating development of an alternative water supply for my old school, Fletcher High School.

In common with the rest of Zimbabwe, municipal infrastructure in Gweru is falling to pieces and they failed to supply water. The headmaster of Fletcher High School found himself with 700pupils and no running water. As former students we passed the hat round and managed to purchase a heavy duty borehole pump for the school. The borehole is up and running now

but nobody knows how large or small the underground water reserves are.

It appears unreliable municipal water supply is the bane of Africa. I was in Tanzania a couple of weeks ago and saw the tell-tale water tanks atop many buildings. In Zanzibar the electricity was also a problem. They did not have mains electricity supplies for weeks. Fortunately they had a generator at the hotel.
However it broke down on my last night there. We get a lot of power cuts in Harare too. So I should have felt at home in Zanzibar but I didn’t, maybe because I was paying.

My experience of Zanzibar was chequered. For a start I arrived without my luggage. I had a cruel attack of deja vu as I stood at the airport carousel hoping against hope that there was more luggage coming. Fellow passengers had already collected their luggage and gone. It was when the attendant switched off the carousel that I realized I could not deny the truth any longer. I had a similar experience in Cyprus eight years ago, when I had to live out of a Woolworths carrier bag for four days.

Unfortunately there is no Woolworth in Zanzibar. I scoured Stone Town (the old city of Zanzibar) looking for a toothbrush and other emergency supplies. It took a major effort just to find a toothbrush. There are no supermarkets there, just a handful of corner shops that are not well marked. The silver lining was that it forced me to explore extensive portions of Stone Town. Otherwise I would never have trudged along in such sweltering heat for so long. I wondered whether any of the modest shops would stock a micro-screen shaver. The moral of the story is that in future, personal care items will be carried in my hand luggage.

My business sessions were due to begin within 48hours and I would need formal clothes. So my anxiety intensified with every passing hour. Fortunately, late the following day I was re-united with my suitcase in a short but moving ceremony at Zanzibar Airport.

Talking to others afterwards, I discovered that Kenya Airways have a bad luggage handling record. That may well be but a symptom of a deeper underlying problem. Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi has become the hub of African connections. Sadly investment in the Airport has not kept pace with the growth in traffic. So the airport facilities appear stretched. The airport terminal building is perennially overcrowded. There are not enough piers for the aircraft and no buses to ferry people to and from the terminal building in cases where planes are parked elsewhere. We had to walk across the apron mingling with roaring jets and dodging tugs. The incidence of delayed flights

could be yet another symptom of stretched infrastructure. Our flight from Nairobi to Harare was delayed by two hours. I knew we were in trouble when five minutes before the scheduled departure time we were still in the departure lounge and I could see a cleaner dashing up the aircraft stairs carrying a vacuum cleaner. Even the departure lounge was overcrowded, with bodies sprawled all over the floor.

Once on board, the actual flights were not too bad though. At least nobody had to sit on the floor. The crew on board tried really hard. Incidentally, in common with other airlines, Kenya Airways also have their share of the following inevitable species:
1. The poseur – a guy who palpably ignores the on-board safety demo to prove to fellow passengers that he is a frequent flyer.
2. The colonizer – a guy who takes over two armrests. He even has his elbows straying into neighbours’ airspace, especially when he eats.
3. The cargo carrier – a lady who has a million pieces of hand luggage. She proceeds to squash or throw fellow passengers’ luggage out of the luggage bins to make space for her own.

I had glorious views of the sea from my room at the Tembo Hotel. Like the rest of Zanzibar, the hotel also features highly ornamental doors.

Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar. (In spite of his weaknesses, he was one of my boyhood heroes). However he seems to get limited recognition

in his hometown compared to say Montreaux.
Maybe it is because in Zanzibar they are battling to meet basic needs. They do not have the luxury of appreciating the arts. As I explored Stone Town, I saw lots and lots of young men just sitting idle along the streets.
It appears there is serious unemployment there.

Overall, I found Zanzibar dilapidated,
a bit reminiscent of Mombasa. The surprising thing is that in spite of its state, the island still enjoys significant tourist arrivals. For me it was like a breath of fresh air when I left Zanzibar and checked into the Holiday Inn in Dar es Salaam. It really is a good hotel, much better than the Holiday Inn in Harare.

Before I traveled, someone warned me that Dar es Salaam is essentially one big Mbare sprawled by the sea (Mbare is a seedy township in Harare). As it turned out I was pleasantly surprised because Dar does have some good bits. I was however left with the general impression that, for some reason, the British colonial authorities put a lot more planning effort into Southern Africa relative to East Africa. Harare’s layout is superior to all African cities I have been to north of the Zambezi River.

In spite of cultural differences, I think the Tanzanians are our close relatives judging by our common linguistic root. I found Swahili strikingly similar to Shona. Sadly there is no reliable record of our migration history.

Taking it all in all, it has been a good year for me in spite of and also because of the circumstances.
That’s it for now folks.
I trust you had a good Christmas.
Wish you a good New Year.