Zimbabwe Absurdity

The power went off in a storm last night. It was probably a tree falling on the lines. Getting to work this morning the foreman told me that the backup diesel engine was not starting from 2 weeks ago. Apparently nobody had told him until today. We have another smaller backup diesel pump and that was pressed into service whilst I tackled the bigger one. It appears to be a fuel problem but I could not solve it so went off to find some 110mm PVC piping to replace another section of pipe that is perpetually splitting, probably due to the excessively high pressure from the over-sized electric pump. We did have a pressure reducer but I can no longer find a reducer to give us the 2 bars necessary to run the various sprinklers. I can find one that reduces to 1.1 bars but that is insufficient. Amazingly I found the pipes and fittings at an outlet in Borrowdale that curiously advertises itself with a pneumatic chested young lass in a very small bikini “For the best after sales service and much more!”. I guess sex sells. I am almost certain I could have sourced the pipes and fittings for far less in the industrial sites but that was a good hour round trip so I paid over the top. The power was still not on when I got back to the nursery and as filling the emergency tanks was a priority, fixing the leaking pipe will have to wait until tomorrow.

I had an American guest recently. When I told her how much my staff were paid I detected a faintly accusing air of exploitation. I explained that our productivity was nothing like that in the USA but it was only earlier this week that I could quantify it.

On Wednesday we started packing sweet potato cuttings that we’d taken into boxes of 200 cuttings each for an NGO. The total requirement was 227,000 which I knew would take 2 days. At the end of Wednesday only 84,000 had been packed. So yesterday I told the foreman supervising this that the women could go when they’d finished and they would still be paid a full day’s wage. The balance of 143,000 cuttings was packed by 14h30!

I was in my local service provider’s outlet at the Borrowdale Village shopping complex yesterday to register my cell phone lines. I didn’t really want to do it but I’d been threatened with closure if I didn’t do it by the end of February. It also meant that I could have the dubious priveledge of being able to access the GPRS facility and use the phone to browse the web.

A women ahead of me had asked the obvious question; why do we have to do this? The sales lady trotted out the standard answer – mainly security and various other reasons that I did not catch. When I pointed out that when I went to the UK last year I bought a SIM card at Gatwick airport from a vending machine without producing any form of identification and that if anywhere should have security issues with cell phones it should be the UK she didn’t have an answer. So I just have to wonder who would be interested in my personal details (ID number, residential address, full name) and what phone numbers I own.

This apparently a la Nina year which should mean at least average rainfall for us. As I speak we are at less than half of where we should be for an average year and heading for even less rain than last year which was very dry. I took this photo early this morning. Development like this usually indicates a big storm later. We shall see.

I was making a deposit into the account of my insurance broker on Tuesday at a local branch of CABS, which despite the name (Central African Building Society) has been a registered commercial bank for some time. Behind the teller was a board offering interest rates on long term, up to 90 days, deposits. The highest rate they were offering was 7% which was a lot better than anything I could find “out there” in the real world. It’s no secret that a lot of money has been externalized from Zimbabwe, this could only be an attempt to get some of it back. I had to admit it WAS pretty attractive but just how secure is the Zimbabwe banking sector?

For the past 4 years Grace Mugabe’s farming company has been farming the land between where I live and work. Mainly they have planted late soyas there with mixed success. It has inevitably been too late – probably something to do with the ZANU-PF congress that takes place late in the year but I have to admit I am not sure what the link could be.

On Saturday they were still planting maize – at least a month too late so it will very likely yield nothing of consequence.
I am sure I have mentioned elsewhere that it is cheaper to import maize into Zimbabwe than grow it here at the moment. That is of no importance to Her Ladyship; she will not be paying for the inputs anyway but she will be pocketing the income!

It was a rather nice looking late model Case 4×4 tractor doing the planting. It was already running on one cylinder less than the full complement and pouring blue smoke out of the exhaust. I guess somebody else had paid for that too.