Zimbabwe Absurdity

While I was away in South Africa last week, the new budget for 2008 was announced. I am told it holds the world record in terms of numbers ($7.84 quadrillion forecast expenditure – go work it out for yourself!) but definitely not value. My next door neighbour tells me that the biggest single item was allotted to the election next year, some 220 trillion Zim dollars. That’s $220,000,000,000,000. I doubt that it will be used to organize a well run free-and-fair election but more of a let’s-win-at-any-cost sort of election. The unit used – was the trillion.

Oh, divide by 1.6 million to get the cash to US dollar rate and 3 million to get the transfer rate. That’s valid for the next day or two only.

I got back from a week in South Africa late on Friday night. I don’t think I’ll be tempted to drive at night for quite some time. There were no near misses but it was very tiring. Often there were no road markings, about 10% of oncoming vehicles could not find the dimmer switch, vehicles had a variety of headlights in a variety of working conditions, and there were no lights on in the towns en route to show me where I was which I found very disorientating. On arriving in Harare I had to guess where the centre of the road was. Fortunately it was not raining which would have made it even worse. It all drove home just how far we have slipped in this country. We seem to live in a cocoon and with no outside reference it’s difficult to see just how far we have fallen. Suffice to say it’s a long way.

I could only afford to take one week off which was not really enough to forget all the stresses but I just had to do it for a break and to do some shopping. Time was when we used to go “South” to shop for luxuries but now we do it for essentials. Amongst other things my shopping list read:

1. Flour (to make bread)
2. Yeast (ditto)
3. Sugar
4. Light bulbs
5. Breakfast cereal
6. Borehole pump
7. Vehicle spares
8. Toilet paper
9. Cooking oil
10. Olive oil
11. Marmite (essential!)

And it can all be got easily, and ALL the groceries are available under one roof, the only difficulty being deciding which brand to get! Definitely easy foraging.

For some truly absurd reason one is only allowed to take ZW$3m out of the country. It’s certainly not exchangeable and anyway, the truth must have sunk in because no-one was remotely interested. I took out a lot more than that and got a good bit of humour giving out $200000 notes with the explanation that our biggest note was (past tense intentional, it’s already changed) worth all of 70c South African. There was a good bit of incredulity but most people believed me, I think. On the way back the touts were out in force at the border post “helping” to clear one through customs for a bit of real money. I was carry a good bit over the duty free limit and it was hot so I succumbed. I was through the border in all of 10 minutes for R100 (about US$15) and a wad of Zim dollars. Oh well, it IS Africa I guess (what happened to all those high principles I used to have?). Impressively enough my declaration of goods purchased was rewritten in about 2 minutes flat for a fraction of the original value. The customs official was suitably uninterested (did she recognize the handwriting?) and I was waved through.

On the way down I managed to not take a critical turning and ended up some 30km off route heading towards Pretoria. I stopped in a “location” (black settlement area) and asked for directions. It was the sort of situation on which bad movies are made; you know, “White man takes wrong turning and ends up in wrong part of town and is murdered/raped/stoned/beheaded for his silliness by sullen, angry blacks”. Except that as far as I could see, no-one was the slightest bit interested. What did interest me was that right “next door” to this heavily populated and not obviously poor area is the distinctly wealthy white farming area of Groblersdal. I was told by my hosts that Mbeki (the SA president) has already made comments on this too. I wonder how long it will take…

There is a South African cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro who is adept at skewering the local politicians. This cartoon is thanks to him and more can be found at the South African Mail and Guardian homepage.

The income tax (PAYE) lower limit is at the moment ZW$4m a month. Officially, i.e. using the official exchange rate of 35000 to the US dollar, this amounts to US$114 a month which is a bit of an insult to say the least. The reality is that ZW$4m is actually worth US$2.85 and I really cannot think of a polite adjective for that.

I’m not sure if this cartoon is a reference to a South African situation that I don’t know about. I suspect not. Price fixing in Zimbabwe was exactly this though; an excuse for those with paws in the black market to get filthy rich. It seems to have largely fallen away as I found out yesterday in a supermarket.

