Freedom Day long weekend: meaning no work for the wicked and may the car guard get his gratuity.
The problem with inheriting wealth from a rich uncle that one despised when alive and continues to despise after death is an apparently natural human tendency to treat the legacy with contempt and opportunistic venality. When that uncle held one in thrall, never allowing one to participate in the complex process whereby that added value to our lives was made, and nurtured, then our own contempt will be our undoing and before we learn the truth we shall have impoverished ourselves and are left to wallow in regret and that sustained self-pity based on blame allocation, when the well runs dry.
!
I was talking with an old acquaintance a few days ago about his working in Malawi, a place I have visited on business occasionally over the past thirty years. It sounded like a distinctly double-edged experience. The country has the appearance of
being superficially beautiful and his life as an expat worker was blessed with good
living and great weekends, but up close and personal the warts proliferate. Poverty is
more than endemic, the plague is at its most pestilential and the fact that life expectancy rates are on a diminishing scale does not preclude a high rate of procreation coupled with a great many orphans [ironically, pronounced offens]
Having visited the country myself, as I have said, on various occasions over the past thirty years Malawi symbolises for me the real emerging tragedy of the Mugabe era in Zimbabwe. It is that time beyond encore, I said to him. He was sombre, and nodded. 'Malawi always reminds me of those sad people one encounters in Old Age facilities: ever declining faculties, on a slow road to oblivion; and thankfully blessed with a solid case of Altzheimers-. so whatever times you're managing to have are the good times.'
He also referred to the 'well fed ones': small coteries of Elites: sleek and well fed, and curiously, often dressed, whenever he or I had encountered them, in well-manicured leather. They were well hidden, he added, most of the time, behind bodyguards and high walls, tinted windows and well appointed offices set like wistful oases amongst the squalid circumstances of their surroundings.
This slowly disintegrating country [Malawi] represents a sad truth, which we all ignore, but which is nonetheless apparent. Malawi has never recovered from the long malign rule of its former dictator Hastings Banda. Although the notorious fly whisk carrying little man has long since departed the scene and although modern Malawi has all the inherent trappings of a democracy, with fairly routine changes of government; and anti-corruption trials nogal, not to mention charming and gracious citizens, the damage wrought by decades of corrupt one party rule are seemingly insurmountable. The legacy inherited by the Independent State from their despised uncle, after the dissolution of the failed Federation experiment, has been effectively squandered, and the family jewels have long since been pawned and forfeited.
Moving further south; when we read the routine demands in their various places in the media, that Mugabe should go, we neglect that truth. Mugabe's passing will not change things in Zimbabwe- it cannot.
Mugabe is merely the tip of the spear point of the corrupt missile plunged with hefted weight into the body politic of Zimbabwe. There is almost no corner of that squandered wasteland that is not pawed over for profit by some party functionary. There is also no rule of life that presupposes that a ruthless politician can automatically operate as a competitive business manager. Those who can make this transition simply demonstrate the adage that one or two exceptions do not disprove a rule. These well embedded parasites do not vanish with the wave of a wand- There will be no recovery in this or the next few generations. The precipitous plunge of this formerly, relatively, advantaged place will allow for no recovery. There is no chemo savage enough to placate such a cancer. One suspects that even Castro's reign in Cuba will turn out to have been less destructive than this illusion of democratic process masquerading as outright plunder that typifies the Mugabe era in Afrika.
We don't like to see this but that's what it is. If a place like New Orleans is unable to resuscitate itself after a minor catastrophe what chance a country hit by an apocalypse.
It took the massive Marshall Aid plan to resuscitate Europe after the demolition job waged on the continent by world war two and there was at least a considerable reservoir of skills and ability available to take advantage of the assistance. Africa has none of this- Zimbabwe has exported most of its talent and the system that facilitated such a large reservoir has been wrung dry. It is largely the parasites that remain. A parasite is by definition proactively destructive.
