Blog block

It's been quite a while since my last completed blog: too much to do, too little time, but at last the block is lifted.

Kampala has been more than usually pleasant over the past 10 days or so. This is almost entirely due to the relative emptiness of the streets since the Ugandan schools reached the end of the teaching year. Better still, the schools will not resume until after the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for February 18th.

I was fortunate enough, recently, to visit Cairo for the Super Return private equity Africa conference. My journey to Cairo, via Nairobi and Khartoum, was long - about 6 hours of flying time, from the source of the Nile (Lake Victoria) to the beginning of the Nile delta and its tiny discharge into the Mediterranean sea. The conference was illuminated by the presence of Bob Geldof, who made a refreshingly personal and frank speech to the assembled investor throng: essentially his journey from the poverty of his childhood and the many influences which ignited his passion for Africa - which most of us will always associate with Michael Buerk's broadcasts from Ethiopia and the Boomtown Rats lead singer's single-minded determination to organise the Live Aid concert at Wembley stadium in London in 1984. That determination burns as bright as ever, but it now encompasses advocacy and, interestingly investment, through the proposed Eight Miles private equity fund (of which he is a sponsor). Only during his speech did I appreciate the significance of "Eight Miles" as a name: it is the distance between the closest points of Europe and Africa.

It was both an inspiring and fitting end to a relentlessly positive conference, in which it was universally agreed that Africa was the market with the greatest potential for economic growth and investment returns, bar none. Speakers vied with each other to talk up their latest deals - from consumer goods to infrastructure, from financial services to mining. Risks are diminishing; markets are growing; and the tired economies of the G8 have little to offer. Don't get me wrong, I am very much in the van of this particular Weltanschauung, but Africa retains an extraordinary ability to surprise. And the sad fact of life is that what happens in one part of this most diverse of continents affects the external view of the entire continent. So it was that the very next day, Laurent Gbagbo overturned the results of the Ivorian electoral commission and, through adroit use of the constitutional court, was declared the duly elected President of Cote d'Ivoire. His rival, Alassane Ouattara, meanwhile claims his internationally recognised election victory, with the result that Cote d'Ivoire is in the unenviable position of having two presidents, two prime ministers and two governments and - sadly - tarnishes Africa's image to the world.

There are times (especially for investors) when the attractions of stability outweigh democratic ideals.

Of course, as we approach Uganda's own election process in February, uncertainty breeds some anxiety, but at least at the moment, other news stories form the main topics of discussion. Yesterday, en route to the office, I was entertained by a radio phone-in show (Radio One's Talkback) where the debate concerned road safety over the festive season. Astonishing though it may seem, the high level of accidents involving taxis (minibuses) was publicly attributed - not to poorly maintained vehicles, to speeding, to inexperienced and poorly trained drivers, to overloading, to poor road conditions, or to weak traffic act enforcement...... but instead to ........ women sitting in the front seats. Yes, women sitting in the front seats. Apparently, women (or more accurately, their thighs) distract drivers' attention from the road, and therefore women should only be permitted to sit in the back seats.

Opinion was fairly evenly divided. Interesting, isn't it?

"Property is theft!"

“La propriété, c'est le vol!” stated the anarchist French philosopher Proudhon (pictured above in fellow-revolutionary Gustave Courbet's portrait) in 1840. I first heard this as a callow 17 year-old, and found it bewildering. How could property ownership be equated with theft? To anyone brought up in a capitalist society, it seemed preposterous.

Here’s a link to a well-written and subtle analysis by Oxfam stalwart and land rights expert Robin Palmer, supporting Oxfam’s reputation for policy leadership, with the provocative title “Would Cecil Rhodes have signed a code of conduct [in relation to large scale land acquisition]?”
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/learning/landrights/downloads/would_cecil_rhodes_have_signed_a_code_of_conduct.pdf
Palmer draws on his experience of the scramble for Cambodia, reviews the literature available on land acquisition, biofuel production, etc and reaches uncomfortable conclusions in this excellent paper. In particular, while no-one would deny the critical importance of increasing agricultural productivity in Africa, the risks to the rural poor from the latest scramble (echoing Leopold in Congo and Rhodes in Zimbabwe) from dispossession, dislocation and displacement are huge. In these circumstances, Proudhon's radical statement makes a great deal of sense. The whole idea of fencing off great swathes of land may have contributed to economic growth, but it certainly raises complex ethical questions over the right of individuals to own, in perpetuity, pieces of the planet. Furthermore, anyone with knowledge of recent events in Zimbabwe understands the political timebomb that the inequitable distribution of land can trigger.

These concerns will, of course, be far from the minds of the current wave of private equity fund managers criss-crossing the continent in search of arable land, with their investment horizon of no more than seven or eight years and for whom investments in African agriculture are little more than a play on undervalued land assets. Palmer concludes that Cecil Rhodes would have been more than willing to sign a code of conduct, but would have abandoned it at the first obstacle. It is hard to escape the conclusion that present investors will adopt a similar strategy.

Climb every mountain

Earlier this year, the Kampala Amateur Dramatic Society staged the world's favourite musical, The Sound of Music. I am not a fan of the unashamedly sentimental and heavily embellished story of the von Trapp escape from Austria and, as a result, my mind frequently wandered during much of the production; even, I am sorry to say, during the spirited rendition of Maria's mission to "Climb every mountain".

This song made me think, a little bizarrely, about entrepreneurship and the huge challenges presented by establishing and managing a successful business. As an investor in early stage businesses, I am only too aware of the disheartening statistic quoted by venture capitalists that only 3 out of 10 new businesses survive beyond their first two years, and that only a small fraction of those grow into even moderately successful enterprises. And yet, brave people keep doing it.

Why is successful entrepreneurship so difficult? It demands a very rare combination of personal qualities: a marriage of vision, imagination and creativity with the cold-hearted pragmatism required in order to manage a business effectively. It requires tenacity, determination, stubbornness and, most elusive of all, luck.

Having said that, I do believe that entrepreneurs can do very well in Africa, despite the manifold difficulties of launching successful businesses. African economies are growing rapidly and, except in a few hotspots like Nairobi and Lagos, they tend not to be as crowded or competitive as in many wealthier economies. Furthermore, Africa is, on the whole, a low cost environment with an under-utilised labour force and massive natural resources. There are, of course, a variety of challenges, principal among which is the need to manage the internal factors of a business effectively. Otherwise, no matter how good an idea it is, the business will fail. But there is also help available, from the numerous donor-backed small enterprise support programmes that are a feature of most African capital cities - and indeed also from the increasing number of venture capital funds in search of good quality investing opportunities.

"Climb every mountain" should be the entrepreneur's anthem. It represents the triumph of hope over experience, of optimism over pessimism. Entrepreneurs are the change-makers, and we should celebrate their achievements. As Lord Darlington (in Lady Windermere's Fan) said "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". I doubt if Oscar Wilde had entrepreneurs in mind when he wrote Darlington's part, but it is nevertheless a wonderfully simple expression of what it means to be a human being - a stubborn refusal to accept our own insignificance and the status quo.

Collapse

This is the Rwanda Genocide Museum in Kigali. Residents and visitors alike are reminded of the Rwandese catastrophe in 1994.

In his book, Collapse, Jared Diamond provides a history of the many forces which lead societies to decline and fall. One chapter is devoted to Rwanda, which he analyses in the context of Thomas Malthus's bleak 200-year old theory: human population growth is exponential, whereas agricultural production growth is linear, and therefore population will expand until it consumes all available food unless it is halted by one or more of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.