It was my birthday so I thought I’d go out and see what I could find as a way of a treat. Hey, look, butter! Now that would be nice with some home baked bread (South African flour, South African yeast) and there was no way I was going to join the bread queue – yes the price of some things are still controlled. Well, let’s just check the price. Hmm, 10.25m a kg. Well that makes it close to R50 a kg (may as well use South African currency as I’m using South African flour even though it’s local butter). That’s what I call ridiculous and somewhat above the minimum tax bracket. Put it back and see what else is about. OK, some of Jenni’s favourite “breakfast” dog food. She’s a difficult dog to bribe but she really does like the South African (we are on a theme here) dog food, largely because it smells good I suspect. Now that’s clever marketing; make the dog food actually smell like the label – “Beef & Mutton”. I have tried it and am not sure that it IS actually “Beef  & Mutton” but what the hell, she likes it.  A packet of 1.75kg is the same price as the butter, I guess she’ll just have to do with a bone instead, and anyway, it’s just another day to her!

Simon is a big man, tall and just, well, BIG. He is also my GP or general practitioner -what might be referred to as family doctor elsewhere. He is a genial fellow and not at all opinionated as the older generation of medics in this country can be. He has just moved into his very own practice of which he is justifiably proud. It’s been a long road; he moved here in 1977 just  before it all went pear-shaped and since then he has moved from partnership to partnership, locum to locum but now it’s all his. Not without a bit of borrowing from wealthy siblings in his native Jersery (Channel Islands).”I could not have afforded the garage in Jersey”, he told me when I asked him the obvious question. “Here at least I have a nice house and a quality of education for my children that I could not contemplate over there”.

That was a while ago and today, when I questioned his common sense, the reply was a little more succinct; “When the education fucks up I’ll go”. He’s a good doctor so I hope he’ll stay, not just for the education and the practice he’s waited so long to acquire. There are not many doctors in this town who’ll give you their cell and home number!

“So this is the shotgun approach”, I commented as Simon wrote the script for my infected leg.
“Yes”, he enthused, totally missing the cynicism. “This one is for gram negative bacteria, this one for anaerobes and the third will take out anything else as we don’t know what’s causing the infection”. I looked in awe at the list and not without a bit of trepidation; I have taken so many pills in my life that I am a little bit tired of it. Not that there was an alternative, the infection that I have could clear up (doubtful) or spread to the rest of the body. No thanks. Chatting about the usual things that Zimbabweans chat about these days, i.e. foraging, I mentioned that I’d forgotten that it was milk day. He told me that one of his patients was very ill with what they suspected to be Listeria or Brucellosis, either of which could have come from contaminated and unpasteurized milk. I guess we are starting to pay the price for unregulated suppliers making a quick buck on a very desperate public!

I duly drove over to the pharmacist who greeted my by name (at what price fame?) and collected and paid for the script. I noticed that food was an integral part of the treatment procedure so wanting to hit the nail on the head walked to the bakers (next door but one to the closed butcher) and bought some rusks (bready biscuity things that are popular in this part of the world) and two current buns. Sooo, the costing looks like this:

Doctor’s consult:          $6.6m
Antibiotics and aspirin as blood thinner: 97 and 100 items respectively – $9.7m
Food to take the above: $2.2m (of course I will use other food too but this illustrates the point)
Maths: divide by about 1.3m to get US dollars but this is NOT my point.

So what IS the message here?
a)      It’s cheap enough to keep you alive if you can afford the food to take with the antibiotics?
b)      Food is disproportionately expensive (in this case uncontrolled price) or medical supplies are still very cheap (regulated price)?

