Zimbabwe Absurdity

Conventional wisdom states that in a beyond-hyperinflationary environment one should always invest in resaleable assets rather than have money in the bank. I was pondering this yesterday having decided that there was too much money (Zimbabwe dollars that is) in the company bank account. But it is not that simple. Suppose that I buy a tin of 100000 hybrid cabbage seeds at $10 a seed. It may take me a month to sell these seeds to customers in the form of seedlings. The cost of the seed is passed on – obviously. My supplier is continually putting up his price as the seed is imported and he has to buy forex on the black market. Let’s assume that his price increases linearly (in reality it will be some sort of geometric progression but it is easier this way) and by the end of the month the price is $20 a seed. I have phoned up his secretary every day and increased my price with his. At the end of the month my AVERAGE seed price is $15 so I have lost money on the next tin that I have to buy. This is a problem. I could either charge what I think a new tin of seed will cost me (customers will leave in droves) so that I end up with an average price above his end of month price or I can use very small quantities of seed (impractical). Or as soon as ANY money comes in I can convert it to US$ and then use these to buy more seed. But that’s illegal!

I was chatting to my landlord yesterday too and he recounted a story his friend had told him. He’d gone to one of the big discount stores in town to buy a freezer for his wife. On hearing the price he enquired if there were any more (it seemed like a bargain). Yes there were so he arranged to buy them – all 12! On returning the next day with the bank cheque he found that the price had increased. Incensed he demanded to see the manager who agreed to sell them at the previous day’s price. The buyer enquired if the manager would be interested in buying the freezers (less the one for his wife) back. Yes, he would. A price was agreed, money changed hands and the freezers (except for one) stayed where they were!

On Monday I’d phoned up a company to buy some agricultural chemical and a price was quoted at $560000 a litre. Buy the time I got there in the afternoon it was $800000! I complained and got it at the old price. It IS possible to pick up the occasional bargain where the store has forgotten to put the price up on some goods but as the exchange rate to the US is changing all the time one needs to be quick off the mark! Yes, we are effectively dealing in US$ though all prices are supposed to be given in Zimbabwe $.

We have had a spate of burglaries at work, that’s what one gets for hiring “real” security guards! Anyway, anticipating that the problem is only going to get worse I decided to get a burglar alarm system installed. What one would normally do is get a series of quotes but things ain’t normal any more! I realized that by the time I’d got all the companies interested to give a quote the prices would have changed, so I went ahead and just got the first company that was interested. Expensive today, cheap tomorrow.

I was chatting to Austin at my local gym about this at lunchtime. He had just had his brother up from South Africa for his mother’s funeral. He just could not grasp the figures. The brother works for a German owned firm and they do their budgeting and planning for 10 years at a time! Planning? Budgets? It’s been a while since I did either of those! I will just settle for survival thanks!

“Doctor G has not come back from Malawi” the receptionist said; “would I like to see Doctor P instead?” Considering that my tooth was all but fallen out I didn’t have much choice. 

Doctor P looked young enough to be my daughter (I don’t have one but you know what I mean) and not at all what I expected. She was petite, wore black rimmed glasses and had an impish smile and a sense of humour to match. I took an instant liking to her, not least because she is the first dentist I have ever come across wearing shorts in her practice! After all the usual questions regarding my health she got down to business. After a short while she was leaning heavily on my chest, scraping away at the offending tooth. This was almost pleasant! I managed to unclench my left fist and ostentatiously lay it flat on my stomach. At the end of it all I was told to come back in 4 to 6 weeks.

“Oh, but that’s going to be difficult” the receptionist said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well”, and she looked a bit uncomfortable, “we are not going to be here”.

It seems that doctor G is wrapping up her business and going off to the UK and cannot find anyone to take it over. I wondered if perhaps she was asking too much for the business; she does after all drive a very new looking Benz SLK. “What about doctor P?” “Oh, she’s going back to the States” she replied. 