Malthus's theory has aroused considerable debate and emotion for many years. It has been rejected by many academics on the basis of what has actually happened. The global population has, after all, grown by a factor of 10 since the beginning of the 19th century without absolute disaster. This achievement owes a great deal to scientific and technological advancement: without the Haber-Bosch process to convert atmospheric nitrogen into fertiliser, without the development of high yielding hybrid crops, and without the invention of the instruments of deforestation humankind would have run out of food long ago. And we may yet stave off failure in the food supply for some time to come: we are after all yet to possess the technologies to exploit even a fraction of the world's marine resources. We have also managed to change reproductive behaviour. Voluntarily, through the adoption of contraception, and, in some less-than-liberal countries, through compulsory legislation limiting the number of children per family. Indeed, so effective a tool has contraception proved to be that economic threats from an ageing population - for example in Japan and many European countries - are becoming a matter of great concern.


However, Malthus may still be correct, if not on a global scale, but at the level of particular economies. There is certainly reason to believe that the failures of the Mayan and Khmer civilisations were driven by population growth leading to environmental destruction, and, in Collapse, Diamond argues that the Rwandese genocide was in part driven by the same factors. "Friends who visited Rwanda in 1984 sensed an ecological disaster in the making. The whole country looked like a garden..... Steep hills were being farmed right up to their crests. Even the most elementary measures that could have minimised soil erosion, such as terracing, plowing along contours and providing fallow cover of vegetation..... were not being practiced." (Certainly, when I visited Rwanda in 2002, it seemed as if every square metre of available land was being cultivated, right up to the edge of the mountain top forests that are home to Rwanda's precious population of mountain gorillas). The median farm size had shrunk to less than quarter of an acre. Under these circumstances, increasing numbers of Rwandese were unable to feed themselves and their families. Family tensions and disputes over inheritance became more widespread. Diamond concludes his Rwanda discussion by asserting that population increase was a contributory factor to the 1994 genocide

In the broader African context, this is interesting. The population of the continent as a whole has exploded over the past 40 years. Food production has increased , despite inefficient farming techniques, as a result of the widespread adoption of new crops (especially those originating from the Americas). Maternal and child mortality rates have drastically improved. Conflict has - despite external news coverage - significantly decreased. This creates extraordinary statistics. For example, more than 50% of the population of Niger and Uganda is aged 16 and under. Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and many other African countries have demographic profiles which are not dissimilar. An opportunity - economists like to call it a demographic dividend - but also a threat of social unrest from a relatively poorly educated, unskilled, but rapidly increasing labour force. Could other countries in Africa be at threat of a Rwandese disaster?

In this context, the current trend for large-scale investors - both public and private - in acquiring massive landholdings is relevant. Considerable publicity has recently been given to "land-grabbing" in Africa. There is an entire website devoted to the topic (www.farmlandgrab.org). The World Bank has published a report into land acquisition in Africa. The conversion of agricultural land from food to biofuel production comes in for special attention. Rightly so - in the context of weak governance, low levels of transparency, traditional land rights and a rapidly increasing population - large-scale land acquisition presents a considerable long term social and economic risk. Let us hope that the countries most at risk will sign up for and implement the World Bank's recommendations of how to manage the process.

In praise of millet

When I was a child growing up in suburban England, I thought millet was birdseed. I would see it in budgerigar cages at the local pet shop. I loved birds and longed to keep a budgie of my own, but because my mother didn't like caged birds, I was never allowed to have one. I was also very interested in wild birds and used, with more success, to pester my parents to buy something called Swoop, a mixture of seeds formulated specially to attract wild birds to gardens. Swoop mostly consisted of millet, niger, maize and sunflower seed chips. Regular visitors to our bird table were the workaday sparrows, starlings, robins, blue tits and blackbirds of Southern England, but occasionally exciting newcomers dropped in - bullfinches, nuthatches, mistle thrushes, redwings, goldfinches, and many others.

Millet is one of the few widely-consumed staple crops indigenous to Africa. Maize, potatoes and cassava are all imported from the Americas; bananas, rice and wheat originate from Asia and the Middle East, but millet, along with sorghum and yam, is an original African staple. I first consumed millet in the form of toh, a brown, sticky, slightly sour porridge, in the baking heat and dust of Ouahigouya in northern Burkina Faso many years ago. In Burkina - and across much of the Sahel - millet is an important crop. It is ground and cooked into breads or porridge, or, as I also discovered, it is fermented and made into a sour and cloudy beer.

Once harvested, millet keeps extremely well and is seldom attacked by pests. Its long storage capacity makes millet essential to food security strategies for poorer farming communities in Africa, especially across the Sahel. Plus, it is a remarkably resilient crop. In the words of ICRISAT, quoted in Securing the Harvest: "We are talking about a crop...... that grows where not even weeds can survive; a crop that has been improved by farmers for thousands of years; a crop that produces nourishment from the poorest soils in the driest regions in the hottest climates". Not only does it grow in the most marginal land, and keep well, but millet is nutritionally superior to maize and rice. It has a higher protein and oil content than most grains (especially important in Africa where oil crops in semi-arid ecosystems are scarce).

These features make it all the stranger that millet is one of the so-called "orphan" crops in sub-Saharan Africa. At least until recently, little attention has been placed by research organisations in Africa in developing hybrid millet varieties to increase crop yields, despite the enormous success of hybrid millet crops in India. This oversight is, however, being remedied. The photo above, taken from the Gates Foundation website, shows a field of improved millet in Western Kenya. The importance of millet was briefly discussed at the recent African Green Revolution Forum, whereupon my neighbour leaned towards me and asked "Tom, what exactly do you do with millet?" My response was quick as a flash. "You mill it", I said. It was hard to resist the pun.

It would be unwise, of course, to over-praise millet. Even in improved hybrid varieties, its yields are lower than most other staples. Drought-tolerance and hardiness has its price. While in field, it is also prone to attacks by many pests. The Quelea bird, in particular, is attracted to millet fields and its flocks can decimate crops in the space of a few hours. Hardly surprising, given my first acquaintance with millet. Birdseed.

The African Green Revolution - Accra

I had the privilege of participating in the African Green Revolution Forum in Accra last week. It was enormously uplifting to attend this event - some 800 delegates gathered together to develop plans and share ideas on how to revitalize African agriculture.

Along with all the pomp and ceremony that accompanies events like this, the content of the Forum was deeply thought-provoking, in particular the emphasis on the need for both public and private sector investment to unlock Africa's agricultural potential. Anyone with an interest in investing in the sector is well-advised to visit the Forum's website http://agforum.com/ for extensive coverage of the discussions and agreed actions.


Needless to say, given my own particular professional interests, support to the seed sector figured highly on my agenda at the Forum. It was gratifying to hear about the numerous initiatives underway to support seed research, development and commercialization, though much more needs to be done at a policy level to accelerate the release of new seed varieties. In particular, I would like to see national research organisations - and individual plant breeders - able to secure financial rewards from varieties successfully launched into the market. Well-structured incentives to breeders and researchers would almost certainly increase the flow of new and improved varieties to farmers - and numerous models exist from North American and European research institutions. Having said that, robust systems for the registration, protection and enforcement of Intellectual Property rights are also required (and are absent in many African countries).


On a lighter note, I certainly can't complain about the hotel accommodation in Accra. Having initially been disappointed to have been booked by the organisers to stay at the Holiday Inn close to Kotoka airport - rather than having an ocean view at the Labadi Beach Hotel - my disappointment was assuaged on discovering on arrival at the Holiday Inn that my room had been upgraded, to the extraordinary dimensions of the Presidential Suite, no less!

Reasons to be cheerful (Part 3)

What is it about the music we listen to during our late teens? I heard the late great Ian Dury's Reasons to be Cheerful on the radio yesterday, for the first time in the last 20 years. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence - Dury's harsh smoker's faux-cockney voice rhyming the good things in life.