I got this email via the Commercial Farmers’ Union of which I am not a member, but that is another story. Anyway, I DO know the Travers, Judy’s family have know mine for longer than I have been alive so this is NOT another story. Imire Game Park (pronounced eye-me-re) is the last white owned farm in the Wedza district and has survived largely because they managed to get it National Park status. It seems that this is not enough to put some people off trying…

REWARD FUNDING   Reward funding required towards the arrest and conviction of the persons responsible for the brutal killing of our 3 Black Rhino at Imire Game Park on the night of 7^th November 2007.   “DJ”, mother of 7-week-old “Tatenda” (now orphaned), “Sprinter” (father of “Tatenda”) and “Amber” (pregnant mother and ready to give birth). They were shot while in there bomas. In 20 seconds, our Black Rhino breeding stock were annihilated.   Obviously the bigger the reward the better the prospects of these culprits being brought to JUSTICE all funds will be carefully monitored and invested until such time the reward is paid or refunded to those who have contributed.   All funds made payable to Imire Game Park Zimbank Marondera Branch A/C # 4573 399451001 Contact: Mike or Sheila Thompson, John, Judy or Reilly Travers or Pete and Mandy Bibby Imire Game Park P Bag 3750 Marondera Phone: 022-2054, 022-222857 E-mail: imiregp@zol.co.zw Please forward to everyone, everywhere. 

There are not many social conditions or behavioural issues that I can think of that cannot be remedied by education, though I suppose quality thereof is also important. It is all pretty much irrelevant in Zimbabwe now.

I was chatting to my senior foreman about the continuous requests for more pay and allowances and he said this is never going to end is it. I replied that it was certainly not going to cease in the foreseeable future. He was obviously feeling more than a bit concerned because he volunteered that his 15 year old son was going to school and doing absolutely nothing – the teachers are on indefinite strike. He is not normally this voluble, I usually have to coax information out of him. My other foreman confirmed this; it seems that the children have to go to school, the register is checked and then they are told to go outside and play. Teachers rotate on a two weekly basis just to keep an eye on things but refuse to teach. Many have found work in South Africa for less than the legal minimum but a lot more than they are getting in Zimbabwe.

Last week the one foreman had to go off to the local hospital as his nephew was hit while crossing a road. Fortunately it was nothing serious but a private doctor had to be called in to see him. The government doctors and nurses just sit around and do nothing, they have no drugs or even gloves. If you are critically injured you are just put in a cubicle, the curtains drawn and left to die. I guess there is not too much hope for those with the chronic illnesses. Just when are they going to do something?

We, that’s my generation, are probably a bit of a strange lot by modern standards. I’ll explain. We take things on trust. I last signed a lease on the nursery in 2000. Since then it’s been taken on trust that I’ll keep to the conditions we agreed to on paper back then. When I first computerised the point of sale my landlord was a bit suspicious and required me to print a listing of all the sales I’d made (my rent is based on turnover amongst other things) so he could check up on what I was paying. This lasted about four months until he realized that the computer and my programming were probably more accurate than him tapping away at a calculator. Now he just accepts the figures that I give him.

Some years ago I was working for a company that exported fresh vegetables and various value added products to the UK supermarkets. From time to time the agents we dealt with would send out various staff to check up on various aspects of the business. The first time Tracy came out she was more than taken aback when we stood back to allow her to enter a room first and we (that’s the predominantly male staff) stood up when she walked into a room. We asked her about this and she did admit that she sort of liked it but it took a bit of getting used to. I guess we were (and still are) a bit “old fashioned”.