I really cannot blame anyone for wanting to leave Zimbabwe at the moment, I can even sympathize with them but this is the first time that I have been directly affected by a health professional leaving. I suppose it had to happen. They have been leaving in steadily increasing numbers, frustrated by the poor working conditions, the difficulty in obtaining raw materials and ever increasing hours as other professionals shed their work loads. There is one specialist physician left in the country.

I paid for the appointment and a second hand book that was on sale amongst a whole lot of pulp fiction (Robin Cook et al.) on the mantelpiece (the book was more than the appointment though my medical aid paid for most of it). It was a Zadie Smith book that I’d heard about some years before. I looked at the comments and reviews on the back cover; yes, this was the one I was looking for. Only when getting into the car did I take note of the title; “White Teeth”. 

I have a good excuse why the blog has not been updated; power or lack of it. A cyclone hit south central Mozambique on Thursday and Friday afternoon the winds brought down a tree somewhere on the line which left us without power for 26 hours. The winds were truly spectacular so I’m surprised that there was relatively little damage. By yesterday evening there was a puddle under the freezer part of the fridge and Jenni’s food was distinctly smelly. She does not mind of course. 

Yes, I suppose I could have typed this up on my laptop with the assistance of the UPS plugged into the heavy duty truck battery but I still would not have had any internet connection until the mail server next door was turned on; it is also on a UPS and truck battery. Zimbabwe is replete with devices to keep the TV going, the computer online, the fridge cold. There are numerous vendors for generators, inverters etc. I have two UPS’s in my house, and fridge guards for protecting against low voltages and spikes. One can also purchase fax guards (spikes and high voltage) and devices to protect 3 phase motors from single phasing (only one phase working). Solar power does not seem to be that popular; I guess it is expensive and still not very efficient. 

Any serious function has a generator on standby, like the show I went to on Thursday night. A South African group called Barnyard Theatres put on a show of pop/rock/folk cover songs. It was a quite festive occasion, alcohol flowed aplenty and the group was good though their sound system was not up to their musicianship. The audience was almost entirely white which I suppose was not surprising considering the music style. There was one black/coloured singer in the band and good he was too. At one point the person sitting next to me turned to the person on my other side and said; “M, they could have told them that they didn’t have to have a token black in the band”. Oh, boy, we have a way to go.

This snail was on my rowing machine this morning. I didn’t recognize it as a snail until it started to move. I have never seen a yellow, transparent snail before. I am not sure what type of snail it is, I don’t have a book on snails so if anyone else has an idea of what it is (is this the immature form of something?) I would like to know. I moved it onto a rosebush that had sunlight on it for a better photo. This was the only one of about 15 that was technically good. I did prefer the composition of another but it was not totally in focus. There is a price to pay using a compact camera – depth of focus is very difficult to control.

I am sitting in the Mbare market, well maybe not THE market (apparently this one is called The Rocks for the large boulders in the centre). It is a dusty, dirty place. There are blocks of flats around the small market area, where the windows are missing they have been boarded up. we are waiting for a suspect that we picked up earlier; he has gone off to find the person whom he has indicated is selling stolen irrigation sprinklers that might have been stolen from my work premises. He is apparently related to this person. I am not at all sure why he will decide to shop his relative, but you never know. In the meantime I watch life go by in this area of Harare that I have never before seen.

There is a 7 tonne truck with a partly pulled back canopy some 20m away. People wander up to it and seem to buy and sell things, sugar and the like. It is well known that in Mbare anything can be bought at a price no matter how short it may be elsewhere. I have already been offered fertilizer which is short and I have seen at least one bag of it go by. A group of immaculately dressed school girls go by, white socks, shining shoes, blue skirts, white shirts and a blue striped tie. Not everyone is this smart and there are the usual squabbles of small boys, pinching, punching and kicking as small boys do everywhere.

I expected to see signs of deprivation and hunger but they are not obvious even if they are around. There is a large lady off to my left (I am sitting in a pickup, the detectives are doing a bad job of trying to look inconspicuous – suits and ties and smoking behind the pickup) selling a pitiful pile of some sort of small seed in a small conical dump on an upturned tin. There are tins of all descriptions everywhere. I cannot see any plastic containers but tins there are a plenty. Engine oil cans are the most popular, upturned as impromptu tables. Cooking oil cans are there too but I don’t see any plastic, maybe they are in use as household containers for the ever absent water. A large boulder off to my right has “Chemical Corner” painted on it. I don’t really want to know what sort of chemicals are sold there! Very little is happening, this is obviously not market hour.

Nobody is taking a blind bit of notice of me, I don’t seem to exist. I was quite surprised by this earlier when we called in at a house in another run down area of Mbare. A few people stared but no-one called out to the marungu (white man) in the pick up truck with the handcuffed suspects in the back. Like most whites in Zimbabwe, I am irrelevant.

A recently painted, shocking lime green Peugeot sedan goes past. There is a matching shocking green soft toy on the back shelf. I glance down at a dective’s diary on the seat beside me. It is a 2001 diary. I check the days and dates, they are the same as this year.

The suspect wanders back. Apparently his relative is not answering his cell phone. Right. We move onto another suburb and amazingly actually retrieve a length of flex for a submersible pump though it may not be ours. It’s really difficult policing without a vehicle, the detective says with a sigh as we drive into the police station. No kidding. So it falls to the victims of theft to carry the police around on a wild goose chase that took most of the day. I don’t think the “suspects” in handcuffs really minded. I guess it is not often that they get to ride around Harare in the relative comfort of a private pickup truck!

I found this jewel beetle (Family Buprestidae, probably Sternocera orissa) on a stem of grass while out for my evening walk with Jenni. It was difficult to photograph because every time I moved or put the camera near it, it would move around to the other side of the grass blade. Even relatively small movements of my head would have it moving in the opposite direction! I eventually got around the problem by holding the grass with my left hand and using my camera in the right. It is not ideal; really a tripod is needed for this type of photo because the focusing becomes critical the closer one is to the subject. My camera is a little 5 mega pixel Canon Digital Ixus 500 but it has a remarkably good macro feature. I bought it in Germany in June 2004, the current model already has 10 mega pixels! I would love to upgrade to a SLR but the piggy bank is a bit lean at the moment. Never mind, I still have fun.

I walked past where the skeleton of the heron lies (see earlier blog “A Dead Heron”). There are still some feathers and a few bones to be seen if one moves aside the cluster of cosmos growing there. It is easy to see where it is; the cosmos is much greener than those on either side and about 100% taller. Ashes to ashes, bones to fertilizer.

I was sent an obituary this week of a white South African historian, David Rattray, who was murdered recently. There was no apparent motive. It’s a depressingly familiar scenario – in excess of 2000 white farmers have been murdered in South Africa since 1994. David Rattray was a historian though and immensely popular within and outside South Africa. Aware that this was a high profile case the authorities “moved quickly” and there have been 2 arrests. I am not sure how this bodes for the image of the World Cup in 2010. I can imagine the criminal element is overjoyed at the potential bonanza. I suppose I should clear up a point here; I am not saying that there is no crime in Zimbabwe, of course there is and plenty of it too. The crime in Zimbabwe is rarely very violent i.e. fatal.

Some years ago a friend of mine was pulled out of her car at her parents gate one evening and the criminals made off with it. She got slapped and pushed into a ditch. In South Africa the consequences of car-jackings are frequently fatal. I did hear of a more serious attempt while attending a pre-New Year’s Eve lunch. A friend of a friend was recounting how some months previously she was attacked by her gardener’s son and she stupidly resisted. Things got serious as he tried to cut her throat with a bread knife (for some reason she regarded this as funny, no-one else did). She then gave up and he tied up both her and her son in a room that did not lock. They promptly untied each other and she called the quick reaction squad (private security company, the police in Zimbabwe rarely react never mind quickly) who arrested the miscreant on their way to the scene as he tried to climb over a wall – they thought he was behaving suspiciously. This may sound appallingly violent to most First World readers but the truth is it is rare and fatalities are extremely rare. You could say Zimbabwe is to South Africa as Canada is to the USA. And by the way NEVER call a Zimbabwean South African!  We may sound similar but THAT’S IT!

A friend of mine attended his niece’s wedding in Durban over Christmas. While he was there a cruise ship called into Durban and two mini bus loads of tourists went off to visit the renowned aquarium. Both buses were ripped off before they arrived at the aquarium. The ship’s captain vowed that they would definitely not be back. Yet Zimbabwe gets a much worse press than South Africa. Somehow state sponsored crime is more newsworthy, I suppose I am not too surprised.  But yes, with the declining economic situation in Zimbabwe the crime is becoming more and more common. We have just been ripped off at work of 2 electric pumps, a borehole pump, various tools and money. The thieves gained access to the storeroom and office from a brightly lit area and also attempted various other rooms. The 3 security guards we hired (past tense) had no idea how it happened! We have had an ongoing petty crime problem since we hired these guards. I leave you to draw the conclusion. The police were politely interested but admitted that they were overwhelmed. So, we will try another more “professional” organization. With a dog. I live in hope.

It finally happened; today I bribed a police officer. In my defense I would like to point out that he suggested the bribe, I did not offer it. Yes, it rankles a bit but this is Zimbabwe and one has to be pragmatic.

In a civilized country I would have got away with it I think. To stop at the intersection on the change of the light to orange would definitely have left rubber on the road. No, I was not speeding so I was a bit perplexed when he indicated that I was to pull over. No, they were not giving out fines anymore as it was not working. They were confiscating driving licences instead and you had to go to court to get it back. That’s if the magistrate did not decide to confiscate it (for going across an orange light?). I was then informed that this was all to try and reduce the accident rate in Zimbabwe because people were getting killed etc. etc. etc. It did occur to me to point out that a lot more could be done to curb accidents by clamping down on drink driving, unroadworthy vehicles and minibuses that pullover wherever they like, frequently right ON corners! I could see it was wasted, this was fait accompli. I listened to the patter, it was well rehearsed. I wondered at what stage I should suggest a deal and then thought I did not want to get done for bribing a police officer too. Then it came; we are caring about people about you, we do understand. Right. Just a bit more patter and then – we can do something if you are in agreement. We both knew that he had me exactly where he wanted me. Could I really afford going to court to get my licence back? Would it really get confiscated? Of course I was in agreement. Fine, then I should fold ZW$100000 tightly behind my driver’s licence which he handed back to me and then give it back. I duly complied and watched how he masterfully handled the licence so that an approaching pedestrian could not see it. No amateur this guy! But what of the form that he’d been filling in? Oh that would be taken care of, and it was cancelled in front of my eyes. I did notice that carbon paper was conspicuously absent and I could not see if there were serial numbers on the page. It was not the usual “Admission of Guilt” form that accompanies the speed fining system. Was the whole thing a scam? I don’t know. He did OK out of it though. $100000 (about US$20) is probably half of what he earns in a month.

In a way I can understand why they do it. The police are poorly paid and with inflation topping 4000% they must find it very difficult to not jump at money making “opportunities”. And this month the inflation is going to be a record beater. I mentioned in a previous post that the head of the Reserve Bank had given his year end plan and report. Included was a “Social Charter” which includes, amongst other things, a three month price and wage freeze from March to May. The obvious has happened; prices have gone up in some cases 1000% to last through the price freeze e.g. yesterday a local fertilizer company raised the price of a premixed soluble fertilizer from $1800/2kg to $22000/2kg (divide by around 5000 to get the US dollar price, today only).