For me, it was good to visit Malawi again earlier this month. It was my first proper visit since 2001. Back then, Malawi was visibly the poorest country I had experienced. Buildings were old and dilapidated; there were few vehicles on the roads; people appeared poor: tattered clothes, small, often barefoot. Economic statistics confirmed the evidence of my own eyes. GDP per capital was the lowest in Southern Africa; wages were, in dollar terms, far lower than in Kenya and Tanzania; secondary school enrolment rates were low; and life expectancy at birth was well below 50 (partly due to high HIV infection rates). It was hard to think up any reasons to be cheerful. Malawi is small and landlocked. It is relatively densely populated. It lacks mineral resources. With the exception of Lake Malawi itself, still a favoured stop-over point for backpackers and overlander tourists on their journeys through East and Southern Africa, it lacks obvious tourist attractions by comparison with its neighbours. All in all, prospects seemed bleak.

But, while it is still rated one of the poorest countries in the world, Malawi has achieved something big in recent years. It has doubled its agricultural output. From requiring food aid a few years ago, it is now an exporter of food in the region. Its increase in agricultural production has been driven by the adoption of the Agricultural Inputs Subsidy Programme. It is a simple scheme. Vouchers for seeds and fertilizer are issued to named individuals, identified at community level. The vouchers are exchanged for the appropriate product at participating agro-dealers throughout the country. Dealers return them to seed producers and fertilizer importers, who then redeem them with the Government for cash. The results from the programme have been impressive, even after taking into account good rainfall in the past three years. Malawi’s grain silos are overflowing and poor harvests in Zimbabwe, in particular, have resulted in a ready market for the surplus. It has also created an opportunity for seed companies, large and small alike, to increase seed production, bring new varieties to market and invest in expansion. Reasons to be cheerful (Part 1).

This simple, top-down approach initially failed to win the approval and support of donor organizations. However, after its initial success, donors have scrambled aboard the programme, eager to nail their colours to its mast, though they continue to express concern over how long it will be required. It would seem that the development specialists that populate most donor organizations have not yet understood that their home economies almost all provide subsidies – in one form or another – in support of their agricultural sectors, and have no plans to stop. Food security (not to mention the votes of rural communities) are generally considered too important to leave to market forces alone. Why should Africa be an exception?

Has life in Malawi changed? Statistics suggest that its economy is growing and that GDP per capita is increasing, but these statistics tell us little about the multi-dimensional elements of poverty. Poverty alleviation is not something that can be measured using economic indicators alone, nor even by the logframes so beloved by central planners, economists, and development specialists, but by simpler things, like the ownership of bicycles, footwear, cell phones and iron sheets for roofing – the things that provide evidence of real disposable income.

During my visit, I was lucky enough to pay a brief visit to Namitembo village in Southern Malawi. This Catholic parish is supported by St Bridgets Church in Seattle. It has a simple furrow irrigation scheme which enables crops to be grown in the dry season, a rarity in Malawi where little or nothing grows during for the 6-month long dry southern African winter. It has a small health centre, a primary school and an Agriculture and Trade vocational education college. The two men pictured above, Felix Chigwanda and Johann Chisambo, are leading the gradual adoption of new ways of doing things in an environment that is resistant to change. This year, Namitembo is growing seed maize, taking advantage of the dry season to maintain the necessary crop isolation required in order to achieve the requisite genetic purity. This visit served as a reminder of how real change is gradual and generational, and driven as much, if not more, by community initiatives as by central policy. Reasons to be cheerful (Part 2).

One thing that hasn’t changed is street food, Malawi-style. In many parts of Africa, hawkers stand by the roadside, offering food for sale to passing buses and other traffic. In Uganda, grilled chicken, served on a stick, is the most popular offering, along with bananas and other fruit. In Malawi, the main roadside delicacy on offer is field mice, roasted and served fresh, 100 Malawi Kwachas for four, served head, tail and fur intact. It would be fair to say that it’s an acquired taste, but at least it makes a virtue out of pest control. Reasons to be cheerful (Part 3).

Reject the binary

In the month of Ramadan, what better than to read a book by the controversial academic Tariq Ramadan?

I have just finished reading his latest work: the Quest for Meaning. Professor of Islamic studies at Oxford, Tariq attracts, some might say courts, controversy, presumably because of his willingness to challenge existing orthodoxies. From start to finish, I found The Quest for Meaning exhilarating; refreshing in the clarity of its language in dealing with complex issues, in particular the ways in which different societies interact in the globalised world.

I was therefore very surprised to find several highly critical reviews of the book – one in particular describing it as “philosophy as candyfloss” and comparing it unfavourably to Alain de Botton’s work, among others. I can only assume that the New Statesman reviewer believes that complex ideas and concepts require traditionally impenetrable academic discourse. He ignores the fact that many great philosophers have expressed their arguments and propositions using simple and accessible language. Furthermore, the reference to Alain de Botton betrays an unpleasant form of academic snobbery, most likely driven by envy of Botton’s success in appealing to a popular market.

Tariq’s book opens with an unusual dedication, to the semi-colon, “which in a world of simplified communication and binary judgements reconciles us with the plurality of propositions and with the welcome nuances…. of complex realities”. And this dedication sets the tone for the book, especially in relation to Tariq’s appeal to his readers to respect diversity and accept that there are different histories, different cultures and different truths. He argues that we now live in an age of the instant, where groupthink on a continental, even global, scale governs our attitudes; where people are no longer interested in ideas, beliefs, principles and ethics, but bow to their fears and anxieties, seeking comfort in the search for safety and security. He asserts that governments everywhere understand this, and politicians exploit these fears, to the extent that ignoring human rights in the name of security has become acceptable, even desirable, in the minds of their electorate. To counter these unfortunate trends, Tariq encourages us to accept uncertainty, the grey areas of possibility, and to try to understand and respect the diverse worlds where truths and value systems intersect. Sadly, however, he notes that we are no longer interested. Rather, our attitude seems to be (my words) “Let someone else do the thinking – I’m too busy updating my facebook profile.”

This lamentable tendency towards binary judgements extends to my own efforts to raise capital from investors to invest in the East African agriculture sector. The AAC investment proposition is to identify good quality agriculture-related businesses and provide them with affordably-priced and patient capital for expansion and growth. We define our success according to two measures: in financial terms, from the amount of capital we will ultimately return to investors; and in social and developmental terms, through the achievements of our investees as they grow and increase the supply of goods, services and employment in their markets. This is a fairly simple proposition, yet it causes surprising confusion among potential investors. I regularly encounter comments such as "ah, so you're sub-commercial" or “what is impact investing, anyway. Just another word for cheap money? You guys are distorting the market.” or “No, we don’t understand that sort of thing. Maximising financial returns is what matters. The social returns will follow”. Regrettably, the concept of responsible long term investment for economic growth no longer seems to matter in the eyes of most owners of capital.

Antony Bugg-Levine, of the Rockefeller Foundation and one of the founders of the Global Impact Investing Network, urges investors to “reject the binary”, the either/or simplistic judgement that underpins the arguments against the double bottom-line investment approach. It is probably true that in a well-functioning efficient capital market the concept of providing affordable and patient capital would be irrelevant, but events of the past few years have served as reminders that even in the most developed of economies, capital markets require a strong regulatory environment alongside the forces of industry competition.

And what happens when capital markets aren’t working efficiently? Well, in East Africa, the supply of capital is short. Mealy-mouthed bankers argue that the cost of credit is not the issue, but the availability of and access to credit. They use this argument to justify massive spreads between deposit and lending interest rates. Under these circumstances, is short term oligopolistic pricing the best proxy for defining long term commercially sustainable rates of return? Where there is market failure, the market alone is not enough. In the world of finance, of commercial lending, of private equity and venture capital, of differing investor and investee needs, surely there is room for the acceptance of a plurality of approaches.

A little piece of paradise

I had the great pleasure one night last week of staying at the Norman Carr Cottage on the shores of Lake Malawi. The late Norman Carr’s name lives on, not just as a result of his devotion to conservation in the Luangwa Valley in Eastern Zambia, but also at his lakeside cottage in Monkey Bay on the shores of Lake Malawi, now transformed into a delightful eight bedroom lodge.