Yesterday lunchtime I was about to head out to the gym when Colin came anxiously through the gate. He’s a dour chap with no discernible sense of humour so I should have known that something was up when he was considerably more voluble than usual. He acts as an agent for a number of farmers and they export a considerable amount of granadillas (passion fruit) to the EU. I’d grown a considerable amount of seedlings for a number of his customers and had accepted that they would pay on collection. This may seem a strange statement to make to those of you in civilized countries but we had to adopt an up front payment system to avoid getting left with large amounts of uncollected seedlings (yes, even when the farmer supplied the seed!). We have been dealing with Colin for a number of years now and never had a problem and this year he really owed us a lot as we’d managed to fill up the shortfall that another nursery had created by not germinating a single seedling. But his biggest grower who was planning on a 16ha granadilla project had been turfed off his farm. Now a project of that size requires considerable investment in terms of drip irrigation and trellising so he must have been confident that he was not going to encounter problems. Indeed, Colin assured me (at least four times, he was clearly nervous of my reaction) that this farmer was “connected” all the way to THE TOP. No matter, a fat cat wanted what he saw was a profitable enterprise and he has taken it. It matters not the slightest that he does not need it and does not have the skills to run it. The farmer in question was confident that he could get his irrigation and trellising off and start up somewhere else (make a plan) but I told Colin that realistically that would take 3 months or so and the seedlings would be long oversize by then. So, it seems that I will have to dump some 200000 granadilla seedlings worth some US$4000, a not inconsiderable amount for my business. If I am still here next year and if there are still commercial farmers to be supplied with granadillas we are going to have to review this whole trust issue. I really cannot see why I should “share in the risk” as has been suggested to me in the past! Oh, and I did not lose my cool. I couldn’t really even think how to react so I just shrugged and said nothing much; I think Colin got the message.

A large part of the northern suburbs has been without power for the past six days or so. My friend Trevor tells me he’s become a fair grave digger; mainly for the chickens and other meat that went rotten in his deep freeze. Apparently the power came back on this morning though it was way too late for most. I am more lucky – we seldom get power cuts here and the only likely reason is that we are on the same power grid as an engineers’ barracks down the road (must keep the army happy). I don’t make a fuss about it, it seems that people don’t appreciate the more fortunate. What? You are not suffering like the rest of us?

Yesterday I caught a lift with Andre out to Chinhoyi to check out a small airstrip that we could perhaps use to winch up our paragliders. It was not great weather but the trip was a success and I got a reasonable flight to a nearby polo ground and we decided it was definitely worth another trip when the weather was less ominous. On the way out we chatted about the things that Zimbabweans chat about; power shortages, water shortages, milk shortages, where to find bread etc. Andre mentioned that a tree in his next door neighbour’s plot had fallen on the power line and ZESA had actually come out quite quickly to sort it out. He got chatting to the senior technician and was rewarded with some interesting but depressing statistics.

• There is all of 450MW of power available for THE ENTIRE COUNTRY! The mines get first call so no surprise that there is so little power left for the rest of us.
• Namibia did a deal with Zimbabwe and put some money into the power system. It means that we must supply them next year with 150MW. Given that Wankie is unlikely to come on line with anything significant, the power outages are only going to get worse.
• The fault that caused the outage in the northern suburbs could not be found because the tracing equipment was too old. They had to get help from Bulawayo.

So here is my prediction. This economy will eventually collapse, not due to the kindergarten economic policies of the relevant financial institutions but due to the lack of power.

Very occasionally we are treated to some genuine star performers in this little distraught backwater we call home. Angie Nussie is one. I had never heard of her so went along to the outdoor performance last night and was very pleasantly surprised. I guess I should not have been. Reluctantly slotting herself into the folk rock genre, she is an independent Canadian artiste who won Best Female Performer, Best Acoustic Act and Best Songwriter at the Toronto Independent Music Awards. She accompanied herself on piano and acoustic guitar before a small, appreciative audience. It is really nice to hear good lyrics with a good voice AND good music! Three out of three is very rare in modern music! It’s a pity more people were not there, but as is so often the case in Zimbabwe, advertising was poor for what was a worthy charity cause. Thanks to the Canadian Embassy for this one and if you have not heard her yet, you definitely should!

I think I have mentioned Brian before elsewhere in this blog. He’s a soil scientist who works regionally and likes to tell me how poor he is despite earning real money. He’s a genial guy who helps his son out preparing demonstration plots of the vegetables whose seed his son sells and we buy a lot of the seed into the nursery. Brian has a PhD in his field so he is a useful guy to know and I cultivate (pun) our relationship in order to glean information from him. We were chatting yesterday and he mentioned that a cousin of his who own a quarry just down the road was struggling in the current environment. I raised my eyebrows at this as I know that they have done well in the past. Apparently with even the price of quarry stone controlled this is no longer the case. The price that they are allowed to charge covers only the extraction of the rock and transport to the crusher. Thereafter it’s all a loss! Brian also has a partnership in a farm to the south of Harare. On mentioning that I was getting nervous about the power cut we were experiencing (watching the water level falling alarmingly in the main reservoir) he said that this year they were not even bothering to plant tobacco. Three hours a day was not enough time to irrigate anything substantial, and anyway, how would they cure the crop once harvested? Well, so much for Zimbabwe’s much vaunted once most valuable export.

