Zimbabwe Absurdity

Last Friday night the cooling oil from the transformer at work was stolen. It seems to be a fairly risk free occupation – I have never heard of anyone being caught or electrocuted and it can be sold as a heating oil for stoves etc. There was a proctective cage around it on the pole (this is the 3rd time it’s happened) but of course where there is a will there’s a way and they got around it. Fortunately they felt a bit insecure about the wiring and turned the transformer off – which requires a special fibreglass pole so the transformer did not over-heat and self destruct. I wonder where they got that? Being a weekend nothing much happened from the power authority side (ZESA) but yesterday a phone call got the response that ZESA did not have any oil to put into it. This usually means that the oil is available and ZESA does not have the money to buy it.

There are several premises who share the transformer, one being a golf course and the manager has contacts in high places in ZESA so she told me she would handle it. In the meantime I had to think about how to get water out of our boreholes and into the storage tank from where we can use a diesel pump to get it onto the seedlings. Some years back I had bought a small Chinese made generator though not for this sort of eventuality as we have pretty reliable power. It is also only a single phase generator (3-phase generators are expensive) and is only designed for domestic and small premises. I had serious doubts if it could get the power to the borholes some 300m+ away without a big voltage drop that would stop the motors from running. Anyway it was worth a try. First I had to ensure that the two pumps that are single phase (one is a 3-phase) were on the same phase. That done I opened up the switch box and wired the generator onto the relevant phase and switch. I turned the generator on and hoped. At first I could hear the voltage protection on the pumps kicking in and out as they protected the motors from low voltage but eventually it settled down and we got water!

By 4p.m. the generator was leaking diesel. The cover had to come off and the leaking injector feed was remedied. Getting it all back together was another issue. The cover bolts would not line up with the holes! By 5.30 my patience had run out so it went back together sans a few bolts. Now I have to keep it running long enough to stay in business!

In the US dollar economy that pervades in Zimbabwe change is always an issue. We seem to have got over the problem of dollar notes, though they remain by and large disgusting. Smaller than that is definitely a problem and whilst some outlets use the occasional South African coins it is more common to give chang in items or a credit note at the supermarket.

A couple of days ago I was having a French conversation lesson with my “Professeur de Francais” at an Avondale cafe when the change arrived in the form of half a Cadbury’s Flake (centre of the picture). Apparently it representd 50c. So we shared it and ate it.

We used to find these cape gooseberries (Physalis peruviana) growing all over the forest where I grew up. They don’t orginate here but seem to grow very well just about anywhere. I used to hate the gooseberry jam we got at bording school, it was always very runny and messy! This fruit was from a bush at the corner of the house. It is unusual to find an intact fruit inside the “cage” of the sepals that have partially disintigrated though they do have a very long shelf life.

Mr M has been a good customer over the years – not a very big one but reliable on ordering, payment and collection. This year he has stumbled badly though and we eventually had to throw away his order of 12,000 cabbage seedlings. They had been in the nursery more than 2 months after the due collection and I’d lost any profit on them and they were hopelessly over-mature. True to form he said he was always coming “this week” to collect but he never came.

Yesterday he arrived to see if he could get us to sow another order. He told me that the rains had been so heavy that he could not get into his lands to plant. I told him that when he paid for the non-collected order I’d sow his next one. He asked me if I could not halve the charge to him! I commented that I was not responsible for the rains and we’d upheld our side of the contract. Perhaps he was thinking that I would be happier to get something for my loss rather than nothing and I would be very unlikely to call in the debt collectors. He was right on the latter – I have way to many bad debtors on my books! I should explain that we do tend to try and keep our customers as we are in a competitive market and there is certainly no queue of prospective clients at the gate! He certainly piled on the pressure about how hard things were but I reminded him that when things were good no farmer ever offered to share his good fortune with me – farming is a high risk business with proportional rewards and potential loss. I am in a more low risk business – we don’t charge according to the market forces but I don’t make or hopefully lose as much as he could either.

He went away disappointed that I would not budge. I did tell the senior foreman later that if he phoned to ask if we’d sowed his next order to say that when he gave us a deposit we’d do so but nothing would leave the nursery until his account was up to date. He was right up to a point, I did want to get SOMETHING for the lost seedlings!

Gail remarked that she’d just been caught by the traffic cops speeding in a 60km/h zone but as it was a spot fine and she didn’t have any money smaller than $50 and the cops didn’t have change she was let off. She was lucky; they could have told her to go and pay at the local police station. My senior foreman commented that the traffic police had been told that they had to take in $3000 a day in fines.

They certainly are out in force but they do tend to hang out in the same spots every time. I wonder what they will do if the general public become wise enough that they no longer take in the required amount?

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!