“A little piece of paradise” is the marketing pitch. On approaching the entrance to the lodge, off a dusty marram road through the yellow and grey of a Southern African winter, there is little to suggest the green oasis paradise ahead, dominated by its great sycamore fig tree.

But then, a warm welcome from Taffy and Jenny, the South African proprietors, always on hand to entertain their guests.

A sundowner boatride on the clear and bottomless waters of the lake; the western sky on fire; the only sounds of children playing by the beach and of two hippos wallowing in the reedy shallows.

More drinks by the lake while Taffy regales his guests with the story of Bentley Palmer, who went for an afternoon’s boat trip on Lake Malawi with his wife and mother-in-law, suffered engine failure and miraculously washed up, unharmed, over two weeks later some one hundred miles further north on the Tanzanian shore.

A superb dinner on a raised platform; the lights of fishing boats out on the lake dwarfed by the Van Gogh-bright starry sky.

An uninterrupted and dreamless sleep followed by a warm morning shower in the roofless bathroom.

A magnificent breakfast: strong tea and fresh fruit followed by brown toast buttered with fresh avocado and topped with thick slices of back bacon. The breakfast would be excellent anywhere, but in the bright light of a Lake Malawi morning, it is close to perfection.

The Norman Carr Cottage is a great big piece of paradise.

What's happened to the Pride of Africa?

Earlier this year I became a Flying Blue Platinum card holder, courtesy of having flown at least 60 separate flights on Kenya Airways during 2009. This might give the appearance that I am satisfied with the service provided by Kenya Airways. This, however, is wrong. I am, in fact, extremely dissatisfied. It simply serves to demonstrate the virtual monopoly that Kenya Airways enjoys in the East African market.

A few years ago, Kenya Airways was quite a good airline. Now, its idea of inflight refreshment is a hot greasy cellophane-encased, cholesterol-packed meat pie accompanied by a stale slab of cake wrapped in a plastic bag. Worse, the tea and coffee on offer bear little relation to Kenya’s matchless provenance and, to compound the fault, they are accompanied by something called Cremora. This non-dairy creamer is, in fact, made by Nestle from hydrogenated palm oil and glucose syrup. “Would you like some sweetened margarine with your tea, sir” is a fairly revolting proposition, but that’s what non dairy creamer is, more or less. (For anyone who doubts the truth of this statement, just search YouTube for "Non-Dairy creamer explosion"). I mean, what’s wrong with a milk jug? Or, indeed, scrapping the free refreshment service altogether in favour of a pay-as-you-go snack bar, as many low-cost international airlines have done?

But the poverty of inflight service pales into insignificance against Kenya Airways persistent flight delays, which, at least on certain routes based on my own direct experience, have become the rule, not the exception. That these delays are generally on routes where Kenya Airways enjoys a virtual monopoly fans the flames of passenger suspicion. Is it coincidence, or does Kenya Airways take better care of passengers on contested, rather than uncontested routes? Today, for example, I left Entebbe at 5.10 am in order to make the connection to Lilongwe. On arrival in Nairobi at about 6.30 am, my colleague and I were informed that our flight to Lilongwe (not a well-contested route), scheduled for departure at 8.25 am was delayed by about 30 minutes……. 9.00 am became 9.40 am, 9.40 am became 11.00 am and then, ultimately 1,00 pm. No apology was made, except for a passive statement that I have become all-too-familiar with.

“The flight delay was caused by operational problems. Any inconvenience is highly regretted”

Astonishingly, Kenya Airways regularly features high on the charts of the Pricewaterhouse Coopers annual survey, in association with the East African newspaper, of the most respected companies in East Africa. I am not sure quite how to explain this, except to speculate that the survey respondents don’t actually travel on Kenya Airways very often.

Come on Kenya Airways. Surely the self-styled Pride of Africa can do better than this.

So true to life

Over the course of the last year, NTV Uganda has screened three South American telenovelas, La Tormenta, El Cuerpo del Deseo (translated, oddly, as Second Chance), and Sabor a Ti. The three promotional pictures are a fairly clear indication of the fare on offer. Impossibly beautiful heroes and heroines battling against scheming villains whose objective is to keep them apart...... Throw in some magic and comedy and the recipe is complete. Like soap operas everywhere, the directors have perfected Scheherezade's strategy from the Arabian Nights and end each episode with a cliffhanger, keeping their audiences in keen anticipation for the following evening's events.

As a keen follower of La Tormenta, and the trials and tribulations of the heroine, Maria Teresa Montilla, and hero, Santos Torrealba, I had regarded it as nothing more than an entertaining and harmless fantasy romance. But in Uganda, where the belief in magic remains powerful, where family feuds and disputes over land holdings are common, the story is more believable. Yesterday, at a small clinic in Kampala with La Tormenta screening on the waiting room TV, I overheard one lady say to another "It's so true to life". And in a way, it is. You can certainly see why Eastenders and Coronation Street don't pack in Ugandan viewers with this sort of competition.

I recently re-read a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, entitled Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The scriptwriter of the title refers to Pedro Camacho, a diminutive Bolivian writer with a gift for writing radio novelas for the Peruvian public. Sadly, the stresses and strains on Pedro Camacho to keep churning out new episodes for three or four separate novelas running simultaneously become too much for him, and his novelas collapse in chaos and confusion. No risk of that with La Tormenta, now rapidly approaching its 216th and final episode, when Maria Teresa and Santos will no doubt be reunited in marital bliss having vanquished all their enemies. So true to life!

East Africa United

This most colourful of flags is not yet, to the best of my knowledge, widely recognised. It is the flag of the East African Community, comprising Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

For most of the last year, the best newspaper in the region, the East African, has been running weekly updates on East African Community integration, culminating in the launch of the East African Common Market Protocol on 1st July 2010. This protocol will, we are assured,eliminate the vast amounts of restrictions and regulations often required to do business in the region. In addition to the elimination of trade barriers and border taxes, citizens of East Africa will be able to freely relocate within the community, bringing education and expertise where they are needed most.

However, these changes have not taken place overnight. Even the most optimistic among us recognize that it will take some time before the notoriously tight borders are opened and the pointless red tape eliminated. Conservative expectations are that the necessary legal and regulatory changes will not be implemented in full before 2015 (though given the funereal pace of change in public sectors everywhere this would be quite some achievement). Certainly, not much has yet happened on the ground, if my recent experience of the Malaba border crossing between Uganda and Kenya was anything to go by. Regional studies often highlight the high transaction costs of doing business in East Africa. What better example than a 5 km tailback of trucks on the Kenyan side of the border. Imagine the hidden costs of these delays! With the exception of a few thousand customs service and immigration employees, it is hard to see anyone opposing a borderless East Africa.

It will be particularly interesting to see how the agriculture sector as a whole – and in particular the seed sector – responds to a borderless environment. Regulations (and the effectiveness of regulators) in the seed sector vary widely among the members of the East African Community. In Kenya, regulations are tightly enforced by the Kenyan plant health inspectorate service (KEPHIS), to the extent that most imported seed, especially from other African countries, requires KEPHIS approval. Uganda, by contrast, has a weaker quality control environment for the production and importation of seed , and little or no organizational capacity to implement its rules and regulations. An efficient market would substantially remove the need for Kenyan-style regulation but at least for the time being small-scale farmers with little or no access to market information need the protection provided by a robust regulator. As a general point, harmonisation of standards is fine, as long as it is upwards.

Back to the excellent East African. This week's edition includes some articles on regional private equity, including a piece on African Agricultural Capital on the following link
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/EA%20agrobusinesses%20next%20stop%20for%20private%20equity/-/2558/964378/-/13pu1g5/-/index.html

In my (entirely disinterested) opinion, well worth a read!