Although Zimbabwe can never recover, fortunately that Altzheimers syndrome about which my old acquaintance spoke will kick in, and slowly the people of that wrecked, wretched hole of a place will forget that they ever stood at the edges of greatness: and will lapse into the apathy that accompanies the knowledge that for them at least they had their turn missed their cue, and now the show is over and they will continue forever to enthuse over the odd casually tossed bowl of rice that comes their way..
Of course there will be plenty of hype about 'the growth to follow Mugabe's passing'; and anyone like me who speculates that there is no recovery after death will be denounced as a 'doomist'- but it is not I who am the doomist, I simply note the obvious: as they say- I am merely the messenger. Dead after all is- dead. The real doomists are those who sold out the future of the continent for a four-wheel drive and shopping at Harrods. It is they, who were once known as the 'Wabenzi' [people of the Mercedes Benz] who have ripped the soul out of so much of our continent's enthusiastic rush to take part in the modern world, and have left it skin deep in hope, feudalist in outlook; and possessed of a cancerous growth with so malignant a half life, that generations from now people will still curse the names, through song and parody, of all those thieving 'benefactors' who rendered them unto poverty.
There are many who say that Zimbabwe is entering the final phase now in its three part rise and fall drama. Malawi, even lowly Senegal, is proof that Zimbabwe has not even reached the halfway mark on the road to destruction and poverty. Two thousand percent inflation will soon become three thousand then four then five thousand while the meltdown moves from arithmetic to geometric progression as this apocalypse to which we are witness gathers critical mass. This is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.
Part of the problem facing both these places is associated with learning to stand on one's own feet. This is a problem we ourselves may yet encounter. The problem, as I have already mentioned, with inheriting wealth from a rich uncle that one intimately despises, is that we have treated that legacy with contempt and opportunistic venality. This is what happened first with Banda, now with Mugabe and in fact almost everywhere else on our damaged continent. A class of citizen that brooked no competition somehow appropriated every functioning enterprise in those places to their own advantage, and the detriment of everyone else; and to the inevitable damnation of the enterprise, as the world moved inexorably into the Age of Commoditisation.
We have ourselves sown the seeds of our own dilemma with legislation that similarly favours appropriation of competitive competence to the long-term detriment of home grown competitive vigour. As the notorious so-called 'Bumiputri' [the class that benefits] in Malaysia have grown to become a barrier to the advancement of those non-connected Malaysians they were supposedly advancing, so are the common people in our own backyard again being cheated through a system that promises much but delivers only to the well-connected and well-appointed. Those achieving preferment in this era of the Acquisition will inevitably, and with all the inherent malignancy that typifies the corporate oligopoly, block those of their competitors, without connections, who seek preferment and competitive growth. These poor fools will find themselves excluded and punished for their presumption as we slowly strangle ourselves on our Alter of preferential preferment.
As a potentially entertaining example of this process consider the sudden elevation to emerging billionaire status of one Eltie Links, the head of the AfriSam consortium, which is buying 85% of minnow producer Holcim cement SA from its present owners for 13.9 Billion buckaroons. Part is purchased from its Swiss owners who are craftily, it seems disinvesting from our market place and the balance of 7.4 billion from Aveng Ltd, a local construction company.
The word buying in that last sentence is conditional, in much the same way that buying your house with one hundred percent of the money provided by a bank is in effect a conditional purchase, requiring that you stump up a routine schedule of payments over a longish period of time or lose the house. Rising interest rates will squeeze Mr Eltie's margins, impacting on his payment circumstances, as would a sudden glut of cement or even a decline in the demand therefore.
The former owners walk away with cash, the buyer gets the debt and the chance that the whole operation can finance the debt in the wake of much competition in a traditionally oligopolistic market place with pretensions to monopoly. In theory this should be possible, but as they say in the world of economics - 'on the other hand-'.