I am writing this offline as the continuing power cuts in town ensure that is the case, so I have not had time this morning to check out my corporate bank account, but I have a confident feeling that I might actually be a billionaire! It’s something of a paradox that in Zimbabwe’s hyper-inflationary environment that electronic banking has become more and more the norm. I do wonder if we were in the older paper driven banking years the economy would actually have collapsed – it’s easier now to move money much faster and thus keep up with the inflationary demands. Anyway, I’m expecting some payments in that will definitely take me to billionaire status. Value in real money? About US$1000.

– But that’s really cheap scotch. Look, eight million dollars, that’s eight pounds. Where are you going to get a litre of scotch for that price?
I shone my torch at the price label, and sure enough it was eight million, or close enough. There was yet another power cut in progress and for some reason the booze shelves were in the darkest corner of the supermarket. Luckily I carry a pocket torch and more than a few people had used it. It seems we are now in a situation where the power supply is interrupting the absence thereof.

I pointed out that the wine was also pretty good value at a pound a bottle for a very reasonable quality South African brand. I’d already bought a substantial quantity of the latter for just that reason, it was remarkably cheap in real terms. Yes, I know that I don’t earn real money but I guess we are all looking for ANY good reason to still be here, no matter how artificial it is. I duly loaded up one bottle of scotch and three of wine.

Malcom, who’d pointed out the amazing value of the scotch, is an infrequent customer of mine. He lives a short distance up the same road as my business and is a successful farmer though he’s had a torrid time in the past few years hanging onto his farm. He likes to chat and although fishing is the topic of choice just chatting is fine. He told me that he’d been approached by a next door neighbour who’d “acquired” his current farm and was looking for a business partner for his son and wouldn’t Malcom be interested in return for political immunity? The background to this is the recent Indiginisation & Economic Empowerment Act that has just passed through parliament and is designed to get “those who were disadvantaged prior to April 2000” (the date of official independence) a share of the diminishing corporate pie. It’s a blatantly racist piece of legislation (whites apparently, can never be indigenous but then were all blacks disadvantaged prior to the said date?) but as usual it has not been well thought out or drafted. In reality it seems that the authorities can only call for 51% indiginisation in situations are those involving a merger that could lead to monopolistic practices, a demerger above a certain value, a change in the controlling interest in certain businesses where that interest will be above a certain value, and investment in prescribed sectors where an investment licence is required. Stay clear of that lot and the minister can do zilch. In theory. It has not stopped the opportunists trying to take advantage and pressurizing the likes of Malcom into parting with a controlling interest and then most likely the whole lot.

It would be silly of course to generalize that the whole of the ruling elite are racist though I would be prepared to bet that a lot of them are. Malcom is on friendly terms with the aunt of a very high ranking political figure and he mentioned his problem to her. Her advice was direct; “Malcom, don’t even entertain him. It will all be rosy until they think they are well entrenched and then they will force you off”. Sadly most of the likes of this lady have been driven away by the absurdity that is Zimbabwe. It’s no secret that the ruling elite never wanted a black middle class to emerge and in this they have succeeded admirably.

I wandered around the rest of the supermarket (though it hardly qualified for supermarket status as there seemed to be little in the way of anything to buy) and then wandered out with my prizes. I felt sort of pleased that I’d got a bargain but something inside told me it was really just a “bargain”.

Some things are genuinely cheap though. Today I sent my driver out to the rural district council to re-licence my vehicles. It cost a total of US$9.00 to licence 3 vehicles for 8 months. I suppose one could argue that it’s worthless because you get nothing for it but the reverse is also true!