Kampala after 7/11

A great deal has been written about the hows, whys and wherefores of the July 11th terrorist attack on Kampala. That the attack was planned and executed by the Somalia-based extremist group Al Shabaab, bent on extracting revenge for the deployment of Ugandan peacekeeping troops in Somalia, appears in little doubt. It is further evidence of the danger that the chaos in Somalia presents to the region and beyond, if any were needed.

The response to the attacks has been swift. Government has promised to hunt down the perpetrators, and to continue the "fight for freedom" in Somalia (whatever that means). A range of security measures have been taken in Kampala, including an order by Kampala City Council that all bars and clubs should close by 10 pm, which has, predictably, been completely ignored. Worse, however, are the lengthy delays in entering shopping malls and other public places. It now takes a minimum of about 30 minutes to drive into the Garden City mall, for example, as all vehicles are searched and pedestrians scanned for terrorist devices. Entebbe Airport, once a shining light of efficiency and briskness among international airports, now requires a three-hour passenger check-in time for security access control, adding yet more disincentive to endure travel by air within the region.

When I was growing up in 1970s Britain, the IRA was a real and persistent threat. In 1972, the Aldershot army barracks - where my father worked as a lecturer to the Paratroop Regiment - were bombed in what was one of the first terrorist attacks in England. Only nine at the time, I had little understanding or appreciation of what had happened. Many other fatal attacks were made throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including audacious attacks on the House of Commons (when war hero and Conservative MP Airey Neave was killed) and, most memorably, on the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative party conference, when five people were killed and Margaret Thatcher herself narrowly avoided the explosion. It was a different era, of course, and the instruments of control and surveillance that exist now were in their infancy, but I have no recollection of changes in behaviour. Quite the opposite, in fact. Defiance, a refusal to make any concessions to the threat, to allow the threat of terrorism to interrupt day-to-day life, became a matter of pride. One of the more memorable quotes from JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your [front] door." No doubt, but an accurate calibration of risk and return underpins more than just economic wellbeing.

Stubbornness, of course, is not necessarily a virtue, but in this case at least I think the UK had the right approach. To allow daily life to become interrupted by what remains an extremely low risk is, in some respects, a victory for terrorism, an acknowledgment of the irrational fear it provokes.

This is especially true in Uganda, where other high risk areas of daily life go ignored. The casual loss of life in Uganda from preventable accidents is staggering, far exceeding the threat from terrorism. In the last two weeks alone, there have been two cases of boats capsizing (on Lake Albert and Lake Victoria). The death toll from these entirely avoidable tragedies is similar to that of the terrorist attacks. In both boat accidents, for example, no life jackets or other flotation aids were on board. I wonder what action is being taken to reduce this risk in future.

Ugandan roads are even more deadly. There were more than 2,000 reported fatalities on Ugandan roads last year. Road accidents are too frequent to mention. The issuing of Ugandan drivers' licences is poorly regulated. Vehicles are not subject to annual roadworthiness tests. Buses are not fitted with seatbelts or speed regulators and hurtle through villages and towns at breakneck speed. Road surfaces are poor...... The list of causes is endless.

This morning, a traffic policeman, his overfed belly pushing at the seams of his spotlessly white uniform, waved me over and asked to see my driver’s licence. I duly produced it. He then walked slowly round my car and inspected my insurance certificate, before being interrupted by a personal call on his cellphone. After a short conversation, he wordlessly returned my licence to me and jerked his hand in what I took to be an invitation to drive on. During this pointless little charade, a large, overloaded truck shook, rattled and rolled its way past, its exhaust belching out black fumes, its tyres bald and its rear indicators and brake lights apparently not functioning.

Ugandan roads and waterways present a far greater risk to life and limb than terrorists, even after 7/11.

The Canadian theme continues

By strange coincidence, I received this picture earlier today, showing the first harvest of Hass avocados from one of AAC's investees, the well-named Africado, owner of the Kifufu estate in Northern Tanzania -with a distinctly Canadian connection.......

As production volumes increase, maybe some export grade avocados will make their way on to the shelves of Canadian supermarkets, as Canadian cast-offs and unsold clothes reach Tanzanian open-air markets, spread out on the ground. It's a nice thought, made all the better for its plausibility.

Agriculture, Canada-style

I'm on holiday in Canada, southern Ontario to be precise. I took this photograph of a Syngenta seed variety demonstration plot just outside a small town called Mitchell on Highway 8 from Goderich to Stratford. This is farming country: field after field of corn, interspersed with other cereal and legume crops, on a large scale. Hybrid crops, mechanically planted, uniform spacing, well-fertilised soil and, every 5 km or so, massive grain silos to store the 100-day harvest. It is a picture of efficiency and orderliness.

The contrast with smallholder African agriculture could not be greater. Fragmented plots of land, no mechanisation, haphazard intercropping, home-saved seed and minimal use of other farming inputs.... These are just some of the challenges of creating a green revolution in Africa.

Whether we like or not, farming is a high-input high-output business. Maybe there's room for low-input farming for niche markets serving the chattering classes in wealthy countries. Certainly there is no shortage of organically-certified expensive food products in towns like Stratford (Ontario), home to an internationally-renowned summer theatre festival and also, incongruously, to the Ontario Pork Congress (for further details of this remarkable event, see www.porkcongress.on.ca/). But on a large scale? Impossible.

My A to Z

So, that's it. My African A to Z is complete. For anyone interested, here's the full list.


A Alphabet
B Banana
C Cellphone
D Detoothing
E Egg
F Football
G Gold
H Hair
I Investment
J Jam
K Khartoum
L Language
M Missionary
N Njombe
O Omondi
P Pantomime
Q Quack
R Rubber
S Seed
T Tusker
U Umbrella
V Victoria
W Wilderness
X Xeryus
Y Yamoussoukro
Z Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe

I have written very little about Zimbabwe, despite having spent the best part of four years living in Harare from 2000-2004. On the whole, it was not a happy time for me. Professionally, it was a time of great stress, and it was also during my stay in Zimbabwe that I realised that I had been and was suffering from a chronic health problem. But my problems were minor in comparison to the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans, for whom it was, and still is, a time of disaster.

Zimbabwe has a sad history, dating from the colonial land grab to the disaster of UDI and the long, brutal and bloody bush war, before the brief optimism of independence and majority rule unravelled in hatred, enmity and, latterly, corruption on a grand scale. The economic collapse over the last decade, accompanied by the inevitable deterioration in generally accepted measures of human development - life expectancy, education, health and welfare - is tragic.

Recently, I made a very brief visit to Zimbabwe, in transit to Western Mozambique. Perhaps not surprisingly, given its economic position, it was apparently unchanged. The best barometer, after all, of economic growth and development is new construction. From the wealthy suburbs of Harare, through Ruwa, Marondera, Rusape and Mutare to the border, the road surface still excellent, the grasslands unaltered, the buildings the same....... A country frozen in time, somewhere in the late 1980s, with its old-fashioned courtesy and air of quiet despair.

Back at the beginning of the decade, "it can't get any worse" was a familiar refrain from older white Zimbabweans, their faces prematurely lined from the dry air and hot sun of the Southern African climate. Sadly, the truth is that it can and always will get worse, until enough people decide that it is time to take responsibility. And that is Zimbabwe's history. Only Zimbabweans can ensure that it is not the future.

But Zimbabwe is not representative of wider Africa. Elsewhere, the winds of change are blowing, in politics, in the media, in business and in the unstoppable forces of youth and technology. In this at least, Bob Dylan’s finest lyrics from "The times they are a-changing" could have been written for Africa.

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

Don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.

Your old road is rapidly agein’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand

Oh the times, they are a-changin”

The Zeitgeist is for change, even for Zimbabwe.

Yamoussoukro

"The people also have the right to colonnades..." Lenin's Minister of Culture and most gentle of Bolsheviks, Anatoli Lunarcharsky.

Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the first President of independent Cote d'Ivoire, doubtless would have agreed. How else to explain one of the modern wonders of the world?

On approaching the small city of Yamoussoukro , some 250 km north of Abidjan, there is no indication that anything remarkable lies in wait, until the great dome of the Basilica appears on the horizon. At first, I assumed that the Basilica lay on our side of Yamoussoukro, but to my astonishment, after another 10 minutes' drive, the city itself came into view, between us and the Basilica, revealing the astonishing size and dimensions of the largest church in the world.

Houphouët-Boigny was originally chief of Yamoussoukro in the 1930s, when it was no more than a village. After qualifying as a doctor, he became a union leader, and was then, in common with some other future West African leaders, elected to the French Parliament and held several ministerial positions in De Gaulle's government. He also played a leading role in Africa's decolonisation.

In the 1960s and 70s, the Côte d'Ivoire economy did well under his leadership. The country's success became known as the "Ivorian miracle" and was due to a combination of sound planning, competent administration, a strong relationship with France and considerable investment in the Ivorian coffee, cocoa and rubber industries. However, the economy worsened dramatically in the 1980s, principally due to falls in international commodity prices alongside a simultaneous rise in oil prices. This decline coincided with Houphouët-Boigny adopting an increasingly autocratic and capricious leadership style, best exemplified by his decision first to relocate the Ivorian capital from Abidjan to his hometown of Yamoussoukro and his decision to go ahead with the construction of the church (to give it its proper name the Basilica of our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro) at the estimated and eye-watering cost of US$ 300 million.

The French have an expression for this: folie de grandeur. Houphouët-Boigny would have approved of the expression, if not its application. In a developing country, struggling under a mountain of foreign debt, with huge infrastructural and social needs, the Basilica can hardly be described as an effective and utilitarian investment.

It’s easy to be holier-than-thou. Of course the money could have been used on other projects of greater social value. But it’s worth remembering Lunarcharsky’s words, and reflecting that very few of the world’s great architectural monuments could have been justified on economic and social grounds. After all, Africans, too, have the right to colonnades.

Xeryus

This lovely flower is the African Geranium (Pelargonium Graveolens). It grows wild in Southern Africa, but over recent years a few enterprising farmers have started cultivating it - not for its flowers but for the sweet-smelling and valuable "essential" oil contained, in tiny quantities, in its petals, leaves and stems.

It has a close cousin, Pelargonium Sidoides, known in the Zulu language as Umckaloabo. The Zulus have long known that the Sidoides root steeped in hot water creates an infusion which alleviates cold and cough symptoms. Now, Sidoides is also cultivated and its extracts added to herbal and pharmaceutical preparations manufactured and marketed around the world as cold cures. Indeed, one popular brand in the USA is called Umcka, directly from the Zulu word.

From time to time, I am invited to attend agriculture-related conferences. One of the more memorable of these was the 2007 East African Fine Coffee Association annual event in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has the oldest coffee-drinking culture in the world. Legend has it that a nameless Amhara farmer found his goats eating the berries of a burnt coffee tree and, on trying them, discovered their bitter, smoky and delicious properties...... and the global love affair with coffee took root.

In between sampling excellent Rwandese, Kenyan and Ethiopian coffee, EAFCA conference participants pondered the future of African coffee. A common theme at events like these is the question of how African farmers can increase their share of the value ultimately realised from their products. Discussions usually start with a statement like "at Starbucks in London, Grade A Ethiopian coffee retails at a price of US $10 per pound. The farmer only receives $1 per pound. We need to add value to African production and capture more of the value...." It's hard to argue against this, of course, but the experts present rarely talk about the massive investment in brand development, marketing and distribution that Starbucks - and others - have made which enables them to achieve these premiums. Recently a new retail brand, Good African Coffee, has been launched in Uganda to provide some regional competition to the Java and Dormans coffee shop brands in Kenya. Perhaps one day, one of these will become an African superbrand and go global...... but the challenge is immense.

A few years ago, I was given a bottle of Xeryus Rouge aftershave. It has an interesting and complex (but for me an oversweet) scent. According to the internet, its ingredients include an exciting and eclectic selections of essential oils and plant extracts: tarragon, kumquat, cactus flesh, cedar, sandalwood, red pepper and, intriguingly, African geranium. Droplets of precious African Geranium oil, blended with other essential oils and solvents, packaged in elegantly shaped bottles, labelled and encased with handsome materials, all part of expert Givenchy branding, and its tiny interface with labourers in southern Africa.

From the African Geranium to Umcka and Xeryus Rouge, globalisation at work.

Wilderness

About 20% of the world's total landmass is in Africa. It's a big place. Most of it is wilderness. Whether it is arid or semi-arid land, jungle, swamp, mountains, woodland or savannah, it is probably unsuitable for agriculture and can only support very low human population densities.

These wild places are often turned into national parks, beloved by tourists and offering some measure of protection to Africa’s priceless biodiversity. From Mana Pools on the banks of the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe, to the vast Ruaha and Selous reserves in Southern Tanzania,from the unparalleled Tanzanian Serengeti and its Kenyan continuation of the Maasai Mara to the virgin rainforests of Gabon, well-heeled tourists marvel at Africa’s big game and birdlife from the comfort of their 4WD vehicles and luxurious lodges. Tourist income helps protect and sustain these wildlife refuges, but beyond the boundaries of the parks, the surrounding wilderness is home to dwindling numbers of African pastoralists and their flocks

This wilderness is now starting to attract the attention of foreign investors with deep pockets and a long term view on food prices. The argument goes something like this:-

The world's population is set to grow by as much as 25% over the next 30 years. That means, ceteris paribus, a corresponding increase in global food demand. Most land suitable for agriculture around the world is already being worked very hard. Therefore, to meet the increase in food demand, more agricultural land is needed and/or crop yields must increase substantially. So -

Q. Where in the world is there land available for agriculture? A. Africa.

Q. Where in the world can crop yields be significantly increased? A. Africa

Based on this argument, a new scramble for Africa is slowly gathering pace. Sovereign governments from the Middle East and Asia are buying leases from their African counterparts on huge tracts of land with apparent agricultural potential, in competition with a battalion of newly-formed private capital investment funds from Europe and North America.

I'm not sure that the investors have got this quite right, for a variety of factors. First, most of the land which is suitable for large-scale agriculture is probably already being intensively cultivated by smallholders. Second, there is very little land of any description which is actually empty. It is almost certainly being ranched by pastoralists, with their traditional, if undocumented, land rights. Third, large scale agriculture requires large-scale management, with a blend of agronomic, engineering, financial and administrative skills and experience, which are in very short supply in the “bundu”. And fourth, where are the markets for the production? Africa still has a rapid population growth rate and it is by no means certain that export markets will be accessible by the owners due to food security concerns.

My hope and belief is that the African wilderness will resist the bulldozers and chainsaws and remain, if not unscathed, largely intact. The world would be greatly impoverished without it.

Victoria

Two of Africa's most iconic natural features were named by the British in honour of Queen Victoria: the great lake, source of the White Nile, shared by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, and the spectacular waterfall on the Zambezi river (pictured), separating Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It seems odd that, while many colonial names have been rightly changed over the years, the two Victorias remain as a reminder of Africa's colonial history. I can only assume that it is because these two natural wonders of the world are shared by more than one country that they have not been renamed.

It was during Queen Victoria's long reign that the scramble for Africa took place. The full story of this shameful landgrab is told in Thomas Pakenham's eponymous history, which chronicles (predominantly from the colonial viewpoint) the rush to lay claim to Africa's wealth and partition the continent among the European powers. Occasionally an African voice is heard - for example Pakenham quotes the Ndebele King Lobengula's letter to Queen Victoria asking her to restrain in Cecil Rhodes British South African company's adventurers, presumably in the mistaken belief that she had the power to do so - but in general the source material is European in origin.

Over my years spent in Africa, I have become increasingly aware of the true history of the English. Behind the diffident, courteous, cricket-playing and self-deprecating facade lurks a barely concealed brutality that the whole world - except the English - recognizes. The gross abuse of human rights began with King Richard's massacre of the citizens of Acre in the third crusade, and was followed, among others, with the decimation of native Americans and Australians, the institutionalisation of the slave trade in West Africa and the Caribbean, the horrific, centuries-long, subjugation of the Irish, organised drug trafficking in China, and the looting of priceless historical and cultural artefacts around the globe....... Instead, the English are educated in the myths of Merrie England and fair play when in truth we are a land of villains, vandals and vagabonds.

Lobengula described his experience of dealing with the English using the simple but effective allegory of the Chameleon and the Fly. "Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? The chameleon gets behind the fly and stays motionless for some time. Then, he advances very slowly and gently, first putting forward one leg and then the other. At last, when well within reach of the fly, he darts out his tongue and the fly disappears. England is the chameleon and I am that fly."

On a lighter note, a further unfortunate English legacy to Africa is the absurd habit of wearing collars and ties on the equator. These clothes, appropriate for the English climate, have no business in the tropics, yet they have been enthusiastically adopted by the Nairobi, Kampala and, even, the Dar es Salaam elites. The English influence is weaker in West Africa, where men alternate between suits and ties and resplendent African robes. When I discussed this with my besuited Kenyan colleague, Ndung'u Gathinji. a few years ago, he replied "Yes, they were saved by the mosquito". Queen Victoria might not, in her own oft-quoted words, have been amused, but I was.

Umbrella

Umbrellas improve the quality of life in Africa. As this photograph of some Rwandese women shows, umbrellas are used to protect against both tropical sun and rain: the shelter they provide from the elements is essential.

The pictures tells another story, too. Whether umbrellas are used as parapluies or parasols, it is good to see that unsold and unwanted golf umbrellas find a useful home in the poorer countries of the world.

In fact, umbrellas are more often than not used as parasols. Their utility in tropical rain storms, frequently accompanied by high winds, is limited. The sheer intensity of the rain, thundering down in huge drops, makes it difficult to avoid being soaked even with the protection of an umbrella, courtesy of the splash factor as heavy raindrops explode on impact with the ground.

Water management is a challenge across most of the African continent. In most of East & Southern Africa, long dry spells are punctuated with monsoon rains, occasionally with catastrophic consequences. Most recently, heavy rain across East Africa has caused fatal landslides in both Kenya and Uganda, in locations where deforestation and cultivation on steep hillsides has weakened soil structures.

African farmers frequently bemoan poor rainfall, yet in fact most parts of East Africa have significantly higher annual rainfall levels than most of Europe. Poor water storage and utilisation, rather than absolute rainfall, is the real problem, though high ambient temperatures, altitude and low humidity also mean that water evaporation rates are much quicker. This fact was brought home to me during my spell with Tanwat (Tanganyika Wattle Company) in Njombe, SW Tanzania, where the establishment of a 600 hectare tea estate (Kibena Tea) relied on irrigation to achieve high volumes of green leaf. The water source for Kibena Tea was the Lihogosa wetland in the centre of the estate, dammed at one end to prevent rainwater from draining away too rapidly. The design was simple and, based on annual rainfall expectations, ought to have provided sufficient water for dry season irrigation, but the theory suffered from two errors in assumptions.

First, the designers had made the understandable but naive assumption that the Lihogosa annual rainfall would be the same as at the Tanwat Head Office. a few kilometres down the road. In fact, it turned out to be about 10% lower. Second, the wetland's water level fell by about 60 cm due to evaporation during the dry season, meaning that substantially less water than anticipated was available.

Tanwat's managers and advisors considered numerous solutions - some serious, some in jest - to deal with this intractable problem. Boreholes, improved irrigation technologies, raising the height of the dam.... and one, unforgettable, suggestion of covering the swamp with ping-pong balls to slow down evaporation. We didn't think of it at the time, but maybe a giant umbrella would have done the trick!

Tusker

Bia Yangu, Nchi Yangu My Beer, My Country

Beer is big business across Africa. Kenya is no exception. And Tusker is a jumbo-sized brand. There are other brands in the market, but Tusker has a status all of its own. It is, quite simply, synonymous with beer. Its advertising speaks to the nation. Baada ya kazi ("after work"). Ni wakati wa Tusker ("it's time for a Tusker"). The brand design of a black elephant on a yellow background is simple, effective and has withstood the test of time. In fact, Tusker was first brewed in 1922 by the founder of East African Breweries, George Hurst, whose death in a hunting accident at the tusks of an elephant provided the inspiration for the brand.

Kenya Breweries has managed its virtual monopoly of the Kenyan beer market well. It has created other brands to appeal to market segments whose social aspirations require brand differentiation. Whitecap and Pilsner compete with Tusker for the middle class market, and the interloper, Tusker Malt, sold in a 300ml green bottle, was designed to appeal to professional women, but the original Tusker, sold in a half-litre brown bottle reigns supreme.

Truth be told, the beer itself is almost indistinguishable from most other commercial lagers. Mainstream beers are, after all, brewed using a standard recipe of malted barley, hops and water, with the additional of yeast, additional starches and sugars to accelerate the fermentation process, and a few additives to stabilise the bottled product. But the effectiveness of the branding creates the distinctiveness of the product.

In the mid 1990s, I spent the best part of three months managing a Coopers & Lybrand consulting project with Kenya Breweries for the design and implementation of a standard costing accounting system. Every day I drove across Nairobi to the Thika Road, past the decaying sports complex at Kasarani, to the home of Kenya Breweries at Ruaraka. It was a great assignment: not only was it professionally interesting and challenging, but it also offered an excellent daily lunch in the Executive Restaurant on the third floor of the main office building, infinitely superior to the normal daily fare available in the diners outside Coopers' offices on Kimathi Street in downtown Nairobi.

African breweries have unexpected challenges, not least of which is the supply of barley. Barley is very much a temperate crop, but does grow well under tropical conditions at medium and high altitude. Kenya Breweries had a separate barley-growing operation in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru, which provided farmers with barley seed and agricultural extension services. On harvest. the barley was delivered to its malting plant in Nairobi's industrial area, and, from there, the malted barley was trucked to its three breweries in Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa for brewing and bottling this iconic beer.

Seed

Farming is a way of life for the majority in Africa. Well over 50% of Africa's population relies on farming for food and household income, if not exclusively then to a large extent. That's at least 500 million people. Pastoralists still ranch their cattle and herd their goats across great swathes of arid and semi-arid lands, but the inexorable growth in population puts ever more pressure on land resources.

But African farming, with the exception of a few large scale farms dotted across the continent, bear little relation to the kind of intensive farming practiced in much of the world. African farms are, typically, small - perhaps less than one acre of land, rainfed, cropped intensively, with a mix of cereals, root crops, legumes and vegetables, primarily for home consumption. Most farmers still use farm-saved seed – and achieve crop yields of 10-30% of full potential. Poor quality seed is not the only factor driving low crop yields: unpredictable rainfall, soil nutrient depletion, permacropping leading to increases in pathogens and pests all play their part. Outputs are low, often barely sufficient to feed the family, let alone generating income. Living on the land, eking out a living - it is a hard and ultimately unsustainable way of life.

Seed is the fundamental, the sine qua non of agriculture. We can but speculate, but in the dawn of human civilsation, Mesopotamians, Egyptian and Chinese farmers must have saved seed from their best plants. This seed was preserved, with great care, during the dry season for planting at the onset of the rains. Farming techniques were gradually improved in ancient times, into the middle ages, through crop rotation systems, basic irrigation techniques, the application of animal fertilisers, but progress was slow until two essential scientific discoveries were made. First, the microscope opened human eyes to the small world, a world which gradually revealed the infinitessimal building blocks of life. And second, Mendel's work in 19th century Germany laid the foundations for modern plant science: an understanding of germplasm, of genetic instructions, and of the potential for crop improvement. Now, little more than 100 years after the development of hybrid seed varieties, a new, post-modern, plant science of genetic transformation with possibilities beyond our comprehension is upon us.

How far we have come in our control over nature!

And yet, while the pace of development of plant science accelerates, vast areas of Africa remain in the pre-microscope and pre-Mendelian world, saving seed and relying on the natural environment for food production. Improving seed - the planting material available to farmers - is the first step in breaking the vicious circle of rural poverty. As the manager of an investment fund dedicated to expanding seed production, I am fortunate enough to be able to meet people who have the vision , the dedication, the tenacity, the determination and attention to detail to breed, produce and distribute improved seed to African farmers.

Seed is, of course, just one element of agricultural production, and the provision of improved seed will not itself transform African agriculture. It does however have the potential to begin a gradual shift from the fragmentation of land into ever smaller and less viable holdings towards the development of commercial farming. This will be a generational change, in which people migrate from the land to the city. It will require a co-ordinated plan for industrialization and urban development, and it will not happen overnight.

Seed has always been transformational. Ever since Cain's murder of Abel, the long victory of the farmer over the pastoralist has shaped human history. Africa will be no exception.

Rubber

For a brief period, I was privileged to be the Chairman of one of the Commonweath Development Corporation's most pioneering investments: Compagnie Heveicole de Cavally, a rubber plantation and factory located in Cote d'Ivoire close to the Liberian border. It was a day's drive from Abidjan, the road passing through the town of Guiglo (notable only for a bloody clash between UN peacekeepers and Ivorian protestors in 2005), west to the village of Zagne and the final bumpy 70 km to Cavally.

I only visited the plantation three times, but each drive provided stark reminders of the casual looting of Africa's natural resources - in the shape of numerous trucks bearing huge logs, felled from natural forest, to the port for export. On one memorable occasion, we passed a truck bearing only one massive log, representing perhaps 500 years of growth. Three logs was the normal cargo.

At that time, Cavally as a business was struggling. Despite the fact that West Africa is one of the best places in the world to grow rubber, international rubber prices were low and the plantation was still immature. However, salvation was at hand. Not long thereafter, the price of oil began to rise on the international market and at the same time the price of synthetic rubber (an oil derivative) also began a steep climb. This in turn increased the demand for natural rubber by industrial users, and at one point resulted in a fourfold increase in rubber prices. This was wonderful news for Cavally and its investor - as the supply of natural rubber is now almost exclusively from plantations of the tree Hevea Brasiliensis and these trees, like any other, take a considerable amount of time to grow to maturity and full yield potential.

Like most commodities, rubber had seen price booms in the past. The most famous boom occurred not long after the Belfast resident John Dunlop created (and patented) the pneumatic rubber bicycle tyre in 1888. This simple invention drove a massive increase in the global demand for natural rubber -at that time the synthetic alternative had not been developed - for the production of bicycle and, not long afterwards, motor car tyres. It also drove one of the greatest tragedies of imperial rule in Africa: the rape and pillage of the so-called Congo Free State by King Leopold of Belgium and his accomplices. This hideous history is fully told in Adam Hochschild's compelling book King Leopold's Ghost.

Rubber is made from solidified sap. The best source is the Brazilian rubber tree, Hevea Brasiliensis, and this is now almost the exclusive global source of natural rubber. But rubber can also be obtained from other sources - and a particularly rich source was from the Landolphia vines which grow wild in the rain forests of equatorial Africa. As industrial demand increased and rubber prices skyrocketed, Leopold's administration employed all methods at its disposal to extract as much wild rubber as possible. For the rapacious imperialist Leopold, wild rubber was a Godsend: it required no costs other than labour and transport from the interior to the coast.

To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, conscripted Congolese villagers would slash them (slaughter-tapping) and dry the sap by coating their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be pulled off the skin, painfully, in a process akin to depillation by waxing. The killing of the vines made it even harder to locate sources of rubber as time went on, but the administration was relentless in raising the quotas, the spectacular profits from which financed Leopold's building programmes in Brussels and elsewhere in Europe, creating the "whited sepulchre" of Marlow's recollections in Conrad's classic novel Heart of Darkness. Certainly very little, if any, was reinvested in the Congo.

As the rubber boom continued, the administration became ever more brutal in its methods. Villages who failed to meet the rubber collection quotas had their women and children rounded up and held hostage while the men were sent into the rain forest to obtain rubber as the price for their freedom. It goes without saying that the women were regularly raped by their guards: a ghastly state-sponsored human rights abuse that echoes in the sexual violence which persists to this day throughout the Congo. Some villagers were required to pay for shortfalls in quotas with their lives, their deaths accounted for by severed hands, where each hand would prove a kill. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Leopold's private army, the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.

Was this Imperialism at its worst? Certainly on its scale and duration. Hochschild quotes Mark Twain's assertion that the rape of the Congo directly led to the deaths of five to eight million Congolese over the 20 year period from 1890 - 1910, all for the want of rubber. Today we would call it by its real name: genocide, but no trials await the long-departed Leopold.

The rubber industry has changed now, for the better. But there also remain other, subtler, forms of impoverishment at work. Rubber tapping is a lonely business, often carried out by migrant male workers compelled to seek the meagre wages on offer in order to support their families far away. Their lament is told by Jeremy Seabrook in the excellent book Victims of Development: Resistance and Alternatives, in his vignette of the migrant Malaysian rubber tapper, "alone among his 600 identical trees".

Quack

The African Black Duck

Yesterday, I attended mass at the Catholic church in Ggaba. As usual, the church was packed for the English service: the reverent and joyous congregation numbered at least 500, spilling beyond the airy interior.

I took advantage of a slight delay in starting the mass to read the Catholic weekly newsletter, which has been serialising Archbishop Cyprian's 2010 Easter address. This week's instalment dwelt on the importance of truth in everthing we do, using the Bible's simple message that "the truth will set you free".

In Archbishop Cyprian's words, levelled at politicians, traders, doctors, journalists, perjurers, and others who deceive and mislead the Ugandan populace, "People await.. the truth, but information is given to the public. False accusations are made, but the truth is never revealed. ....... As long as the truth never comes out, we shall never be free from rumour, false accusations and counter accusations". He might have gone on to add that cheating, fakery and the associated failure by the regulatory authorities to enforce proper standards has a corrosive impact on wider ethical standards.

And this situation is by no means confined to Uganda: across sub-Saharan Africa, society is filled with fraud, theft and corruption. The fertile breeding ground of poverty and desperation creates an environment in which these vile charlatans multiply, promoting and peddling their false and unproven goods and services for personal profit in a largely unregulated marketplace, where short term commercialism holds sway over professionalism.

Most loathsome of all are self-styled Christian Pastors who enrich themselves by fleecing their followers through schemes akin to the Middle Ages practice of selling of indulgences for personal profit; and traditional healers, who dream up ever more hideous practices to offer the ignorant and superstitious. In recent years, these have included the burying of human body parts in the foundations of new buildings (supposedly to bring these buildings strength and permanence), and the sacrifice of albinos as a form of medicine. However, on a less-horrifying, but more widespread scale, the absence of well-resourced national bureaux of standards with the powers to take robust and immediate action against retailers and producers offering sub-standard goods for sale to the public leads to widespread product counterfeiting, with all the dangers this presents to the general public. Adulterated cement and fuel and date-expired medicine and foods abound, largely unchecked.

There is a better English word to describe the charlatans responsible for these crimes. The word is "quack", and Africa is full of them. The dictionary defines quack as a person who pretends to have skill, knowledge or qualifications which he does not possess. I had always assumed that its derivation was directly related to the noise a duck makes - hence the picture above - but in fact it comes from the archaic Dutch word quacksalver, meaning "a boaster who applies a salve".

I used to think that there was something comical about the description "quack". Now I know better.