The question that has not been answered is: How did that particular person [Herr Links] get to be so blessed that his 'consortium' was the preferred one out of the hordes of aspirant wannabe millionaires/billionaires in the country ? Was it because he is well connected via his role as former Trade Commissioner and Ambassador to the European Union? There are those who once made Sherry, Port and Grappa who would argue that he didn't fare that well- Perhaps he is a natural captain of industry- now emerging chrysalis like in the wake of a possibly doomed political career? Or maybe he was simply a man in need of a favour; to be rewarded with what is perceived in a non-competitive mindset to be something of a sinecure, the way the plastic shopping bag scam became a sinecure for preferred party apparatchiks. One also wonders if his preferment had a 'facilitator', in the way one wonders who 'facilitated' the notoriously defective ENAtis new national electronic system for registering motor vehicles that has now not been working since blogs ago. Did the person who got that ENatis job get it because of competence or was it another 'Shabby Shaik' deal?
One suspects that the former owners [Aveng Ltd] who have disposed of their part of the operation for 7.4 billion smackeroons saw advantage in getting the cash to invest in somewhere that is growing, rather than leave the equity in a business that had reached the limits of its production capacity. According to various reports Holcim imports a considerable amount of cement from elsewhere, at a price less than what it would cost to produce it here. It was therefore unlikely, presumably, to generate the same potential return on capital employed as could be made skimming greater profits out of formal construction contracts especially as the panic buttons begin to go off over 2010 over the next period of time. And anyway if Holcim can import cement so can a n other.
One scenario for the future suggests that unnamed 'interest groups' have been stockpiling cement, and when the shortages pile up, as they will do given the national construction production timetable that is building momentum daily, then they will release such stocks onto the market, undercutting the process of supply and demand applying at that moment, and who knows perhaps putting Mr Links into a spot of bother paying back the interest on the total 13.9 billion that he has to borrow against an international climate of rising interest rates, while the price per bag is being undercut by crafty, wizened and brutally competent corporate bean counters. One hopes that Mr Links is enough of a competitive pragmatist to be building stockpiles of his own, if he can afford it: as a highly successful adman told me once decades ago: 'The customer is the battlefield the competition are the enemy that must be vanquished.'
The one saving grace of our own national-plunder-the-breadbasket campaign that may work to its comparative advantage is the vast amount of competition that is readily apparent between the members of the ruling party, which should before too long now [over the next twenty years ] begin to break itself up, a process that may be accelerated by an hour or two now that the so-called leader of the official opposition is going into retirement, and handing over the reigns of opposition to no one who will matter anymore. This removal of a long-standing roadblock could be the saving of our competitive State, or it may prove to be as irrelevant as the minority it represents.
The downside for the whole 'plunder at will' mindset, is that people who inherit businesses that they didn't build have a disconcerting tendency to fall over when markets change as they do so often nowadays. [see Malawi fell, see Zimbabwe fall- see- ] To compensate for this they [those who have plundered successfully] have to generate an anti-competitive environment to protect their self-interest. For instance in past times Mr Links would have simply arranged for import protection against any one with enough cash importing cement- you could only import cement if you had a cement factory locally for instance] In a competitive democracy in the liberalising climate of globalisation today this is not too easy anymore - in a non-competitive environment where the referee also gets to play the game then there is a slow insidious 'Zanufication' process that gets to work and eventually the referee becomes the only player, and the spectators no longer have anything to watch except the rise and rise of the inflation rate as more and more money chases less and less product. This is what took place in Malawi and is trending towards its apotheosis in Zimbabwe. There are a disconcerting and rising number of instances here [in Southern Azania: SA] too that the ruling party is playing both referee and participant in its own game, Mr Links' rise to glory being only one such example.
Alternatively the new owners of inherited Commoditised businesses may simply take their profits and walk away, as Mzi Khumalo did last year with his three quarter billion Group Five winnings, and as they are doing with the now late Edcon group- bought by offshore private equity in what may well turn out to be the corporate rape of the decade.
Enough already, for freedom day has passed and workers day will be celebrated without work and there are people out there making bucks while the hay passes by.
Are you getting your share of the spoils?
Keep on blogging
NiK
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment