Seed Capitalist

Mangoes for sale

2012-02-13T01:11:00.000-08:00

Taken yesterday by the roadside on Malawi's M1 between Dedza and Lilongwe. 100 Kwacha per dish of ripe mangoes (that's about 40 US cents). Wherever you travel across the continent, there will be similar roadside stalls during the mango season.

And yet, in Malawi's supermarkets, all you can find are cartons of imported fruit juice and sweetened juice drinks. The value chain is broken.

Africa and the ICC

2012-01-24T01:39:00.000-08:00

The International Criminal Court is raising a hell of a storm across Africa. There are current investigations and/or indictments in Uganda, Sudan, Ivory Coast, DRC, Central African Republic, Kenya and most recently Libya. The fact that most of its current energies are focused on Africa has led to a disturbing discourse, promulgated by the powers-that-be, that the ICC is in some way "targeting" Africans.

This is very sad. It seems to me that it is an entirely good thing for people everywhere that there is an independent body able to investigate alleged crimes against humanity and bring charges against parties involved. And it also seems to me that we ought to be able to put narrow-minded nationalistic concerns behind us and wholeheartedly support the ICC's aims and activities.

To those, therefore, who complain that the ICC is anti-African, the logical response is to say that in fact it is pro-African, as it devotes so much of its time and resource to investigating alleged crimes on the African continent, and seeks to bring justice to the African victims of these crimes. It is also worth pointing out, as an aside, that the ICC is intended to be a court of last resort, which investigates and prosecutes only where national judicial systems and processes have failed, and that instead of complaining about the ICC it would be better by far to complain about the weaknesses in many African judicial systems - and then do something about them.

But these arguments usually fall on deaf ears, for the very human reason that we can all agree about a good thing when it happens somewhere else. The ICC is a wonderful organisation - as long as it's not going about its business in my back yard!

Coffee's coming home

2012-01-21T00:41:00.000-08:00

The slogan for the European Championship football tournament held in England in 1996 was "Football's coming home". Well, the global love affair with coffee is coming home to East Africa where, with the honourable exception of Ethiopia, consumption of the region's most famous indigenous export crop has been very low.

For many years, it was quite hard to get a good cup of coffee in East Africa, outside the major hotels, high-end restaurants and tourist lodges. Instant coffee prevailed, more often than not in the shape of the tasteless brown powder of the Africafe brand. Now, there are a slew of entrepreneurs establishing coffee houses and chains in the major cities across East Africa. The trend started with the hugely successful Java brand in Nairobi, followed by Dormans (also Nairobi), Good African Coffee (Kampala) and my own personal favourite, the beautifully-branded Msumbi Coffee (Arusha and Dar). Better still, coffee prices to the farmer for both arabica and robusta are shooting through the roof, providing farmers with the incentive needed to invest in replanting their coffee fields with higher-yielding seedlings. The picture above shows a coffee nursery in the prime coffee-growing area close to Kilimanjaro.

Five years ago, I attended the East Africa Fine Coffee Association (http://www.eafca.org/) annual conference in Addis. It was a cheerful and friendly event, which provided plenty of opportunity to enjoy the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony and discuss the prospects for the industry in the region. Back then, only the most optimistic could have foreseen the market growth in the region and the price growth on international exchanges. I'm very sorry not to be attending this year's EAFCA renewal back in Addis, where coffee aficionados will again be coming home under far more celebratory circumstances.

The Haven in Jinja

2012-01-16T00:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice shot of the Pearl Capital Partners advisory team, taken this Saturday on our annual staff retreat. We went to the Haven, a lovely place on the west banks of the Victoria Nile near Jinja, overlooking the rapids.

Just like the Norman Carr Cottage in Malawi, the Haven manages to be a delightful place to stay without standing too much on ceremony. Everything is good: both the location and the home-baked bread are both among the best in Uganda. There's a pool table, a volleyball court and no need of a swimming pool with the river right below. The cottages are comfortable and the staff pleasant and efficient.

It is to be recommended to any visitors to Uganda in search of a haven for a few days. Excellent.

New Year with Bebe Cool and friends

2012-01-08T01:56:00.000-08:00

What to do on New Year's Eve? This is a difficult question for non-Party-goers like me, so I was delighted to see that the Jamaican duo Chaka Demus and Pliers were playing at the Speke Resort in Munyonyo, just round the corner from my Ggaba home. This passed my various tests for an enjoyable evening out: nearby (therefore little risk of Kampala traffic jams); outdoors (slightly lower noise levels combined with fresh air and easy escape routes); and professional musicians playing real music (rather than the lip-synching that passes for live music at many Ugandan shows).

Chaka Demus and Pliers had a string of hits in the 1990s. My personal favourite was their reggae/rock n'roll rendition of Twist and Shout, but Tease Me, Murder She Wrote and She Don't Let Nobody were all great songs. So, for a mere 50,000 shillings (about $20 at current exchange rates) for the VIP enclosure, plus a fireworks display and a string of curtain raiser performances from up and coming Ugandan musicians, it sounded like good value. The key words here are, of course, "sounded like". I had forgotten that Ugandan promoters are at least as unreliable as promoters everywhere else in the world. This show was promoted by Moses Ssali (pictured above) a.k.a. Bebe Cool, one of Uganda's best-known and most popular musicians and son to the politician Bidandi Ssali, who stood unsuccessfully for the Ugandan Presidency last year. Bidandi's campaign slogan was "Trust Me": the electorate responded with less than 1% of the popular vote.

After spending an hour negotiating the three kilometres from home to Munyonyo (due entirely to rigorous searching of every vehicle entering the Speke Resort), we arrived shortly after 9 pm, by which time a few acts had started to appear on stage. The MCs for the show were two appallingly unfunny comedians, whose main joke line in between acts focused on the ways in which women from different Ugandan tribes behave during - how shall I put it? - moments of intimacy. Enough said! The intervening music wasn't much better, ranging from moderate to abysmal. But to their great credit, Ugandan audiences are in general very forgiving, and this one was no exception: happy enough with the entertainment on show and why not? Plenty of alcohol was flowing, the evening was warm and dry, with the promise of better things to come.........

As the clock approached midnight, and there was no sign of Chaka Demus and Pliers, I felt the first twinges of anxiety. Were they actually going to perform? The fireworks came and went, the old year was gone and the new year started, the MCs continued to heckle the audience, the audience gradually became more irritable at the delay, until Bebe Cool himself turned up and performed a few songs. It took until a little after 2 am for Pliers, or (at the risk of being excessively suspicious) someone claiming to be Pliers, to come on stage and announce that in fact Chaka Demus hadn't actually turned up. Pliers (or the man who claimed to be Pliers) then played four or five songs - which notably did not include any of the duo's most well-known hits - before finishing up at around 3 am. And was there any apology from the MCs or the promoter? Silly question, really. After all, apologies require respect for others, and respect for others is, on the whole, a commodity in short supply among Uganda's elite.

Being conned is hardly an auspicious start to the New Year. Oh well, at least Bebe Cool's still laughing. We all came, paid for our tickets, and he didn't need to pay the main act. Nice work if you can get it.

Open Sesame

2012-01-06T05:06:00.001-08:00

Anyone familar with the story of Ali Baba in the Arabian Nights will remember that the password to the thieves' cave was 'Open Sesame". When I was first told the story, back in 1970s pre-McDonalds Britain, I had no idea what sesame was, but the globalisation of cuisine has changed all that. Now I know the delicious taste its seed imparts to middle eastern favourites like hummus bi tahini and baba ghanoush, among others, and the delicate flavour of its oil in many Asian dishes. I also learned that sesame is in fact one of the oldest crops cultivated by humankind, dating back to the Babylonian era. It was perhaps the most valuable oilseed in the ancient world because of its tolerance to drought, its high oil content (about 50% oil), the ease of oil extraction and its stability.

I didn't know much about sesame cultivation until my recent hot and dusty road trip to North West Uganda, where, along with cotton, it is an important cash crop. Sesame (usually called by its Arabic name of Simsim) is very often grown in tandem with cotton: it is drought-tolerant and withstands high temperatures. It makes an excellent rotation crop for cotton as it has different nutritional requirements and it suppresses two significant cotton pests, root rot and nematodes. Several of the cotton farmers we visited were also growing simsim, harvesting manually and allowing the cut plants to dry off in bales (pictured above) to reduce the risk of crop loss resulting from seed pod shattering while in field. In the USA, plant breeders have developed simsim varieties which are not prone to shattering, but these are not yet available in Africa.

Plus ca change

2011-12-31T00:48:00.000-08:00

I have a book on my bookshelf entitled "Realizing the promise and potential of African agriculture". It was published in June 2004 by the Inter Academy Council, following intensive research and consultation in 2002-2003. I found it very useful when I began to develop the investment strategy for African Agricultural Capital in 2005. Well-researched, well-written and well-intentioned, it sets out a shopping list of recommendations that, taken together, will achieve the goal expressed so concisely in the title of the book itself.

Some eight years later, I wonder how many of the recommendations have been acted upon and how much change has taken place for "the man [and woman] with the hoe", which remains the best description of the average African farmer. Certainly, some progress has been made. For example, more African farmers have access to certified seed. Information and communication technologies are infinitely more accessible than they were, as a result of the rapid spread of wireless communication. Rural infrastructure has, in general, got slightly better. Import statistics, at least in East Africa, suggest that the use of fertiliser and crop protection inputs has increased.

Otherwise, however, I suspect that very few elements of the plan have been implemented. Indeed, at the risk of being cynical, I'd hazard a guess that you could repackage and republish the recommendations without anyone noticing that they were first issued eight years ago, and, perish the thought, that you could probably do the same again in 2020....... Worse still, it's already happened, more or less, in the form of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (fondly known as CAADP to its friends).

Why is it that the very well-qualified people that populate the corridors of academia and administrations around the world persist in believing that plans translate into action, when there is so much evidence to the contrary? In his provocative book, The White Man's Burden, the rogue World Banker Bill Easterly argues very strongly that "Planners", at least with regard to foreign development aid, have failed, and that the real agents of change are what he describes as the "Searchers", the people who experiment, who learn from experience what works and what doesn't. He might have described them as "Doers". Easterly is by no means alone in his critique, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain satirized planners and do-gooders more than a hundred years ago. Graham Hancock exposed the hypocrisy and waste in the aid industry in his modern classic The Lords of Poverty. Dambisa Moyo added her voice a few years ago in Dead Aid. And Michael Maren provides anger, emotion and powerful anecdotes of development failure in his well-names The Road to Hell [is paved with good intentions].

Different planners have different justifications for their continuing existence. But, apart from the honest few, who admit to doing a well-rewarded job for money, not love, their justifications are variations on the common themes of self-delusion and faux-humility: we're learning, they say ,we're learning from the past about what works and doesn't work; we're different........ A more plausible justification would be that, in some way, planning fulfils the atavistic human need of security, a belief that the future can be controlled and a desire to perpetuate this comfortable illusion from which bureaucracies derive their power and authority.

Zanzibar Queen

2011-12-22T02:48:00.000-08:00

Freddie Mercury would have been 65 earlier this year. It's hard to imagine the most flamboyant of glam-rockers as a pensioner. He died 20 years ago from an AIDS-related illness, but his extraordinary musical talent endures. For the legion of Queen fans, YouTube provides heaven-sent music and video alike. Radio Gaga (with its video montage taken from Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis), I Want to Break Free, Under Pressure and the beautiful Love of my Life, the list goes on and on.

Like all those who are taken from us before their time - one thinks of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon and Princess Diana, among others - Freddie's image is frozen in time. Inez in Huis Clos says "One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly underneath it, ready for the summing-up. You are your life, and nothing else." Well, Freddie certainly packed a lot into his 45 years.

Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946 into an Indian Parsee family, he left Zanzibar at the time of the 1964 revolution (which overthrew the Sultan and his Arab/Asian government, and led to the union with Tanganyika and founding of Tanzania) and settled in the UK. His musical talent was evident from a young age as a pianist, guitarist and vocalist and, after a few flirtations with unsuccessful bands, he formed Queen in 1970 with Brian May and Roger Taylor. Queen's glory decade began with the phenomenal success of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 and reached a climax with their show-stopping performance at Live Aid in 1984. Freddie's ambition was for Queen to be "the Cecil B DeMille of rock n'roll" and David Mallet's Queen videos, with their use of film from the 1920s and 30s, pay homage to the glory days of cinema spectacle.

Sadly, his prodigious talent goes almost unknown in Zanzibar, apart from a sleazily-pleasant bar called Mercury's in Zanzibar town. In 2006, the Zanzibari government sanctioned a celebration of Freddie's 60th birthday, but subsequently withdrew its support of the event after an Islamic pressure group complained on the grounds that Freddie was not a true Zanzibari , that he was gay, which is not permitted under sharia law, and that"associating Mercury with Zanzibar degrades our island as a place of Islam". Freddie would have loathed this intolerance, which speaks volumes about the prevalent attitude in most African countries, regardless of the dominant religion, towards homosexuality.

The great Christian writer, CS Lewis, at the end of the chapter entitled Sexual Morality in his finest book, Mere Christianity, writes as follows: "...If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, then he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasures of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising .... and backbiting; the pleasures of power, and hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the Human self I must try to become. They are the Animal self and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But of course, it is better to be neither."

In Uganda, anti-homosexual rhetoric is particularly virulent, to the extent that parliamentarians have called for the death penalty for practicing homosexuals, and elements of the popular press have published the names and photographs of homosexual Ugandans who dare to make their status public, and have incited violence against them. Early this year, this despicable conduct almost certainly led to the shocking murder of gay rights activist David Kato in Mukono.

Maybe, in time, a more liberal and tolerant attitude towards the ways in which adults choose to indulge their sexual pleasures will develop across the African continent. And maybe Freddie Mercury's matchless talent will be honoured by more than a tourist-targeting cocktail bar in the country of his birth.

Christmas tree

2011-12-19T23:52:00.000-08:00

In most of East Africa, December marks the beginning of summer. By mid-December, the short rains are over, the humidity falls and the mercury rises. For anyone who's grown up above the tropic of Cancer, it feels distinctly un-Christmassy, though the occasional appearance of a sweaty-looking Santa Claus and some half-hearted piped Christmas carols in Nakumatt, Shoprite and Game serve as an unwelcome reminder of the commercial excess in most of Europe and North America.

Excess aside, however, Christmas, along with the long evenings of the Wimbledon fortnight in late June and early July, is the time of year when I feel most nostalgic for home. Prototypical bright frosty mornings, Christmas lights strung along the high street and, best of all, the annual task of decorating and admiring the Christmas tree.

The bizarre tradition of chopping down a conifer, bringing inside the house and decorating it hasn't really taken root in most African countries, though a few Harare vendors did a roaring trade in thinnings from the pine plantations in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands. Before that, when I was based in Tanzania's southern highlands, I was lucky enough to live and work on a large wattle and pine plantation, where one of the unwritten benefits of employment was the December visit to the forest to fell a Patula Pine (pictured) and bear it home in triumph.

In Kampala, however, apart from the hideous plastic efforts available in Game, there don't seem to be any Christmas trees on sale. Surely there must be a good business proposition here. Buy up a few acres of mountainside land in Eastern Uganda otherwise unsuitable for farming. Plant the land on a 2-3 year rotation with Patula Pine (or another vaguely Christmassy conifer suitable for the Ugandan environment). Chop them down when they are 2-3 years old and bring them to Kampala for sale at Garden City, Lugogo, Kabalagala and other expatriate hang-outs. Or, better still, make home deliveries on special order. Sell them at $50 each to homesick expatriates and pocket a healthy seasonal profit.......

Come to think of it, the Christmas tree is just the tip of an iceberg. A good quality turkey is very hard to find.

Conservation agriculture

2011-12-09T01:18:00.000-08:00

In his French A-Z, included in the fascinating non-fiction miscellany that makes up Bamboo, William Boyd writes about Xavier Rolland, his neighbour in SW France. Rolland has a small farm, which he works himself and, according to Boyd is "possibly the hardest working person I have ever encountered". For those of us who occasionally witness the daily grind of rural life, this comes as little surprise.

Boyd is usually very incisive and accurate in his observations, but in the following passage about Xavier Rolland, he falls prey to a very common misconception about farmers: namely that they enjoy a loving relationship with mother nature. "He ploughs his fields to the very edge of roads. He obliterates hedgerows..... and cuts down trees..... to gain a few extra square metres..... He is close to the land, but his relationship with nature seems more like that of a tenant with a rapacious and demanding landlord. There seems no love of the countryside..." No indeed: in many ways, conventional agriculture is little more than a ceaseless battle against the forces of nature.

Last Sunday evening, I travelled to Northern Tanzania and stayed the night in a small hotel in the town of Boma N'gombe, close to Kilimanjaro. The following morning, I flew about 100km to the south in a tiny single-engine Cessna. It was a bright clear morning. For once, Kilimanjaro was fully visible, resplendent in the sunshine, with a fresh coating of snow and frost. We flew over the semi-arid scrub that makes up such a large proportion of Tanzanian and Kenyan Maasailand. There was little or no sign of agriculture, at least on any scale: indeed, the only signs of human activity were red-clad Maasai herdsmen, their flocks and their manyattas, overnight homesteads for family and flock alike. From the air, the landscape is dotted with trees, except for a few large expanses of grassland. It is a fragile environment: the sandy red soil is prone to rapid erosion, especially if the trees are cleared for cultivation. Rainfall is low and unpredictable. The large expanses of grassland are usually evidence of areas of black cotton soil, where the heavy clay content of the soil prevents drainage, making the land prone to waterlogging and, in turn, unsuitable for most trees.

African farmers have traditionally avoided farming black cotton soil. It is heavy and hard to work using hand tools. But, in comparison to the red soils which are preferred, it is nutrient-rich. In some parts of the world (Queensland and Southern Brazil, for example), commercial farmers using conservation agriculture techniques have managed to unlock the potential of these soils to great effect.

Conservation agriculture is yet to be widely adopted in Africa, perhaps because so little of the continent is commercially farmed. Often called zero-tillage farming, it has three fundamental principles: to minimise soil disturbance, thereby preventing erosion, water loss and the oxidisation of organic material; to increase organic matter in the soil, creating a living rather than an inert soil environment; and regular crop rotation, reducing the build-up of pests and pathogens in the soil.

Later that same day, I returned to Sanya Juu, a small town on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. We invested in the development of a Hass avocado plantation there about four years ago. The young trees are already laden with fruit (as shown in the picture above). The environment there is very different. Annual rainfall is higher. Soils are fertile and deep. The altitude is higher and the ambient temperature cooler. European farmers (like Xavier Rolland) feel at home in this more temperate environment, where conventional farming methods yield excellent results.

But across Tanzania, (and elsewhere in East Africa), these areas are already farmed very intensively. To unlock Tanzania's agricultural potential, farmers will need to venture further into lower altitudes and semi-arid conditions, and will need to adopt new farming methods suitable for different soil types, in the forefront of which is conservation agriculture.

Cordylobia anthropophaga

2011-12-08T02:43:00.000-08:00

The description "Man-eater" is most often used of lions and tigers, but that's what the scientific name for this small and apparently inoffensive fly means. Anthropophagus, derived from the Greek words for eating human flesh. The culprit is not the adult fly, but its larva, which burrows into its host and feasts on its flesh before emerging from the skin to enter its pupa phase.

Variously called the Putsi fly, Tumbu fly, or Mango fly, cordylobia anthropophaga is a thoroughly nasty little creature, as attested by the rebarbative set of images that an internet search on "putsi fly" produces. And now, after almost 20 years of residency in sub-Saharan Africa, I can also personally attest to the discomfort caused by this mini-man-eater. Called Mango fly because of its affinity with mango trees, it lays its eggs on damp surfaces, including laundry hanging out to dry. A thorough ironing kills the eggs, but if, as I did, you impatiently grab an article of clothing from the washing line, you do so at your own peril. Never again!

Movember

2011-11-30T14:39:00.000-08:00

What do you first notice in this famous photo-portrait of Salvador Dali? My sample of 10 was unanimous: "the moustache", they crowed. The chicken barely registered a mention.

Every now and again I am reminded of how disconnected I have become from the zeitgeist of my culture. Earlier this month, during a short visit to the Netherlands, I met a representative of one of our investors sporting an impressive moustache. I was surprised: since the days of the silver screen, of Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and the great Charlie Chaplin, the popularity of the moustache seems to have been on a fairly continuous decline, punctuated only by Tom Selleck's luxuriant growth in the TV series Magnum PI. But the decline has been arrested especially in the month of November, courtesy of the Movember movement.

Movember originated in the United States a few years ago as a means of raising money for and awareness of men's health issues, in particular for prostate cancer-related charitable causes. Movember is now spreading the globe: a reminder of how potent the internet is in disseminating information. Having only heard about myself earlier this month, I assumed that at least to date it had passed Africa by. But I was wrong. Almost immediately on my return to Kampala, I saw a Movember stand in the South African retailer Game store at the Lugogo shopping mall.

For me, the month of November will always be sombre. Dark, cold, the beginning of winter, without the bright lights of Christmas or the hope that the New Year brings. Also, I associate November with Remembrance Day. My mother was a poppy lady every November, collecting door-to-door on late autumn evenings for the military charity the British Legion, and, while my schoolboy head was instead full of plans and excitement for the fireworks and bonfires of Guy Fawkes night on 5th November, I would sometimes be persuaded to accompany her on her door-to-door beat through the quiet residential areas of northern Fleet. Both my parents were veterans of the second World War and my father's family connections with the military, through his decorated uncle (Tom Adlam, awarded the Victoria Cross in the first World War), were strong.

My father suffered from prostate cancer - fortunately the slow-burning variety. His PSA levels were checked regularly to ensure that the rate of increase in cancerous cells remained slow. He passed away almost six years ago from heart failure at the ripe old age of 86. I don't know what he would have made of Movember - he wasn't given to the support of causes - but he preserved his own moustache until his demise, and I think if nothing else he would have like to have seen even a temporary increase in facial hair. Hearing about Movember has also reminded me, as I approach my own 50th birthday next May, to regularly check my PSA levels for any evidence of this most stealthy of cancers.

Tinga Tinga

2011-11-21T00:38:00.000-08:00

During a recent visit to Dar es Salaam, I stayed in a hotel in Msasani within easy range of the Tinga Tinga Co-operative's base close to the Morogoro shops. I took advantage of my proximity to pay a visit to the artists' studios, and happily browsed for about half an hour.

I love Tinga Tinga painting. I love its use of enamel paint, its bright colours and cartoon style. A vibrant riot of colour, celebrating the heat, humidity and exuberance of the tropical coast. Sadly, most of the art on offer was mediocre tourist fare: lurid depictions of the "big five" animals alongside the more traditional birds and marine life, but every now and again, one stumbles on something interesting, or beautiful, or, very occasionally, both.

Over the past twenty years, Tinga Tinga painting has evolved to include humorous, sometimes satirical, representations of daily life in Tanzania. Until recently, the painting pictured above adorned the wall of my office. I don't know how much artistic merit it has, but I think the joie de vivre of its cross section of the Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam firmly places it in the "interesting" category.

The absence of perspective in most Tinga Tinga paintings gives the style a naive and childlike quality. As I looked through the artwork on display. I was reminded of the 1960s film "The Rebel", probably the English comedian Tony Hancock's most memorable film, which satirises art snobbery everywhere. Hancock plays a middle-aged middle-class Englishman who abandons his surburban life to become an artist in Paris. Initially, his flatmate's (beautiful) paintings are mistaken for his own, and he becomes the toast of Paris. As the story develops, Hancock's own paintings (immortally described as "infantile" by George Sanders' superbly urbane art critic) are revealed first to acclaim but then, quickly, to ridicule.

I wonder how the cognoscenti react to Tinga Tinga.

Life is sweet

2011-11-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

"..solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" was the great 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes' bleak assessment of the human condition without political community.

Hobbes might have been a little more cheerful had the sweetness of sugar been widely available, but in his day, the European sweet tooth was only satisfied by honey and ripe fruits. Sugar was yet to make its appearance. The discovery of the New World changed all that. Suddenly, vast tracts of cultivable land became available to Europe. Once indigenous populations had been subjugated (or, more often than not, decimated by disease and genocide), the hideous triangular trade began. Cheap trinkets from Europe to Africa in exchange for boatloads of African slaves to the New World in exchange for cargos of sugar and tobacco back to Europe. Hobbes' words would also have made an accurate description of the life of slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. One only has to read extracts from the loathsome Thomas Thistlewood's diary, quoted extensively in Adam Hochschild's book Bury The Chains, to appreciate the horrors of sugar plantation life in Jamaica and elsewhere.

The sugar industry in Kenya was my first significant exposure to agro-industry in Africa. I worked on a consulting assignment for Coopers & Lybrand in 1996, in partnership with Barclays Merchant Finance, to provide advisory services to the Kenyan Government on the privatisation of Chemelil Sugar. Like many of the sugar companies in Kenya, Chemelil was under-performing: cane costs to the factory were high, sugar yields were low, and the market suffered from periodic distortion due to low cost imports. I became very interested in the dynamics of the sugar industry - and, after reading the excellent book Seeds of Change" by Henry Hobhouse, in its history. Recently, Elizabeth Abbott published a well-written and more complete history of the sugar industry entitled Sugar: a Bitterweet History, which should be compulsory reading for sweet-eaters everywhere.

As the resident sugar industry expert in Coopers Kenya, I subsequently led a team on a management consulting assignment at the giant Sudanese sugar company, Kenana Sugar. Kenana dwarfs the Kenyan sugar companies. Carved out of the desert a little south of Kosti on the White Nile, its huge area, massive factory and large-scale irrigation facilities drawing water directly from the Nile (pictured above) is remarkable. With production figures exceeding 350,000 MT per year, it is one of the largest sugar businesses in the world, supplying most of Sudan's needs and exporting to the Middle East and Europe.

So, let's start with some facts. Sugar is produced from sugar cane (in tropical and sub-tropical climates) and from sugar beet in colder climates. Sugar cane, like the banana, was first domesticated as a crop in New Guinea about 2,500 years ago. Sugar cane is one of the most efficient converters of solar energy into biomass (and potential chemical energy). It is perennial - though after several ratoons it begins to lose its vigour and needs replanting. Almost all countries around the world produce sugar. As far as I can see, only Norway and some of the other smaller European states have zero production. Indeed, many countries have autarkic policies for national sugar industries (for example China and India) and of total global production estimated at 150 million MT, only about 20-25% is traded internationally. This means that the price of sugar on the global market can fluctuate dramatically if the supply side is affected by factors leading to significant under- or over-production by large exporters like Brazil or Australia.

Or, indeed, Mauritius, which is where I have the pleasure of being at the moment. Coming to this lovely island in the midst of the Indian Ocean is one of the privileges of my job. Alas, there is little if any time to sample the delights of the beach, but just to be beside the waterfront in Port Louis is compensation enough. While Mauritius has developed world-class tourism and offshore financial services industries, the cultivation of sugar cane and the processing and production of sugar was until recently the bedrock of the island's economy - and remains a very important contributor. As such, Mauritius has invested heavily in supporting the industry through world-class research and development of improved cane varieties, to ensure that it can produce high-quality sugar at a competitive cost of production.

The manufacturing process of sugar from cane is simple. Freshly cut sugar cane is crushed, the juice extracted and the fibre broken up. The fibre (called bagasse in the industry) is used as biofuel to power the mills. In Mauritius - and increasingly elsewhere - surplus power from bagasse is sold to local electricity distributors. After impurities are removed from the juice, the pure juice is reduced by evaporation until the liquid is sufficiently concentrated to allow sucrose crystallisation. The viscous black liquid that remains - molasses - is used for bioethanol production and for animal feeds. In effect, nothing goes to waste.

Until 2006, Mauritius benefited from very favourable tariffs that allowed it, under the Lome Convention, to export the majority of its sugar production to the European Union at preferential prices. Despite the removal of these tariffs, the Mauritian industry has remained profitable, due to industry rationalisation and value addition.

Yet, just as in the Caribbean, the Mauritian sugar industry was also founded on slavery and indentured labour. It seems extraordinary that such an inessential, indeed damaging, commodity should have caused so much human suffering and death. Sugar has no nutritional value. It contributes to tooth decay, diabetes and obesity. But by some biological quirk, some evil trick of mother nature, it delights human tastebuds to the extent that we cannot live without it.
Perhaps it's just that sugar helps us believe that life is sweet, and not, as Thomas Hobbes asserts "nasty, brutish, and short".

Footing beside the Nieuwe Meer

2011-11-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

I've recently returned from a short business visit to Holland. I arrived before dawn after a cramped, uncomfortable and sleepless overnight flight from Entebbe (via Nairobi), but was fortunate enough to be able to get an early check in to my hotel. After the obligatory shower following a long journey, I decided against sleep in favour of taking a walk and getting some fresh autumnal air into my lungs.

Is there anything more therapeutic than "footing", to give walking its Kampala slang name? I don't know if it's a function of simply breathing outdoor air, or the joy of being closer to nature, or, as Ian McEwan describes it in his aptly-named novel, Amsterdam, the "gentle release of endorphins" brought on by vigorous footing, or indeed a function of all three. Whatever it is, for me it is one of the most primal and precious of pleasures. Even in the flat lands - the nether lands - of the landscape around Schipol airport.

I footed along the quiet banks of the Nieuwe Meer for a good hour or so in watery sunlight, revelling in late autumn colour and the birdlife of my childhood. I counted a remarkable 21 different bird species, including chaffinches, jackdaws, magpies, coots, mallard ducks, pied wagtails, and a few winter visitors like greylag geese. Best of all was the sight of a pair of whooping swans in flight, presumably on their journey from the breeding grounds of the far north of Europe to their winter home further south.

One of the bizarre aspects of footing in richer countries is how few fellow-walkers one meets. In my 90 minutes along the Nieuwe Meer, I only encountered about ten other walkers, four of whom were with their dogs. The absence of pedestrians was even more pronounced during my recent visit to Canada, where - astonishingly - on the 20 minute mid-morning walk from the hotel to visit my sons, through a fairly densely-packed residential area of Burlington, Ontario, I did not see a single fellow-pedestrian. In most of Africa, of course, pedestrians abound and I have become so accustomed to crowded pavements that the emptiness of rich and densely-populated countries always comes as a surprise.

The positive power of capital

2011-10-31T01:08:00.000-07:00

"The positive power of capital" is the slogan of the giant emerging markets private equity firm Actis. For all the justifiable criticism of unfettered global capitalism, private sector investment remains the most effective means of driving economic growth.

Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to have two wonderfully professional and hard-working volunteers, Paul Fletcher and Swarupa Pathakji, join us through a programme managed by the excellent Edinburgh-based organisation Challenges Worldwide. Paul's principal assignment was to study five original AAC investees from the date of investment, with a view to assessing their prospective financial returns and the impact that each investee has had on its stakeholders to date, and publish the findings.

The publication is available through the Pearl Capital website www.pearlcapital.net/new_impact_investment.html and is well worth a read, especially by anyone who doubts the positive power of capital to create wealth and opportunity.

Tabasco sauce

2011-10-16T03:39:00.000-07:00

During last week's ANDE conference, I asked our waiter for some chilli sauce to spice up my dinner, but met with a blank look. I had forgotten that in the USA you don't ask for chilli sauce, you ask for Tabasco. What greater success is there for a brand, when its name replaces the name of the commodity itself?

To my surprise and delight, my neighbour at dinner told me that the manufacturer of Tabasco sauce was still an independent family-owned business. And, so it is. This is the 5th generation of the McIlhenny family business from Avery Island, Louisiana. Sometimes, it seems as if the whole world is controlled by faceless transnational corporations, but in fact family-owned businesses still employ many more people around the world than public companies and governments combined. And long may it continue!

Africa, in particular, has a disproportionate number of micro- small and medium-sized enterprises, generally individual or family-owned. The plethora of small local brands makes it quite difficult for internationally -recognised brands, like Tabasco, to gain a foothold on the continent. By way of illustration, I have long had my own favourite brands of hot sauce across East & Southern Africa. For a long time, my absolute favourite was the fiercely hot Nali, from Malawi, and whenever I am fortunate enough to be able to visit the "warm heart of Africa" I make sure to return with two or three bottles of Nali. Since taking up residence in Uganda, however, Nali has been supplanted in my affections by the consistent excellence of Pearl's Garlic and Chilli sauce, manufactured in Kasese by Reco Industries (though the Little Ritz - the diner across the road from our Kampala offices - offers a ferociously-hot unbranded chilli oil, said to originate from Rwanda, and well worth sampling in extreme moderation).

For chilli devotees, there is even an index - the Scoville Index - which officially measures the relative hotness of chilli varieties (as defined by their detectability to the human palate in parts per million). According to Wikipedia, the current accolade for the world's hottest chilli cultivar goes to the well-named Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper, though as far as I am aware, chilli sauce manufacturers are not yet obliged to provide an indication of their Scoville scores on their labels.

For my palate, however, no commercial preparation matches the flavour and aroma of my own very simple harissa, a simple blend of African birds eye chillis, garlic, mint and olive oil. Magnificent! Maybe it's time to start branding and bottling it.

Still No Exit

2011-10-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

KADS next production will be No Exit, to be staged at the shortly-to-be-opened reincarnation of the Latino Club in Kampala in early November.

I really hope that we get good audiences for this quite astonishingly brilliant and disturbing play. While its depiction of hell may be far less physically terrifying that the punishments meted out in Dante's nine circles of hell, the three traitors ruthlessly expose each other during the course of the play and at its end we are in no doubt that they are eternally frozen - not in Dante's ice - but in the timlessness of their claustrophobic room.

It's not for the faint-hearted, and all the better for that!

Empire of Illusion

2011-10-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a fascinating book by Chris Hedges entitled The Empire of Illusion. Well-written, acute and scrupulous in quoting sources, it is an excellent addition to critical analysis of the modern United States of America. Its chapters include a rather-too-detailed description of modern pornography, which might suggest a degree of prurient interest if Hedges' revulsion was not so apparent, under the title the Illusion of Love, and a profoundly depressing analysis of the assault on education, in particular the liberal arts, entitled the Illusion of Knowledge, before culminating in the concluding chapter, the Illusion of America.

Heaven forbid, he even dares quote from the famously-impenetrable Adorno in his analysis of the role of popular culture , though I think Marx goes unmentioned - presumably Hedges' publishers drew the line at mentioning that particular spectre of the past. When Marx, and his magnificent historic insights, was still taken seriously, Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School in the 1960s tried to reinterpret Marx's theories in the context of the modern world. Adorno's interests were in the impact of mass media on consciousness and individualism. Just as in Huxley's futuristic fantasy Brave New World, Adorno argued that popular culture was designed to turn people into passive consumers, content even in the most miserable of economic circumstances, and that advanced capitalism had in effect subverted the possibility of rebeliion and revolution as foreseen by Marx.

The book finishes with a splendid analysis of the moral and political bankruptcy that ultimately destroys empires from within. In a paragraph eerily reminiscent of the collapse of the Libyan regime earlier this year, Hedges writes that empires fall because "they all were taken over by a corrupt elite. These elites, squandering resources and pillaging the state, are no longer able to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness, and their empires died morally. Their leaders, in the final period of decay, had to rely on armed mercenaries because citizens would no longer serve the military. They descended into orgies of self-indulgence, surrendered their civic and emotional lives to glitter, excitement and spectacle of the arena, became politically apathetic, and collapsed."

In fact, the book doesn't quite end there. Even Hedges (or perhaps his publishers) cannot quite manage to resist the compulsory happy ending. Instead, he talks of the enduring power of love to transcend the forces of the establishment. A couple of years ago, I went to see the remarkable special-effects film Avatar, which was utterly spoilt by its ending, in which the noble savage, living in harmony with nature, triumphs over those who use technology to plunder her resources. A likely story: certainly not one that aboriginal communities in the Americas or Australasia would recognise. The truth is that when empires collapse from within, it takes generations for them to emerge from the chaos and dark ages that follow. So why can't film-makers and writers tell the truth? At least Hedges' book tells us why, even if it fails to remain true to itself.

Seed Tribe

2011-09-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I attended a workshop to discuss the future financing of Africa's seed industry, convened by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and held at one of Nairobi's swankiest hotels, Tribe, located next to the Village Market in Gigiri. While Tribe is an extremely stylish venue, no question, it fails the gestalt test in that its constituent parts make up much more than its whole. Everything is beautiful - yet together it somehow lacks a coherent theme. The venue aside, the workshop itself was outstanding.

Some six years ago, nobody was interested in investing in Africa's seed sector, so the presence of at least six representatives from actual or potential investors was very encouraging. Increasing populations, increasing food prices and long term investment in the breeding of crop varieties specifically suited to a range of different topographies have created an environment which may break the low input/low output cycle in African agriculture.

But attractive industry fundamentals don't automatically result in attractive investment opportunities. Managing a seed business is difficult and fraught with risk. It involves the maintenance of "breeder seed" - the parental material from which hybrid seed is itself produced. It involves uninsurable agricultural risks (drought, disease, pests, etc), regardless of whether it is produced by outgrowers or on owned farm land. Especially for hybrid seed, maintaining appropriate isolation during crop flowering to avoid genetic contamination is a challenge. Once the seed crop is harvested, it needs to be transported for sorting, drying, processing and storage, with attendant logistics and processing risks. Because agriculture is seasonal, all this has to be done some 5-8 months before the seeds are actually sold to farmers, which in turn leads to a cash flow challenge during the holding period. And then, seed companies face the universal business challenge of managing their large number of small agro-dealer debtors.......

Growth, too, brings its own business challenges. An owner-manager can generally manage a small business without too much managerial support, but as his/her business grows, s/he must invest in recruiting new managers, the development of business administration systems, internal controls and the delegation of authority.

Given all these risks, it often amazes me that there are people out there who want to take up this challenge and deliver improved seed to Africa's farmers. But there are, and they are a remarkable group of astonishingly determined and unsung heroes. During the conference, Aline O'Connor Funk, consultant to AGRA and a former seed business owner-manager in the United States, shared with us the tag-line of the American Seed Association. "First, the seed". It would take a brave person to disagree.

My memory of 9/11

2011-09-11T02:01:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that it's the tenth anniversary of the assault on New York and the World Trade Centre. People of my parents' generation used to say that they could always remember what they were doing on the day of JFK's assassination in 1963. I suspect 9/11 will have the same impact for my generation.

I was at home in Harare, at number 25 Brentford Road, close to Ballantyne Park. In August 2001, after a particularly gruelling travel schedule, shuttling between the UK, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe, I came down with a very painful and debilitating attack of shingles. Because I was struggling to recover, the CDC medical adviser, the redoubtable Dr Paul Clarke, advised me to have specialist medical review in the UK.

As chance would have it, my UK flight was scheduled for about 9 pm on the evening of 9/11, when the news broke at about 4 pm Southern African time. I was busy packing my bags for the flight. The BBC website bore the extraordinary and unthinkable breaking news that first one and then a second aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I remember switching on the TV and seeing the first footage before setting off for Harare's airport in a taxi.

The mood on arrival at the airport and in the BA departure lounge was sombre. Together with the other passengers, I watched events unfolding on CNN and Sky TV. A lot of alcohol was being consumed in silence. Later, as we boarded the BA flight to London (one of the last flights before many airlines grounded their planes), I found myself sitting next to an Algerian-born female journalist. We chatted for a while, anxiously, both slightly drunk, before lapsing into silence as the cabin lights were dimmed and the plane thundered down the runway. Oddly - perhaps because of the alcohol or because of my illness - I had the best night's sleep on a plane that I have ever had.

Real Impact

2011-09-08T02:11:00.000-07:00

Back in the innocent days, "malnutrition" was used as another word for famine. I still remember the shock of Michael Buerk's reports from Ethiopia in 1984, when pictures of malnourished children horrified the British public and inspired Bob Geldof's extraordinary Live Aid campaign. Today, famine has returned to East Africa, threatening the survival of up to one million Somalis (maybe more) and, indirectly, the stability of the region as a whole.

Since then, the aid industry has become, for want of a better word, professionalised. There are hundreds of new organsations working alongside the UN, the International Red Cross, Oxfam, Save The Children, Care et al, all of whom have communications and PR departments vying with each other for press coverage and donor recognition for their work. Yet, despite the proliferation and professionalisation, thr four horsemen of the apocalypse still have their powers undimmed, and the survival of millions is at severe risk. To be fair, Somalia presents a unique set of challenges to the distributors of emergency food supplies. The state of anarchy that has prevailed since the late 1980s and a complete lack of basic physical and social infrastructure creates an extremely dangerous vacuum for the aid agencies to operate in.

But malnutrition is not just about the quantity of food available, but also its nutritional content. The FAO estimates that up to 80% of malnoursihed children live in countries with food surpluses. Countless people across East Africa (and elsewhere, of course) suffer from an impoverished diet, excessive in carbohydrates and frequently lacking in essential vitamins and minerals. The poor quality of diet manifests itself in numerous chronic health conditions, in particular in the high and increasing rates of diabetes in the region.

There are two general solutions to poor nutrition: one, do nothing about the diet itself, but fortify its constituents with synthetically-produced vitamins and minerals. I call this the sticking-plaster approach, doing nothing about the fundamental cause of the problem, nor addressing some of the long term adverse health consequences of poor diet. However, it seems to be the preferred solution by health ministries in the region - in Kenya, for example, it is becoming common for maize flour and even sugar manufacturers to add Vitamin A and other nutritional supplements to their products. This is a good thing, in that it does at least ensure that children (in particular) have sufficient nutrition to grow properly, but it needs to be balanced with a second solution, which addresses the root cause of the problem and provide people with the education, knowledge and practical guidance to improve their diets. To be more specific, with regard to Vitamin A deficiency, the Kenyan consumer can purchase vitamin A-fortified bags of sugar, but s/he should also eat more pumpkins and carrots.

About five years ago, l made an investment, through African Agricultural Capital, in an early stage integrated pest management (IPM) business operating in Thika, central Kenya, called Real IPM. The business began by supplying phytoseiulus persimilis (a mite which preys on rose growers' most damaging pest, the red spider mite) to the Kenyan floricultural industry, thereby enabling rose growers to use fewer synthetic pesticides with both cost and environmental benefits. Since then, Real IPM has grown into a successful biopesticides and IPM business, developing its product range, its customer base and its geographical scope.

Not content with its success alone, its founders, Louise Labuschagne and Henry Wainwright, have established a not-for-profit organisation called Real Impact (http://www.realimpact.or.ke/) which is pioneering the improvement of nutrition in and around the Thika area of central Kenya, working with a range of organisations (schools, hospitals, community organisations, etc) to establish "nutrition gardens" - essentially equipping these organisations with the skills and know-how to improve the diets of their beneficiaries through the cultivation of kitchen gardens with a range of vegetables, legumes and staples designed to improve the nutritional profile of a Kenyan institutional diet.

Nutrition gardens may not be a solution for Somalia, but they do offer a much more sustainable solution to malnutrition than the sticking-plaster of food additives. Knowing the tenacity and determination that has propelled the growth of Real IPM, I am sure that Real Impact will live up to its name, and, in time, transform dietary behaviour in its chosen region and beyond.

Goat racing

2011-09-02T06:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Kampala's leading social event of the year, the Royal Ascot Goat Races at the Speke Resort in Munyonyo, as a member of a syndicate with a goat in each race. In keeping with tradition, goats are named by their owners, their names being derived from (fictitious) sires and dams. One of our goats was the superbly named Hugh Grant - by California Freeway out of Devine - but alas, he failed to rise to the occasion.

The racing itself is entirely incidental to the day out. Goats aren't like greyhounds - they don't run for fun - and they are of course too small to have jockeys to urge them along. So the racecourse consists of a grassy oval, fenced inside and out, and the goats are pushed around the course by a kind of manual snowplough. Every now and again, one breaks into a trot, and, as they approach the finishing line, that is what decides the winner. Our syndicate managed one winner and one third place, which was almost enough to cover the costs of purchasing the animals. The real benefit of ownership, though, is that it confers VIP status on syndicate members, with entry to the owners' marquee with unlimited food and beer and wine on tap.

This is a Kampala society day out, to come, to see and to be seen, to drink copiously, to admire the ladies dressed up to the nines, and to forget..... And, brash though it is, it does raise a great deal of money for local charities, and in that regard at least, it probably delivers more social value than its infinitely more famous eponymous parent in the third week of June in England.

No Exit

2011-08-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

Kampala Amateur Dramatics Society's next production will be the great French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, usually translated in English to No Exit. It will be staged on the first two weekends in November as a dinner theatre production, and offers Kampala audiences something very different to KADS's usual fare.

The plot is simple: three condemned souls are incarcerated in a room in which the essentials of any sort of civilised life are absent - no bathroom, no privacy, no books, no mirrors. Their punishment is to torture each other by picking over each other's lives in an eternal present from which there is no escape. The play's most famous quote is "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people) but my own favourite is Garcin's observation that [the three lost souls] "are chasing after each other, round and round, in a vicious circle, like horses on a merry-go-round."

A friend observed yesterday that Sartre's hell is very close to his own idea of hell: a place in which God/Jesus is absent. It's hard to disagree: there is no God and no love in the room - and the natural world is completely closed off - but it also makes me think of the hell of the Big Brother house, where repulsive contestants voluntarily subject themselves to a complete lack of privacy in exchange for the possibility of winning a large cash prize, and, ghouls that we are, we revel in their torments for the vicarious pleasure of not being there with them.

No Exit certainly promises to provide some food for thought (please excuse the pun) for its dining audience in November. It will make challenging and thought-provoking theatre, itself all too absent in KADS' normal round of frothy comedies, feelgood musicals and traditional pantomime.

Cassava Disease

2011-08-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

About this time last year, the Economist featured an article about the spread of new varieties of stem rust, a fungal disease which can cause significant crop losses in wheat. The variety of stem rust causing most anxiety among agricultural scientists is rather unimaginatively called UG99, having been first observed by Ugandan researcher William Wagoire in 1999.

Stem rust (pictured) is not a new disease: the late great Norman Borlaug's work initially focused on breeding stem rust-resistant wheat varieties, when he made the serendipitous discovery of the gene Sr31 that not only increased tolerance to stem rust, but also substantially increased yields (and was one of the most important contributors to the Green Revolution in the 1960s).

It's not clear yet how widespread Ug99 will become, or how it can be controlled, and so it presents a considerable threat to the world's most important food crop (alongside rice).

Given the importance of agriculture, it used to surprise me how seldom news stories like this appear. On reflection, though, perhaps it isn't really so surprising. I recently read, for the first time, Amartya Sen's long essay Poverty and Famine, in which the renowned economist argued that famine was caused not by the non-availability of food, but rather by inefficient food distribution mechanisms and a lack of money. Experience bears this out - when was the last time anyone heard of a serious food shortage in a wealthy country with decent roads and other infrastructure? As a result of this - and the separation of modern urban life from the soil - the overwhelming majority have no experience or understanding of agriculture. A constant food supply is taken for granted, so why on earth would agriculture be in any way newsworthy?

This week, however, I was surprised to hear a similar story on BBC World Sevice on another critical staple crop, cassava. As many as a billion people depend on cassava's starchy roots as a staple food, and yet it is hardly known outside the tropics (except in the long-deceased tapioca pudding of my youth). It is particularly important in West Africa, and also in parts of East & Central Africa.

Cassava is an excellent food security crop, as it can survive in drought conditions. In areas of Uganda, it is treated as a "food bank" - when supplies of fresh matooke bananas or other staples run low, cassava roots provide a reserve source of carbohydrates. In other parts of the world, cassava is also used for industrial starch production, for animal feeds and, more recently, as a feeder crop for ethanol production.

TheBBC report highlighted a report just published by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. The report warns of the dangers presented by cassava's four most damaging pests and diseases: cassava mosaic disease (pictured), green mite, brown streak disease and whitefly. The report urges the establishment of early warning systems for disease outbreaks, so that they can be contained quickly and effectively before spreading to other regions. Cassava, like bananas and potatoes, is propagated using plant cuttings rather than conventional seed. This means that infected plants can move rapidly from region to region, increasing the risk of disease transmission.

It's not the exciting political news that keeps us glued to CNN and Al-Jazeera newsfeeds. But, for the billions that make up the so-called bottom of the pyramid, it's a lot more important.

Malawi shandy

2011-08-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

A Malawi shandy is simple and delicious: a mixture of soda water, lemonade, ginger beer and angostura bitters, served with plenty of ice cubes in the largest available glass to hand. Nothing better on a hot Southern African day (except possibly a cold beer). Sadly, I missed out on a Malawi shandy during my most recent visit, but apart from that, my visit to the "warm heart of Africa" did not disappoint.

It was good to see considerable progress at both of our Malawi investee seed companies, Seed Tech and Funwe Farm. Production volumes on the increase and belief in and commitment to the future. As with all East & Southern African countries, agriculture is the modus vivendi for the majority. The Malawi government introduced a highly successful Agricutural Inputs Susbidy Programme about four years ago: a well-managed subsidy scheme that has led to considerable growth in the distribution of quality certified seeds and fertiliser throughout the country, created an opportunity for seed companies to develop and, if reports are accurate, led to an increase in farm yields of between 50% and 100%.

And yet the future of this successful programme may be in jeopardy, because Malawi is running out of money. An undignified spat with the British government earlier this year led to the mutual expulsion of high commissioners, followed by a suspension by the British of budgetary support to the Malawi government, in turn followed by the reduction and suspension of other bilateral aid programmes to the country. Malawi is heavily dependent on aid inflows, among other things because of its considerable trade imbalance, and the suspension of aid has resulted in a shortage of foreign exchange - most clearly visible in queues at petrol stations and the informal rationing of fuel. Under these circumstances, will Malawi be able to cntinue to afford its agricultural subsidy programme? Let's hope so: it would be a tragedy if the gains in productivity over the past five years were lost in a political squabble.

As a fringe benefit, my visit to Malawi also enabled me to spend three nights at the Norman Carr Cottage in Monkey Bay. The London Review of Breakfasts blog post on the Norman Carr Cottage in 2006, together with its two comments, speak volumes for this most idyllic lodging, which serves to demonstrate that hotel facilities are unimportant in comparison to hospitality, location and simple good food. My advice is simple: go there if you possibly can, relax in a hammock under the giant sycamore fig tree beside the lake, order a Malawi shandy, and thank God you are alive.

Uganda's burning

2011-08-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

It's been a pretty awful month so far. It started with an appalling fire at Owino market (Kampala's largest and busiest) in the early hours of the morning, and ever since then, the newspapers have been full of gloomy news.

Among other things, East Africa has now been identified as a major drug transit point, for both international and local distribution. This comes as little surprise to any of us who see large amounts of conspicuous consumption by young people wth no apparent profession, (legitimate) business or family wealth. It certainly doesn't look like hard-earned money. What did, however, come as a surprise to me was the assertion in the newspapers that the maximum penalty for offenders who pleads guilty to the possession or trafficking of narcotics is a fine of one million Ugandan shillings (about $350 at current exchange rates).

The economy continues to struggle. Despite reasonable rates of economic growth, the effects of increasing fuel prices and a 20% fall in the exchange rate since the beginning of the year has resulted in high inflation rates without (as yet) any benefits from economic growth trickling down to the "man in the Kampala taxi". Poor harvests in the first half of 2011 combined with food shortages within the East African region as a whole have also pushed food prices much higher.

Teachers are demanding significant salary increases and threatening strike action. On the one hand, it's hard not to feel sympathy for teachers. How families can survive on income of less than 1 million Ugandan shillings (remember - the maximum fine for narcotics possession) per month I do not know, but at the same time Uganda's tax base is so low that it's impossible to see how the Government can afford an increase in teachers' salaries, not to mention the knock-on effect on other public sector workers of a salary increase to teachers. And, as a separate issue, while the quantity of education service delivery in Uganda has increased dramatically in recent years under the Universal Primary Education (UPE) initiative, the quality of education provided through UPE is generally acknowledged to be very poor. Makerere University lecturers are also threatening strike action for similar (and even less justified) reasons.

And now the "giveaway" of Mabira Forest, which seemed to have been shelved following public discontent in 2007, is back on the agenda, apparently in order to increase the amount of sugar cane under cultivation. It seems desperately sad tha,t in a country where so much land with arable potental lies idle, one of its few remaining natural forests is under threat of being cleared for sugar cane cultivation.

Even at a domestic level, this has been a particularly bad month. While Owino was burning, our refrigerator caught fire on Sunday morning. We awoke to the acrid smell of smoke, and the terrifying experience of flames and smoke in one's own home. Fortunately, I managed to remember most of the things one is supposed to do in a fire (apart, that is, from calling Kampala's underfunded fire brigade) - evacuate the house, switch off the elecricity, smother the flames, and so on, though I did forget to cover my nose and mouth and as a result inhaled an unpleasant amount of smoke. It goes without saying that we now have a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket and two smoke alarms installed.

I feel for the market traders at Owino, though. It's hard to make an honest living in Kampala at the best of times. And it's certainly not the best of times in Uganda.

The birth of a country

2011-07-08T00:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, South Sudan became an independent country. After some 50 years of struggle, the South has finally gained independence from the North, and the hastily-drawn colonial boundaries of the 1950s have at last been re-drawn. The historic woes of South Sudan go much further back: through the bad days of the Ottoman empire and the Anglo-Egytian condominium, slave-traders brought up countless slave caravans from the South to Khartoum and onwards to the Middle East.

The new country is both full of hopes and burdened by expectations that its political leaders may struggle to fulfil. The transition from the politics of liberation to the politics of leadership and development is difficult in any environment, let alone one where the vast majority have grown up in a state of civil war and uncertainty, and where education, in particular, has been absent for all but a fortunate few.

Dimly, in my Sunday morning torpor, I listened to a thoughtful analysis on BBC World Service's excellent programme The Forum, in which the chief topic of discussion was the likelihood of "success" for a newly-created country. One expert panellist (Anatoli Lieven) set out the three factors which - in his historical analysis - seemed to be the key drivers for successful secession. First, the existence of strong administrative and physical infrastructure. Second, a sense of national unity that binds people together at a cultural and even an emotional level. Third, a tradition of solving disputes and disagreements through negotiation rather than the use of force. Based on this analysis, at least, the prospects for South Sudan are not good as, with the possible exception of the second, it fails Lieven's criteria.

There is, however, still room for optimism. There is no doubt that the world understands the challenges of nation-building much better in the light of recent history. The new country also enjoys enormous international goodwill and will as a result benefit from very considerable bilateral and multilateral development aid. And South Sudan is blessed (some might say cursed) with massive unexploited natural resources, the wise use of which offers the potential for the rapid development of much-needed infrastructure.

So, just as with any new birth, let us pray that South Sudan grows and flourishes, and confounds the gloomy biblical prophecy that some of the pentecostal Christian churches that themselves infest the fertile spiritual ground of South Sudan purvey: "How horrible it will be for the land of whirring wings which lies beyond the rivers of Sudan" Isaiah 18.1. Better, by far, to acknowledge how horrible it has been, and look with hope and determination to the new future.

A price to pay

2011-06-29T03:28:00.000-07:00

This time last year I was on holiday in Southern Ontario, marvelling at the orderliness of large scale Canadian agriculture. This year, I was closer to my childhood home, deep in the Hampshire countryside. In his wonderful book, The Ages of Gaia, James Lovelock deplores the destruction of the English countryside - its meadows and hedgerows teeming with biodiversity - and its replacement with mechanised monoculture. And yet, while it may no longer be the thing of beauty celebrated in words by Housman and Hardy, in music by Vaughan Williams, and in painting by Constable, to my eyes at least, in the long, still, sunlit June evenings, it retains a tranquility and gentleness which is hard to find elsewhere.

In recent weeks, the international media has been reporting a new food emergency in the Horn of Africa, affecting Somalia, northern Kenya and south east Ethiopia. The rains have once again failed in this most marginal area for agriculture and many communities are at risk from the loss of meagre livelihoods, displacement and, possibly, famine. Coming at a time when regional food prices are already running at all-time highs, food aid is urgently required. Among other reasons, the media is once again trotting out comments from aid organisations attributing Africa's agricultural woes to, among other things, farming subsidies in the West. The hypothesis as generally expressed as follows: "agricultural subsidies are damaging to developing countries because they undermine the viability of local farmers". The argument follows that subsidies create over-production, over-production results in lower prices on the international market, and farmers in developing countries have no incentive to invest in agriculture because of the low price of competing imports.

But (with apologies to William Wordsworth), as I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills on the downs between Winchester and Petersfield, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the policy makers had probably got it about right. After all, farmers need to make a profit. Enough of a profit to encourage investment, but not so much of a profit that every tree is uprooted and every square inch of land ploughed up for agriculture. Indeed, farmers are also be rewarded for reforestation, for hedgerow conservation, and for the adoption of other environmentally friendly activities. If farming is unprofitable, what happens? Farmers no longer have any incentive to farm and the countryside - and the rural economy - suffers. There is risk to the wider economy: the risk of greater exposure to short term commodity price fluctuations; and the political risk (with unthinkable consequences) to any government of a failure in the food supply chain. Preservation of the countryside, too, is a public good

So my simplistic analysis suggests to me that African governments would do much better to erect and enforce import tariff barriers on food supplies, thereby creating an environment which encourages investment in agricultural productivity so that farmers can make profits and reduce their exposure to short term price fluctuations, rather than muttering about the injustice of agricultural subsidies elsewhere in the world. Tanzania does this with its rice industry, charging a 75% tariff on imported rice and it is no coincidence that investors are eying large scale rice production with considerable interest. The sugar industry in the region also has some protection from low cost imports. True, import barriers create opportunities for smuggling, tax evasion and corruption, but the risk of malfeasance should not drive sensible economic policy.

Budget Breakfast

2011-06-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

East Africa is just coming to the end of its annual budget frenzy. A number of years ago, someone cooked up the idea that all member states of the East African Community should present their annual budgets on the same day. This year, of course, the stakes are high: East Africa as a whole has been experiencing rapid inflation (driven by price rises in basic needs - in particular food and energy prices), currency depreciation, and the resulting political instability elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.

According to the East African, the Finance Ministers didn't do a great job this year: I quote: "they sacrificed free market policies in the political horse-trading that has largely restored the numerous import exemption schemes blamed for slowing intra-regional trade.... [leading] to a slow return of entrenched nationalism that will slowly undermine the remaining stages of the region's integration process - the Monetary Union and Political Federation." A fairly disappointing analysis in the context of the real economic risks that present themselves.

Many moons ago, when I worked in Coopers & Lybrand Kenya's management consultancy practice, I co-ordinated the production of pre- and post-budget newspaper articles by partners and senior managers as part of Coopers' marketing programme in the region. Since then, the stakes have risen. The big 4 accounting firms and local accounting institutes splash out on budget breakfasts, lunches and cocktails - if you are able to get on two or three invitation lists, you can spend a full day criss-crossing the city in search of the next freebie in the opulence of Kampala's leading hotels.

The truth is that the budgets are usually a damp squib, full of self-congratulations and airy promises based on dubious assumptions and murky public sector accounts. Quite why public sector governance is so weak, when calls for ever-stronger private sector governance from public sector regilators continue to be so loud, seems strange. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal's 2,000 year-old question remains as relevant as ever.

Winterthorn

2011-06-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

Every now and again, I find something really interesting in Business Daily. Yesterday's copy contained an article on the so-called Fertiliser tree, Faidherbia Albida, commonly known as Winterthorn in Southern Africa. Here's the link: http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/-/539444/1171952/-/122lfrcz/-/index.html

Among its many positive attributes, Winterthorn is leguminous. That is to say, it fixes nitrogen in the soil, and researchers have apparently found that the yields of maize and other staple crops improve when planted alongside mature trees. I have always found it difficult to get a straight answer on the real impact of nitrogen-fixing plants on the nitrogen content of soil, but given that Winterthorn needs fairly generous spacing, it seems safe to assume that only a small proportion of nitrogen consumed by the inter-crop will be put back by the tree.

However, there are numerous other benefits to Winterthorn. It forms a useful windbreak for maize and sorghum. It sheds its leaves in the rainy season, which means that high levels of sunlight reach inter-crops during their peak growing season after the rains have finished. By forming a mulch, its leaves reduce soil water transpiration. Unusually, it flowers at the end of the rainy season and therefore provides a valuable forage source for bees at a time of scarcity. Its seed pods are good fodder for cattle and goats, and its timber has a very high calorific content when used for charcoal or firewood.

Indeed, the only drawback to planting Winterthorn in suitable semi-arid eco-zones would appear to be that its leaves are particularly attractive to African elephants. And it goes without saying that elephants and farmers are not the best of friends!

Motokas, cows and wives

2011-05-27T03:40:00.000-07:00

Having only recently finished Twelfth Night, I had promised myself that I would take a 12-month break from matters theatrical..... But, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I find myself in another play starting next week at Uganda's National Theatre in Kampala. We will be doing four performances of the comedy The Cow Needs A Wife, written by Angie Emurwon and a prize winner in last year's BBC World Service African playwriting competition.

Without giving away too much of the story, the plot of this hilarious play revolves around the efforts of a poor young man (Mamboleo) to pay the bride price for his chosen woman, assisted by his over-bearing uncle (Motoka) and the cunning jack-of-all-trades (Kuyiya). I will be playing the role of Motoka, so named as the first owner of a motor car (motoka in Luganda) in his village.

The central themes of the play are bride price and fund-raising, both of which have considerable significance in Ugandan life. The logic of bride price is simple: it represents compensation paid to a family for the loss of a daughter. In an environment lacking an external welfare state, the extended family is the only approximation to a social safety net for the disadvantaged. But in recent years, some non-governmental organisations in Uganda have campaigned against bride price, on the grounds that it encourages society to regard women as chattels that can be bought and sold. It is hard to know to what extent this campaign has attracted popular support, either among women or men, in a society where the Kwanjula (betrothal ceremony) is deeply rooted in traditional culture. My own theory is that, as Uganda becomes wealthier and more urbanised, the Kwanjula - where the bride price is paid in the form of gifts of livestock and other commodities - will become increasingly celebratory and ceremonial, and that the transactional element will wither away.

One consequence of bride price is the need for would-be grooms to fund-raise among their families and friends in order to raise the necessary cash to meet the huge costs of betrothal and marriage. Next week, when we stage The Cow Needs A Wife, I know that in the tranquil lawns surrounding the theatre, there will be at least three or four tables each evening where meetings of wedding committees will be held, to organise functions and raise money to finance the event. Complicated budgets are drawn up and pledges from friends and family carefully recorded. Very few men in Uganda can afford to meet the costs from their own resources, especially in a country where extended families are large and where it is not unusual for weddings to have more than 500 guests.

And this is the cultural backdrop to this excellent comedy. If you are able to come and see it next week, don't miss it!

Nazareth

2011-05-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

I went to Nazareth last week. Not the Nazareth in the Holy Land where Jesus served his apprenticeship as a carpenter, but the Nazareth that lies about 100 km south of Addis Ababa in the Oromia region of Ethiopia, its name a reminder of Christianity's long history in highland Ethiopia. (Or so I thought, until my host pointed out that the city's Oromo name is Adama, and that it had only been renamed by the last Emperor Haile Selassie some years ago.)

It was four years since I had last visited Addis. As with so many African cities, the pace of economic growth (at least if construction work is any sort of proxy) is rapid: yet the country remains in visible poverty. My journey took me south, to the Southern Nations and People's region. Shortly after the town of Butajira, we branched off the main road and continued along an excellent all-weather road en route to a farm in the Hlaba district. There were hardly any motorised vehicles on the way: most people travel on foot or, for a lucky few, on donkey carts. I saw very few shops on the way: the exchange of goods appeared to be reliant on weekly open-air markets in village centres. The rains had recently started and farmers were busy using ox-ploughs to prepare their fields for planting. In such a region, households are dependent on wood and farming waste for their energy source, yet there were almost no trees visible standing more than about head-high.

After reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse last year, this visit was a timely reminder to me of the vulnerability of rural communities like this to any adverse shock - for example, failure in rainfall. No rainfall, no crops. No crops, no food. No safety net, and no incentive to traders to transport food into the district, because there would be no money to pay for it. The same could be said of the long term impact of annual farming on soil fertility: diminishing farm yields feeding an ever-increasing population. It is a sobering thought.

On the way back into Addis, I saw a sign for Bobmarley Square (sic), a reminder of the strong connection between the Rastafarian movement and its spiritual home in Ethiopia. Tafari was, in fact, Emperor Haile Selassie's real name: according to Rastafarian beliefs, the embodiment of God on earth and the opponent of western Babylon. It is almost exactly 30 years to the day since Bob Marley's untimely death from cancer, and 36 years since Haile Selassie was executed by Mengistu's Derg, but the Rastafarian movement lives on.

Panacea

2011-04-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

For all the hype that surrounds microfinance, one can be excused for believing that it will save the world. There is an initiative by the Ugandan government called "Bonna bagaggawale" which, loosely translated from Luganda means "Prosperity for all". Few appear to take it as a serious policy statement, but as a long term vision it is laudable. Bonna Bagaggawale could, however, be the manifesto for the microfinance movement, the latest cure-all in a long sequence for the world's woes.

I've recently finished reading the provocatively titled book "Why Microfinance doesn't work" by Milford Bateman, which should be compulsory, if uncomfortable, reading for microfinance believers everywhere. Bateman poses the question of why countries that have achieved microfinance saturation over the last decade (for example Peru, Bosnia and Cambodia) do not demonstrate obvious and substantive poverty reduction and "bottom-up" development gains. While the book deals less with African countries (where the microfinance movement is younger and, presumably, reliable statistics are harder to come by), Bateman supports his arguments with impressive statistics and qualititative observations. His conclusion is simple: that most independent evaluations are unable to show concrete evidence that microfinance has had a significant impact on poverty alleviation.

Indeed, Bateman goes further. He asserts that, contrary to the major premise of the microfinance movement: that it promotes poverty reduction by enabling the poor to borrow and invest in income-generating activities (and create a kind of virtuous spiral of wealth creation by micro-entrepreneurs), that in fact the vast majority of microfinance loans are taken out for short term expenses like school fees, health care, funeral expenses or other consumption requirements. So, far from creating wealth, microfinance adds a new item to many household monthly budgets: repayments to the microfinance institution (MFI).

No doubt microfinance supporters can (and will) produce powerful statistics of their own in support of the developmental thesis rubbished by Bateman. So far, at least in my experience, their rebuttals have been feeble. Recently, on quoting from Bateman's book, a MFI Chief Executive responded to me that "poor people also have a right to credit". Well, I can't remember seeing that particular right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A few years ago, at the onset of the credit crunch, my brother remarked to me, after having lived for a year or so in Nairobi, that while there wasn't a great deal of money around, at least personal indebtedness was very low. After the consequences of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, this seemed to him to be an entirely positive aspect of African economic life. What he didn't appreciate was the colossal demand for short term debt to meet essential consumption requirements. Now, better by far to have this demand met by properly regulated MFIs than by the Tallyman with extortionate interest rates and brutal enforcement methods (hence the classic movie poster above), but to represent this as poverty alleviation? To me, that's a bit like saying that credit cards and other unsecured lending are the solution to the world's economic problems. I don't think so.

The trouble with walking to work......

2011-04-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

.....is, of course, that you have to walk home again.

Or at least, under normal circumstances, it is difficult to think of any other possible objection against this carbon-friendly and healthy alternative to Kampala morning traffic jams. But in Uganda, the "walk to work" campaign has taken on a whole new significance. Led by a loose alliance among the leaders of opposition parties, this apparently innocuous campaign, ostensibly against high food and fuel prices, has provoked a powerful, many say disproportionate, reaction by the Ugandan government. Here's a little piece of visual evidence from the Monitor newspaper. It's certainly a deterrent to leaving the car keys at home.

But leaving aside the muscular response, what's driving the underlying problem of increasing food prices? Global commodity prices, especially oil, are one factor. Increasing regional demand, in particular from South Sudan, is also cited. But the fundamental law of supply and demand is the real driver. Quite simply, there is a supply-side problem, fanned by the increasing demand of a growing population. There's not enough production and, in Uganda at least, there certainly isn't enough storage capacity. I've written before about the remarkable informality of Uganda's food distribution systems and the reliance on fresh products for food - and the lack of buffer stocks of maize and rice in particular - mean that there are no smoothing mechanisms in times of plenty or scarcity

And prices are rocketing upwards, across the board. Matooke, potatoes, maize and beans have all seen increases of between 20-40% in recent months. Not surprisingly, increases in staple foods are also driving up the cost of dairy products, poultry and pork. Fish prices have doubled in the last two years or so, as a result of the depletion resulting from over-fishing in Lake Victoria and Uganda's other major lakes. It's at the bottom of the pyramid, where food costs make up the major part of the household budget, where the impact of inflation is felt the most. When the Ugandan President said, a few weeks ago, that increasing food prices were good for the farmer, he was right, up to a point. Commercial farmers may well make some hay while the sun shines, but the truth is that most small-scale farmers are net consumers, not suppliers, of agricultural products.

"It's the economy, stupid" was Bill Clinton's slogan in his successful campaign against George Bush in the 1992 presidential elections. It's a phrase that could apply to a number of the popular uprisings that have sent shivers down the spines of many longtime autocratic leaders across Africa and the Middle East.

The best response for the nation to the "walk to work" campaign is investment in the agriculture sector. Big fists will only make things worse.

A green and yellow melancholy

2011-04-13T05:28:00.000-07:00

It's always a wrench, coming to the end of a play. This will be my last post about Twelfth Night, by some distance my most successful production so far. And while I couldn't have asked for a better cast, the real star was the English language, in Shakespeare's incomparable hands. Here are just a few of my favourites quotes from the play:-

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.

You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard.

You are all idle, shallow things. I am not of your element.

Let us draw the curtain and show you the picture.

Madam, I will.

A very dishonest paltry boy.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenge.

Get him to say his prayers Sir Toby, get him to pray.

She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.

Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil ... are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the Devil

And it is with a green and yellow melancholy that I say goodbye to the characters and the words. Plays are labours of love: maybe one day I'll be brave enough to choose the wonderfully-named Love's Labour's Lost.

Or what you will

2011-03-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

To be performed at The National Theatre in Kampala in early April. "'Twill be admirable".

Banana Republic

2011-03-11T01:03:00.000-08:00

Uganda is a true "banana republic", not in the disparaging meaning of the expression, first coined to describe the United Fruit empire in central America in the 1950s and 1960s, but in the significance of bananas as the preferred staple crop. Most Ugandans consume huge quantities every year - some estimates put daily consumption about 1 kg per day - mostly of matooke (cooking bananas) but also of the delicious sweet "apple" bananas pictured, and many other varieties.

Quite apart from their taste, bananas have been a great crop for Ugandan farmers, because they are incredibly easy to grow. Plant a sucker and, provided it rains, the sucker will grow rapidly and produce a truss - perhaps weighing 15 kg or more - within a year of planting. It needs little or no inputs and maintenance: nature does all the work. And indeed, once the banana plant is established, it will throw out further suckers which, left alone, will in turn grow and produce within a year. As with the potato in pre-blight Ireland, it is the easiest option for the farmer.

But, just as potato blight ravaged the Irish potato crop in the mid-19th century, causing a disastrous famine, so Uganda is falling victim to banana bacterial wilt disease. Bacterial wilt kills the banana plant and infects the soil. It spreads rapidly, mainly because transplanted suckers are the normal method of propagation. Experts estimate that crop losses may be in the region of $500 million per annum. This in itself is very significant, of course, but the slight reduction in supply of matooke to urban markets also results in substantial food price inflation.

Ugandan researchers have, with local and international support, been working on solutions to banana bacterial wilt. Indeed, my colleagues at the Kilimo Trust provided a grant to Uganda's National Banana Research Programme for this very purpose. And progress is being made: disease-free tissue-culture banana plantlets are available in Uganda; improved farming practices can restrict the spread of bacterial wilt. But perhaps the most promising solution is the most controversial: the incorporation of a sweet pepper gene into the banana to inhibit the transmission and spread of bacterial wilt.

There is a great deal of international hostility to GMOs - most of which, in my opinion, is based on emotion rather than fact - and this hostility presents itself among many in the donor community who finance national agricultural research and development bodies in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. But they tend to overlook one very important fact of life in low-income countries; namely, that opposition to GMOs is driven by the wealthy, by people who have choices in the food that they eat. For the poor, the simple availability and affordability of food is infinitely more important than the manner in which it is produced.

Valentine's Day

2011-02-15T01:55:00.000-08:00

Any excuse for a party! Kampala has taken Valentine's Day to its heart. Last night, the streets around the redlight district of Kabalagala were heaving with red-and-black-clad young people in search of one other. Indeed, a few, presumably unfortunate, stragglers could still be seen adorning the infamous Al's Bar as I drove to work this morning. Not bad for a Monday night.

What should be a charming celebration of love and affection has been transformed into a marketing feeding frenzy. First commercialised by the American greetings card industry as a much-needed shot in the arm after Christmas, Valentine's Day has spread throughout the world.

Kampala florists peddle overpriced bouquets of red "sweetheart" roses, bred for productivity alone at the cost of size and fragrance. Gift shops sell heart-shaped boxes of chocolates alongside red satin lingerie. Restaurants and Hotels compete to lure couples for Valentine's day dinners and overnight stays. And yesterday, in a piece of stunning marketing, I saw Lifeguard condoms getting in on the act. In the midst of all this tawdry marketing, it's a wonder that the banks have so far failed to push short term unsecured loans out to the amorous to finance the celebrations. I can see it now: "the Lovers' Loan" repayable over six months.

Still, I shouldn't be such a killjoy. After all, the global demand for roses always leads to a spike in prices in the first two weeks in February, providing East African growers with a much-needed contribution towards their profitability. The floriculture industry is a huge employer of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in rural areas and generates considerable foreign exchange inflows to the regional economy.

Pearl of Africa

2011-01-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

The expression "Pearl of Africa" to describe Uganda is popularly attributed to Winston Churchill. In his book My African Journey, published in 1908, Churchill described Uganda as, "...from end to end a beautiful garden..... the exuberance of vegetation...scarcely describable" Churchill was especially complimentary about the kingdom of Buganda: "endowed with unique environmental attributes, with a remarkably and unexpectedly vibrant, structured and cordial social and political system nestled out of reach of the outside world." Such a positive view of African society was, both then and even now, unusual: the Zeitgeist of the time was more of the Heart of Darkness school of thought, describing Africans as primitive and savage, and in need of proselytising and civilizing. Elsewhere, Churchill does indeed describe Uganda as "the Pearl" but the description had, in fact, been earlier used by both Speke and Stanley. Given his voracious appetite for reading, it is unlikely that the young Churchill had not been aware of this view.

Regardless of its origin, what is not in dispute is its accuracy. Uganda still has the most wonderful environment. Over the Christmas holidays, my two sons and I visited Queen Elizabeth National Park in SW Uganda and enjoyed chimpanzee tracking in the Kyambura Gorge, a boat trip along the Kazinga Channel and several drives through the northern sector of the park. Our journey took us past crater lakes and the foothills of the Rwenzori (pictured above) between Fort Portal and Kasese, the Ankole tea extates at Bushenyi and through the savannah lands between Mbarara and Masaka. A delight! The following week, we also made a short visit to Jinja, for a day's whitewater rafting on the Nile, a day both thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. For once, the tourism slogan chosen by Uganda - Gifted by Nature - is no exaggeration.

Ugandans are justifiably proud of the name 'Pearl of Africa". As evidence, many Ugandan organizations have chosen “Pearl” in their names. My own favourite, until recently, was the superb Pearl range of sauces, jams and pickles manufactured in Kasese - the chilli and garlic sauce is second to none. But now there is a new Pearl, Pearl Capital Partners, formed last year to be the fund management business for AAC’s successor funds, the African Seed Investment Fund and the AAC Fund (in formation). My colleagues and I are proud of being one of the very few venture capital / private equity fund managers resident in Uganda, and what better name to choose to assert our Ugandan connection?

True, Pearl lacks originality, but then again, imagination and originality are not usually associated with the focus on facts, figures and empirical analysis required by successful venture capital and private equity investment managers.

Twelfth Night

2011-01-07T02:26:00.000-08:00

After a full year off from Kampala Amateur Dramatics (during which time I am compelled to admit that KADS standards have risen considerably), I will be doing the March production, William Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night at the National Theatre in Kampala. Early last year I completed an adaptation of Euripides The Bacchae, but, probably wisely, have decided that Twelfth Night will be much more of an audience-pleaser, with its blend of farce, mistaken identity, cross-dressing and wit. Auditions will be at the National Theatre on 17 & 18th January, with the main challenge being the identification of a credible pair of twins.....

Blog block

2010-12-10T02:43:00.000-08:00

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!"

2010-09-30T01:06:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-09-27T01:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-19T03:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-10T01:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-08T06:04:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-08-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-16T02:23:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-08-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-03T03:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-19T02:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-28T19:03:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-03T03:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-30T00:40:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-05-25T02:52:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-13T02:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-08T00:57:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-21T01:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Pantomime

2010-03-30T01:27:00.001-07:00

For the past five years I have been involved in Kampala Amateur Dramatic Society's annual pantomimes, staged at the National Theatre in or around the first week of December. Where else in the world could a bunch of amateurs stage their productions at the National Theatre?

Uganda's National Theatre is a marvellous place. Constructed in the late 1950s to a standard British theatre design, the stalls seat around 230, with a further 120 or so in the circle. It is blessed with great acoustics, but goes sadly under-used despite the Ugandan love for the performing arts (especially music and dance). It has also suffered from under-investment over the years, which manifests itself in outdated sound and lighting systems and dilapidated stage (and backstage) facilities. Nevertheless, when the lights go down and the curtain is lifted, it is still a great venue.

Pantomime is a peculiarly British theatre form. It contains a number of specific ingredients: slapstick, cross-dressing, songs, satire, vulgarity, romance, villainy and animals, woven into the fabric of a traditional children's story, with a requirement for plenty of audience participation. First-time panto audiences usually find the whole thing bewildering, but most (regardless of their background or culture) come to appreciate the mayhem, which makes it puzzling that, to the best of my knowledge, it remains such an exclusively English language theatre art form.

Three out of the last five Kampala pantomimes have been written and directed by the remarkable GP, Dr Dick Stockley, whose creative talents (some might say, not I) burn even brighter than his medical..... First was The Pied Piper of Hamelin, featuring a fiendish plot to swindle the Piper of his payment. Second came The Emperor's New Clothes, a satire based on Kampala's attempts to ready itself to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2007. And most recently came a good-humoured reworking of Dick Whittington. Between these I directed TinTin Goes Bananas - in which the intrepid Belgian boy detective uncovers a wicked plan to export Uganda's gorillas - and Robin Hood of Mabira Forest, where the evil Sheriff of Kampalaham, in cahoots with the greedy sugar barons, plans the destruction of Mabira Forest, but is foiled by the noble Robin and his band of merry women.

This year - well, KADS' current plan is for a Shrek/Cinderella combo, Donkey, Prince Charming and all, provisionally entitled Shrekerella. I'm sure it will be riotous entertainment in the best tradition of Kampala panto. Too many competing professional and personal commitments mean that, for once, I shall not be involved, except as a first-time member of the audience.

Omondi

2010-03-29T04:07:00.000-07:00

In recent years, courtesy to Barack Obama, the Luo tribe has become well known. With homelands bordering on Lake Victoria, this Nilotic tribe – which has close relations in Uganda and South Sudan – is one of the largest and most prominent in Kenya, with a reputation for intellectual achievement, fishing and craftsmanship.

While working as a management consultant with Coopers & Lybrand in Nairobi, I became friendly with a Luo colleague, Denis Osano, whose pride in being Luo was matched only by his sublime confidence. Denis was more than willing to discuss all matters Luo and, one day, explained to me that Luo names (which almost exclusively begin with either As, for women, or Os for men) usually are derived from the circumstances of birth. For example, a boy born on a sunny day might be called Ochieng, or a girl born at night might be called Atieno.

We then established that my Luo name, in the absence of any special distinguishing features, would likely have been Omondi, signifying that I was born early in the morning. Happily, Tom is also a popular Christian name for Luo boys, I think because of the high regard still held for Tom Mboya, a charismatic union leader in post-independence Kenya, tragically assassinated in 1960s power struggles. I went on to ask Denis whether there was a Luo name that described being born on the roadside (as happened to my eldest child Alfred), and was glad that this infrequent event did indeed exist in the form of Oyoo (born on the way). From that moment, Denis habitually called me Omondi and would, occasionally, enquire how Oyoo was developing.

Armed with this knowledge, I wondered recently what the name Obama signified. Apparently, it means "crooked" (as in limbs rather than morality), which suggests that Barack Obama senior may have been born with some curvature in his legs. Barack itself means “blessings” in Kiswahili – and this is a much happier and more appropriate name for the American President.

Much has been written about President Obama's extraordinary achievements. That the son of a Kenyan immigrant student (who then abandoned his American wife leaving her to bring up the young Barack in relative poverty, albeit with the staunch support of her parents) should rise to the Presidency is the stuff of fantasy. It also bears witness to the mobility that American society still permits – and redeems the constitutional American promise of equality of opportunity. There is a word in Luganda, biyinzika (coincidentally the name of one of AAC’s Ugandan investee businesses) which literally translates as "everything is possible". What better example is there of the spirit of biyinzika at work? Sadly, at least at present, it is impossible to imagine that a young African could rise from a similarly humble background to aspire to the presidency, such is the dominance of the post-colonial elite in African politics.

What impact, then, will Obama’s election have in his father’s continent of birth? My hope is that Obama will be an inspiration to Africa's young generation, to transform the corrupt and unrepresentative gerontocracies which dominate African governments on this most youthful of continents into a new and vibrant meritocracy. Goodness only knows, transformation is needed. We can but hope. Biyinzika!

Tom "Omondi" Adlam

March 2010

Njombe

2010-03-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

In February 1998, I was working in CDC's offices in Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, awaiting my transfer to Tanganyika Wattle Company (affectionately known as Tanwat) in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. I had taken a long lunch hour in order to do some shopping on Oxford Street. On returning to the office, I announced my realisation of the remoteness of CDC's offices from Central London, whereupon a colleague invited me to have a look at a map of East Africa.

"That's what I call remote" he said, pointing at Njombe.

A few weeks later, on the 720 km drive from Dar es Salaam to Njombe, I was in no doubt that he was right. Tanzania is a big country. The journey was a full day's drive through Morogoro and Mikumi national park and the Ruaha gorge with its forest of baobab trees, up the Iringa escarpment through the pine and eucalypt plantations of Sao Hill before a left turn at Makambako and the final 60 km to Njombe.

The visitor to Tanwat is greeted by a wall of black wattle trees (acacia mearnsii), first planted on a 10 year rotation in 1950s colonial Tanganyika. The bark of this Australian import to East & Southern Africa has a very high tannin content which, when extracted from the bark through a simple boiling process, coagulates into a black solid which is now primarily used in tanneries in South Asia. Next was the tea estate, Kibena Tea: a bright green monoculture of neat tea bushes (camellia sinensis) carefully pruned to waist height for ease of plucking. And then, a turn on to the management housing crescent, with its jacaranda trees and colonial-syle bungalows, complete with well-worn furniture and wood-burning stoves. Even Tanwat's address was redolent of step back in time: Private Bag, Njombe, Tanzania.

Since Tanwat's early days, the tea estate, pine and eucalypt plantations and, latterly, a wood-fired power station were added to the wattle estates to create an integrated agro-forestry business which, at its zenith, employed upwards of 2,000 people. Because of its relative remoteness, Tanwat also developed staff housing, a company infirmary, primary schools, mechanical and vehicle workshops. It was, as my first MD Tom Lupton said to CDC's then-Chairman during a short visit, an example of social best practice, an example of the positive power of business activities and investment to build economic communities, not simply through foreign exchange generation, employment and tax collection and payment, but also through the training and skills development of its employees - perhaps its greatest legacy of its almost 60-year life - along with the development of the tiny settlement of Njombe into an urban centre in the region. Tanwat is by no means unique in this regard: there are many plantation towns in East Africa - Mumias, Webuye and Kericho in Kenya all come to mind - but it is nevertheless a fine example in the best tradition of Saltaire, Bourneville and the industrial model villages of the early Victorian era.

There's always a "but" however, and Tanwat is no exception. Every silver lining has a cloud - and Tanwat's cloud was the importation of the Black Wattle tree acacia mearnsii to East Africa. Wattle is now categorised as among the worst Invasive Alien Species. Here's the wikipedia comment:

The invasiveness of this species is partly due to its ability to produce large numbers of long-lived seeds (which may be triggered to germinate en masse following bush fires), and the development of a large crown which shades other vegetation. A. mearnsii competes with and replaces indigenous vegetation. It may replace grass communities to the detriment of the grazing industry and grazing wildlife. By causing an increase in the height and biomass of vegetation A. mearnsii infestations increase rainfall interception and transpiration, which causes a decrease in streamflow. Soil under A. mearnsii becomes desiccated more quickly (than it does under grass). A. mearnsii stands also destabilise stream banks and support a lower diversity of species

So, like almost everything, Tanwat's legacy to Njombe is a mixed blessing.

Mercenary Missionary Misfit

2010-02-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

There is an old saying that expatriates in Africa fall into one of three categories: mercenary, missionary or misfit. I hadn't thought a great deal about this harmless stereotyping until I recently came across the following academic abstract on the internet:

There are three stereotypes of the development worker: mercenary, missionary and misfit. The origins of this tripartite characterization of the aid community are unclear but certainly it has a currency, or at least a resonance, within the industry. ........ While there are individuals who can be recognized as approximating to each of the three stereotypes, in general people veer between them, at different points in their careers and even at different points on the same day. Finally, although these three characterizations — missionary, mercenary and misfit — appear to be contrasting, …… they are in fact variations on a common theme and a modern version of what people in the industry tend to see as the new `white man's burden'.

Well, well. The ancient stereotype is now the subject of academic discourse.

In general, the least interesting of these categories are the missionaries, though they still come in abundance to this most religious of continents. Mercenaries have always been attracted by Africa’s wealth – first they came for the slave trade, then, and now, for Africa’s minerals and natural resources. Most recently Simon Mann failed in his alleged attempt to lead a coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, eerily reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth’s humdrum novel The Dogs of War, except that his plane, so to speak, failed to get off the ground.

Expatriation to another culture, where rules and customs are not the same, is fertile ground for misfits, who relish the apparent freedom they have to be themselves, liberated from the social and behavioural constraints they are subjected to at home. And they make the most interesting stories. Because of my experience in Sudan, it is probably not surprising that of all the misfits that litter the British relationship with Africa I find Gordon the most fascinating. It is impossible to do justice to Gordon in a few words. His extraordinary career spanned the Crimea, the Taiping rebellion in China (where he led the wonderfully-named Ever Victorious Army in support of the Manchu dynasty), to his anti-slavery campaigns in Africa, before he lost his life to the Mahdi's Ansar in ill-fated British support of Ottoman control over the Sudan.

But it is Gordon's character that is even more interesting. His personality displays numerous apparent contradictions. Pride and arrogance with humility, compassion with ruthlessness, discipline with rebelliousness. And these contradictions are all-too-apparent in the circumstances of his death: defending a corrupt administration - which he loathed - against a nationalist liberation movement.

Before accepting his fatal mission to Sudan, Gordon had been considering a senior role in King Leopold's so-called Congo Free State. It is fascinating to speculate how this deeply religious and compassionate man would have dealt with arch-mercenary Leopold's brutal administration. Another misfit, Roger Casement, came and went through the Belgian Congo before achieving fame in the campaign against the exploitation of the Putumayo Indians in the Amazon, and notoriety (and subsequent execution) for treason.

And therein lies both the charm and the weakness of misfits: their stubborn refusal to conform to expectations, their unpredictability. As a stereotype, "misfit" is meaningless, but "Mercenary. Missionary and everybody else" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, and certainly wouldn't support academic analysis.

Language

2010-02-17T04:38:00.000-08:00

Africans frequently lament the tendency by non-Africans (especially in the media) to regard Africa as a single entity - and to extrapolate the problems in one country - it could be Congo, or Sudan, or Zimbabwe, or Somalia, depending on where the news is worst - to the entire continent.

They do so with good reason. Africa is an extremely diverse continent, and its diversity is exemplified by the extraordinary number of languages - and language types - spoken across the continent. Wikipedia informs us that there are at least 2,000 separate languages in Africa (about 30% of the world's total) with numerous different roots. For students of linguistics, Africa is fertile ground, in particular because of the number of creole languages which have developed from trading pidgins. I became interested in pidgins and creoles perforce - as Peter Muhlhauser's (my linguistics tutor at university) principal area of research was in the structure of new languages (creoles) developing from pidgins.

My first actual acquaintance with a real creole language was in Sierra Leone in 2005. Krio is widely spoken throughout Sierra Leone - a creole language based on English but with a structure similar to the Yoruba language from Nigeria. Krio's origins lie in Sierra Leone's history as a home for freed slaves, the first wave of whom returned to the West African country from Nova Scotia in Canada. The story of the founding of Sierra Leone is told in Adam Hochschild's brilliant history of the campaign against slavery, Bury the Chains, though the legacy of krio as a fusion between the English spoken by the returnees and the indigenous languages spoken by Sierra Leone's population at the time is not mentioned in his compelling book. While moving from meeting to meeting in ancient Freetown taxis, I kept hearing the same catchy but incomprehensible song on the radio, which, the taxi driver informed me, was called Tutu Pati, by Sierra Leone's most popular musician, Emmerson. Subsequent enquiry revealed that Emmerson's enormous popularity was partly derived from his campaign against corruption, and that he had released an album entitled Borbor Bele (picture attached) in which the title song condemned corrupt governmental officials who steal public resources and grow fat on their ill-gotten gains (hence the Bele of the title).

Not surprisingly, given the colossal number of distinct languages, language policy forms an important element in education and nation-building in modern Africa. Most countries elected to use the former colonial power's language for government, a decision which - despite the manifold advantages of using a widely-understood global language - did little to build a sense of unity among the various tribes that make up most if not all modern African nations. In this context, Julius Nyerere's most lasting legacy as the first leader of Tanzania will probably be the adoption of Kiswahili as the country's official language. Doubtless it is no coincidence that Tanzania has suffered less inter-ethnic conflict than most if not all other African states since independence, despite its multi-ethnic population. Unlike most "official" languages, Kiswahili is the language of the people - and not of either the ruling class or of a particular ethnic group.

On a lighter note, African English (as spoken in East Africa) has thrown up a variety of new words and usages. Among my favourites are the verb "jubilate", an amalgam of celebrate and jubilant): "the demonstrators jubilated when their leader got up to speak", and the verb "avail" used with the meaning of making oneself available. "The particpants in the workshop are requested to avail themselves for a group photo at 10.30 am".

Khartoum

2010-02-11T01:41:00.000-08:00

Christmas holidays, December 1975: not much to do on a cold winter's day and, back then, only three TV channels to choose from on our recently-acquired colour TV. The film Khartoum on BBC2, starring Charlton Heston as Gordon and (in retrospect the absurdly-cast) Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi. For a 13-year old boy, despite the longueurs of political debate, it was gripping stuff, made all the more poignant by Gordon's final and heroic defeat......

I did not imagine then that 17 years later I would relocate to Khartoum, as Oxfam’s Finance and Administration Manager for Sudan. I arrived in the sweltering heat of the Sudanese summer on 29 June 1992. It was an inauspicious start: my luggage failed to arrive with me. Perhaps because it was my first expatriate home, I have special, vivid and affectionate memories of Khartoum. It is an ugly, sprawling city, redeemed only by the Nile, but also exotic, a place of great excitement for a young man whose ideals were not yet sullied by the shades of grey of experience.

I remember the environment: the horrors of the rainy season, when the city roads fill with stagnant water, mosquitoes abound and the humidity is almost unbearable; my first haboob (sandstorm), which sounds almost romantic, after a Lawrence of Arabia fashion, but which in fact is desperately unpleasant; and the white-robed men and elegant women, resplendent in gaudy toobs, walking together in family groups along the banks of the Blue Nile.

I remember food and drink: the delights of Sudanese fresh grapefruit (often the only fruit available in the market), unparalleled in their sweet yet astringent flavour and juice; the joy of the short Sudanese winter, when a glut of fresh vegetables appeared in the market, grown on the white Nile flood plain; drinking jugfuls of karkade (hibiscus juice) at the Sudan Club after a breathless game of squash in the baking heat; delighting in the morning fathur (a mid-morning breakfast) at about 10 am, of ful, taammiyya and delicious baba ghanoush; and feasting on fried chicken from Khartoum 2.

I remember friends: Rachel Lyon whose energy, determination and commitment at the Sudan Council of Churches was testament to her zest for life; Robert Maletta, photographer, writer and sometime Country Representative for Oxfam; Manal Hassanein, proud Nubian first, Sudanese second, my Arabic Teacher, lessons at her family home in dusty Erkowit; and evenings at Tom and Olivier’s apartment in Khartoum 2, eating, drinking, playing bridge and solving the problems of the world, before the hasty departure to beat the midnight curfew.

I remember places: a visit to the sad township of Jebel Awlia on the outskirts of the city, where the displaced from the civil war in southern Sudan lived in the most miserable of conditions; the neatness of Khartoum University with its incongruous statue of Gordon; driving across the Omdurman bridge, past Mogren point and its decrepit fairground attractions, towards the silver dome of the Mahdi’s tomb; the turmoil of Omdurman souk; and the Friday evening drive to witness the strange sunset sufi darweesh whirling dances and ceremonies.

I remember events: the excitement of Pope John Paul’s visit to Khartoum in early 1993 and his celebratory mass at Green Park, attended by hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Christians, in reverence and quiet pride; meeting Helen Fielding, before she became famous for the creation of Bridget Jones, researching her prescient satire of the aid industry in the much under-rated novel Cause Celeb; the heat and boredom of the interminable opening of the Ministry of Agricultural and Livestock Resources; and the drums and exuberance of an Eritrean wedding reception.

Oddly, despite these, and many more, vivid memories, I have not enjoyed my occasional return visits to Khartoum in the intervening years. For the most part, my memories are of the good, of a selective set of snapshots, impossible to recapture, and no more real than the fictional cinema depiction of Gordon’s last stand in Khartoum which so fired my 13 year old imagination.

The reality is that there are many bad things too, and these have not changed.

Jam

2010-02-01T04:23:00.000-08:00

Traffic jam, to be precise. From Cairo to the Cape, from Dakar to Khartoum, the continent’s capital cities are, more often than not, in a jam. The one exception to this rule was Harare: sadly only because Zimbabwe’s petrol pumps ran dry. Instead, one would see lengthy queues of stationery vehicles outside fuel stations, waiting for days for fuel deliveries.

For many years, I considered Nairobi jams to be the worst, but first Lagos and now Kampala top my mental chart. There are parts of Kampala (Kibuye, Kabalagala, Bwaise) which are almost permanently at gridlock. The four ingredients which combine to make Kampala jams so unpleasant are the disregard for almost all driving etiquette, an absence of any apparent controls over the issue of driving permits and roadworthiness of vehicles, the prevalence of boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis) weaving through congested traffic, and hot weather. Add in the frequency with which Government VIPs sweep by the waiting traffic, preceded by brutish sirens, motorcycle outriders and armed police escorts, with a few opportunists following the cavalcade, and Kampala’s odious traffic jam recipe is complete. It is without a doubt the least attractive aspect of living in this city.

There’s a famous Disney cartoon, Motor Mania, one of the first episodes in the "Goofy the Everyman" series. In this cartoon, Goofy undergoes a Jekyll and Hyde transformation when he gets behind the wheel, from a mild-mannered family man to an aggressive beast, and provides a lesson in how not to drive safely. Sadly, we are all Goofys on Kampala roads. Polite drivers have no chance. It is perhaps a lesson in life: in Kampala, one has to seize opportunities when they present themselves. The extraordinary thing is that all the attrition and aggression this results in does not cause more road rage incidents.

And with 50-100 imported vehicles registered every day, it is hard to see how the traffic situation is going to improve. There is little that can be done to improve Kampala’s road network, so the only solutions in the long term must be a switch to public transport (unthinkable) or a switch from four to two wheels. 18 years ago, when I visited Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, I was struck by the fact that “le moto” appeared the main mode of transport. I saw this again in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam six years ago, where waves of slow-moving motorcycles dominate the city roads. Kampala is an obvious candidate to switch from four to two wheels – I have been giving it considerable thought in recent weeks as my journey to and from the office becomes slower and more unpleasant almost by the day.

Investment

2010-01-26T09:22:00.000-08:00

Africa needs investment. Lots of it, for the long term. Whether it's public investment in infrastructure, private investment in commerce and trade, or personal investment in education and skills, long term investment is in desperately short supply.

There are numerous reasons for this, many of which are related to investor perception of risk, but a major contributory factor is also excessive recurrent expenditure in the public sector. which indirectly acts as a brake on domestic investment. Africa is home to about one billion people, divided among a remarkable 53 separate countries, governed by 53 separate administrations, most of them burdened with overblown and inefficient post-colonial structures sucking in domestic savings to finance short term budget deficits.

This situation is good for bank shareholders and managers. Accept deposits at 0-2% and lend to Government at 12-15% (or more), but is otherwise disastrous for domestic investment and economic growth. Rates for the private sector, with the exception of the largest corporate borrowers, are in the high teens or worse, and loans are seldom made for periods exceeding three years. In this case, it is, for once, impossible to point an accusing finger at bankers - whose job has always been first and foremost to safeguard customer deposits and, consequently, take as little risk as possible. There is an old banking maxim “You are never wrong not to invest” which encapsulates the banking industry's traditional aversion to risk, best illustrated at the beginning of Monty Python’s satirical sketch of the banker who has forgotten his own name but remembers that he is “very, very, very…. rich”.

I quote: "I'm glad to say that I've got the go-ahead to lend you the money you require. Yes, of course we will want as security the deeds of your house, of your aunt's house, of your second cousin's house, of your wife's parents' house, and of your granny's bungalow, and we will in addition need a controlling interest in your new company, unrestricted access to your private bank account, the deposit in our vaults of your three children as hostages and a full legal indemnity against any acts of embezzlement carried out against you by any members of our staff during the normal course of their duties... "

While my friends and colleagues in African banking will refute this comparison, at least from my perspective the caricature is alarmingly close to the truth. 150% asset collateral plus personal guarantees are the norm - not the exception. And of course the derisory returns to depositors lead to inequitably high returns to bank shareholders and managers.

A secondary but additional problem is that it is extremely difficult to invest in long term assets (infrastructure, agriculture, plant and machinery) using short term finance. By definition, long term assets take time to construct, instal and commission. Short term finance needs regular servicing and repayment - which can seldom be met from cash flows generated by new assets. As a result, expanding businesses which already carry high business risk become saddled with high financial risk - often a fatal combination. There is a dire shortage of affordable long term capital - both debt and equity - which matches high business risk with low financial risk..

In practice, therefore, in the absence of a banking industry willing and able to invest at rates of interest which permit long term private sector investment, or the ready availability of equity capital carrying realistic return expectations, most African countries are still reliant on foreign direct investment and aid flows to finance development expenditure. This dependency on foreign investment and assistance creates a subtle form of re-colonisation which, due to the protean nature of money, is both far more insidious than its precursor and infinitely more difficult to resist.

Hair

2010-01-11T23:44:00.000-08:00

Wherever I’ve been in Africa, hair is important, very important. Hair comes in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes: wigs, weaves, braids, locks or – occasionally – natural. With the exception of subsistence agriculture and childcare, I would not be surprised if the hairdressing sector is the largest informal employer of women on the continent, such is the frequency with which many women visit their preferred salon. Allied to frequency, the labour-intensive nature of African hairdressing, where it is not unusual to find three stylists simultaneously braiding one head of hair in a process which can take the best part of a whole day, necessitates high numbers of low-paid workers.

The sheer size of the hairdressing industry, and associated beauty care products and services, provides evidence for one of the great mysteries in life: the female budget. Exactly how women can afford the level of investment in personal appearance is baffling, but the results are, more often than not, spectacular. The premium price for human hair (as opposed to synthetic hair) has also led to another business opportunity. Most human hair is apparently sourced from China and India, where many poor women annually “harvest” their hair and sell it for processing, packaging and export to Africa and elsewhere.

Nor is hair by any means a feminine issue. African men, too, pay considerable attention to their hair, the general rule being the less the better. Certainly, most city-slickers sport perfectly shaven heads, requiring weekly attention, though a few free spirits wear braided locks or carefully-sculpted afros.

That’s not to say, of course, that this emphasis on appearance is in any way uniquely African. Hair, for instance, is so important in the USA that Time magazine’s August 2009 edition screamed the headline Why Michelle Obama’s hair matters. For many African-Americans, hair styles have become a subject for debate. Does wearing straight European-style hair compromise Black identity? Given America’s history, this is a sensitive subject, but one I think that does not reward excessive deconstruction. It is universally acknowledged that human beings have a strong desire to look different, to stand out from their peers, and that for many women this desire is most easily satisfied through hair colour, cut and style. I would therefore prefer to think of hair styles as a celebration of diversity, in which the issue is not really about loss of identity, but an emphasis of the importance we attach to the care and decoration we render to our bodies.

Regrettably, this desire can often cross the line into self-harm, either through obsession or physical damage. For white people, this is most clearly seen in the growth of tanning studios, where large amounts of money are spent on the privilege of exposing skin to damaging UV light for the elusive golden-brown colour redolent of tropical beaches and high incomes. Africans face different threats. First is the damage to hair caused by using hair-straighteners – either chemical “relaxants” or super-heated combs. Second, and much worse, is the use of lotions to lighten skin colour. Many of these vile lotions contain not much more than bleach and can cause permanent damage to facial skin with serious long term health consequences, all in pursuit of that same golden-brown skin of the tanning studio.

Liverpool Football Club’s most famous manager, Bill Shankly, once famously said “Football isn't a matter of life or death, it's much more important than that”. He could easily have been talking about hair.

Gold

2010-01-05T04:31:00.001-08:00

African gold first came to mainstream European attention when Arab chronicles of journeys through the Sahel became known. Among others, Al-Umari described the vast amounts of gold transported by Mansa Musa (pictured), king of Mali, on his pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century.

Since then, lust for the metal (and other minerals) has been the driving force for plunderers of African natural resources. It lay behind Cecil Rhodes's klepto-corporations in Southern Africa where, to this day, de Beers still controls a substantial portion of the world's diamond market. It has despoiled the Congo in ways that King Leopold could only have dreamt of when he shamefully referred to the division of the “magnificent African cake” in the 19th century. Today's plunderers come, by and large, in business suits and negotiate mining concessions from host Governments - though where the rule of law breaks down - as in Sierra Leone in the 1990s - the ugly side is still very visible.

In East Africa, Tanzania is best endowed with valuable mineral resources, but to what extent do these resources translate into economic benefit? Not much, at least according to a report commissioned by Tanzanian religious organisations entitled "A golden opportunity: How Tanzania is failing to benefit from gold mining" which can be found at http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=19218. I quote:

"Gold mining is the fastest growing sector of Tanzania’s economy. Minerals now account for nearly half the country’s exports and Tanzania is Africa’s third largest gold producer. Yet ordinary Tanzanians are not benefiting from this boom both because the government has implemented tax laws that are overly favourable to multinational mining companies and because of the practices of these companies. Tanzania is being plundered of its natural resources and wealth. Between 1997 and 2005, Tanzania exported gold worth more than US$2.54 billion (bn). The government has received around $28m a year in royalties and taxes on these exports, amounting to just 10 per cent over the nine year period. The 3 per cent royalty has brought the government only an average of US$17.4m a year in recent years.......

.....We calculate that Tanzania has lost at least $265.5m in recent years as a result of an excessively low royalty rate, [and] government tax concessions that allow companies’to avoid paying corporation tax...... This is a very conservative estimate, in that it does not cover all the gold mining companies or all figures for recent years (which are not publicly available). Neither does it cover the financial costs of other tax incentives such as VAT exemption, which are extremely difficult to estimate. These extra revenues could of course provide a huge boost to tackling poverty in Tanzania. We also estimate that the prioritisation of large-scale gold mining in the country has come at the expense of small-scale artisan miners, around 400,000 of whom have been put out of work.

This report identifies three severe problems with gold mining in Tanzania, namely:

• It provides the government with very low tax revenues

• It is subject to minimal governmental and popular democratic scrutiny and is associated with the problem of corruption

• People in the gold mining areas are barely benefiting and many are being made poorer. "

Plus ca change. It seems extraordinary that there is no internationally recognised best practice for both Governments and Mining Companies to follow.

____________________________________

As all photographers know, gold has also given its name to the Golden Hour - the hour before sunset - when daylight is softer and warmer in colour, and shadows lengthen. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced close to the equator, when the sun's rays travel through more of the atmosphere and blue light is diffused. Across East and Southern Africa, with its low humidity and high percentage of dust in the air, this effect is further enhanced, and results in spectacular sunsets of gold and red and violet and the horizons disappear in purple haze. The brevity of sunset makes it all the more beautiful.

Football

2009-12-31T01:51:00.001-08:00

The self-styled beautiful game is incredibly popular across the continent. Yet, on the eve of the biennial Africa Cup of Nations, football discussion in East African bars and clubs is almost exclusively focused on the English Premiership. Almost every man that I meet follows one of the English “big four”, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool, and, in my experience, they are for the most part better informed than most soccer fans in England.

The Premiership’s popularity is driven by a number of factors.

· Local leagues are not televised (and, even if they were, the quality on offer would be well below European standards). No supply translates into no demand.

· Courtesy of South Africa’s Multichoice satellite TV, available throughout the continent, at least four Premiership games are televised live each week, usually more. The time difference of three hours means that English games are screened from late afternoon to late evening, when the bars and clubs, crammed with young men wearing team shirts, do brisk business.

· African players are well represented in the Premiership – almost all the teams have at least one regular African player.

· Links between the UK and anglophone Africa, in particular, remain strong due to the ambivalent nature of the colonial legacy.

In East Africa, too, the massive interest in the Premiership also reflects the fact that this part of the continent consistently under-performs in continental competitions (which are dominated by North and West Africa). Certainly, the Africa Cup of Nations is eagerly anticipated in West Africa, as a prelude to next year’s World Cup in South Africa, where it will be a surprise if at least one African side does not make it to the final stages of the competition. In North Africa, too, passions run high. The recent diplomatic tension between Egypt and Algeria, fuelled by Algeria’s defeat of Egypt in their play-off in Khartoum, is reminiscent of the famous “soccer war” between Honduras and El Salvador in the late 1960s.

But Africa’s susceptibility to external cultural influence can be detrimental. I have just finished reading a long poem by Ugandan author, Okot p’Bitek, entitled The Defence of Lawino. This epic takes the form of a lament by an Acholi woman, Lawino, for her husband Ochol's abandonment of his indigenous culture and values in favour of the ways of the colonial power. Her lament is presented in thirteen separate submissions, including for the loss of traditional clothing, cosmetics, cooking, music and dance, language, child-rearing, medical treatment and, saddest of all, the rejection of ancestral names. No-one would argue that cultural paralysis is a positive thing, but the assault on African values and traditions is corrosive. It used to be driven by colonialism, but now it is accelerated by the instruments of mass global communication - so positive in many ways - but destructive of the fragile structures of indigenous culture.

Back to the football. In the Cup of Nations, Nigeria’s Super Eagles are overdue a win and probably have the greatest depth of talent available – but in the really important competition, I’m a strong supporter of Arsenal. Could this be their year, or will they once again flatter to deceive?

Eggs

2009-12-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

In JRR Tolkein’s first classic tale of Middle Earth, The Hobbit, there’s a riddling contest between Bilbo Baggins and the creature Gollum. Bilbo’s first riddle is

“A box without hinges, door or lid,
Yet inside golden treasure’s hid”

to which the answer is obviously an egg. Obvious, at least, to anyone brought up on a European or North American diet of large eggs containing bright yellow-orange yolks. This egg yolk pigmentation was something I had always taken for granted as normal, until I moved to Khartoum in 1992, where I was surprised to find that shop-bought Sudanese eggs had very pale grayish-yellow yolks. Since the taste was pretty much identical, I didn’t think about it much at the time, apart from the fact that it rendered the expression “sunnyside up” redundant.

One of the great pleasures of African life – even of the curious hybrid lifestyle of the long term resident – is the simplicity and freshness of the food we eat. Of course, Nairobi and even Kampala supermarkets offer the consistent year-round supply of most products that people from supermarket economies have become accustomed to – but nearly everybody buys fresh food from the market. In Khartoum, this meant that the supply of fresh produce was very seasonal: most green vegetables, for example, were only available in the short Sudanese winter – the rest of the year it was simply too hot for most temperate and sub-tropical crops to flourish. But the benign climate in highland East and Southern Africa provides almost a constant supply of most fresh fruit and vegetables – and the export horticulture business has led to widespread availability of exotics like leeks, French beans, sugar snap peas, courgettes and baby corn (among others).

Furthermore, the exacting food appearance standards so beloved by major supermarket chains lead to huge amounts of rejected produce which makes its way into local markets (or cattle feed). Despite our best efforts, mother Nature remains unable to produce uniformly straight French beans or identically-sized mangoes, and as a result our local markets overflow with stubbornly non-conformist misshapen fruits and vegetables whose taste belies their appearance.

Which brings me back to the subject of eggs. During a short consultancy assignment for Kenya’ s largest grain milling business, Unga, I learned that it was common practice to supplement commercial chicken feed with yellow dye to colour the yolk. This practice apparently began in the 1930s, when factory farming became widespread in Europe and North America, and when chickens no longer had access to fresh vegetable matter containing the xanthophylls necessary to generate the yellow colour preferred by consumers. Initially, fresh marigold petals were added to feed mixes, but for cost reasons this was quickly replaced by the synthetic dyes still used today.

The obsession with appearances (at least insofar as food is concerned) has still to make its way to Main Street, Africa, perhaps because people have more pressing needs than the colour of their eggs or the size of their tomatoes. The economy is not yet – to use a foul expression - supermarketized.

Detoothing

2009-12-20T23:48:00.000-08:00

Over the past year, there has been a long running campaign against cross-generational sex in Uganda. This is a picture of one of the more memorable billboards adorning Kampala, highlighting the problem in stark and unambiguous terms.

In his amusing ethnography entitled "How to be a Ugandan" the writer and journalist Joachim Buwembo describes a number of stereotypical Ugandans, including "sex worker". This chapter describes the nature of cross-generational relationships between men and women as being mutually beneficial. An older man befriends a young woman (often a University student) and, in exchange for his gifts and financial support, she becomes his willing mistress. This arrangement did not prevent her from having other boyfriends, nor was it expected to last beyond her student years. However, in recent years, the social acceptance of cross-generational sex has been challenged, in particular through the spread of HIV/AIDS. There is currently a radio advertisement which uses a HIV+ man as an example of why it is so important to "get off the sexual network". Regrettably, however, it takes a great deal more than advertising to change behavioural norms, especially in a country with rampant poverty.

The fact is that many (if not most) young women are subject both to poverty, and to peer pressure to look good, to wear fashionable clothes, to make regular changes to their hairstyles, to furnish their rooms with new consumer durables....... and this requires a source of income. “Detoothing” is a term used by young Ugandan women to mean getting as much financial reward from a man while successfully eluding sex. It is an expression unique to Uganda, to the best of my knowledge. I haven’t heard it used anywhere else I have lived and worked. At least according to the newspapers, it is a fairly common occurrence, often ending badly. Some studies have apparently found that many adolescent girls believe that rape is an acceptable response by men to having been “detoothed” - which is a deeply worrying finding.

On an individual level, detoothing seems rather ridiculous, as opposed to harmful. There is always something faintly amusing (in a rather unpleasant schadenfreude way) about older men pursuing young women with gifts and being disappointed. But in reality it reflects badly on both parties and is certainly not a positive social trend.

However, when there are so many examples of similar behaviour that pervade Ugandan society, it is perhaps no wonder that detoothing is regarded as good sport. Detoothing, at a macro-level, goes by many other names: bribery, corruption, graft, but it pretty much amounts to the same thing. Getting something for nothing. A de-linking in the relationship between financial reward and hard work. To a large extent, I believe that one of the principal factors driving the detoothing culture is the influence of donor organisations, who offer financial and technical support for worthy goals, but all too often allow themselves to turn a blind eye to waste, pilferage and inefficiency in the implementation of their vision of development.

It would of course be wrong to describe donors as being detoothed. It would be more accurate to refer to the process as “milking”. But just as older men are willing accomplices in their own detoothing – in search of a new and exciting sexual partner - so too often are representatives of donor organizations willing accomplices in corruption. The problem is that it isn't really in anyone's interests (apart from the anonymous and remote tax payer, part of whose taxes go towards the aid budget) to expose inefficiency and corruption, just as it's not really in the detoother's best interests - or those of her victim's - to publicise the event.

In the words of the radio advertisement encouraging us off the sexual network, "this is not good".

Cell phone

2009-12-15T05:41:00.000-08:00

The pace of change in Africa is astonishing. And what better example to illustrate this than the revolution in telecommunications? It is hard to think of a more transformational industry than the cellular phone. Its impact has been big elsewhere in the world but, for the most part, fixed land lines were part of the infrastructure fabric. Communication was always possible.

But this was not the case in most African countries. 17 years ago, when I first moved to Sudan, it was very difficult to make an international phone call. I remember well visiting the matchless Acropole Hotel in downtown Khartoum to use, at vast expense and inconvenience, their crackly international telephone line. All Oxfam had at the time was an antiquated telex machine. 12 years ago, in Njombe, SW Tanzania, it was almost impossible to make a land-line international telephone call, even from my employer's (Tanganyika Wattle) offices, though we did have a satellite phone in case of emergency. And nine years ago, in Zimbabwe, I bought my first basic Nokia model and plugged in to Econet. Since then, like most people, the cell phone has become an integral and essential part of my life. Increased network coverage, competition, international roaming mean that it is now unusual not to be able to communicate even from the most rural locations.

In Central and East Africa the most successful of the early communications businesses was the well-named Celtel, founded by one of Africa's most celebrated entrepreneurs, Mo Ibrahim. Over a period of about 10 years, Celtel expanded rapidly and, in 2007 was acquired by Kuwaiti investors and rebranded as Zain. Aesthetically this was a disaster. Celtel had irritating slogans with meaningless punctuation - for example "Make. New Friends." or "Change. Your World." - but its billboards were otherwise attractive. After the change in branding, Zain introduced a truly hideous shade of pink into the East African landscape along with the trite slogan "A wonderful world". Sickly pink buildings now litter Uganda's towns and villages.

Besides creating the ability to communicate, the cell phone is now, through initiatives like M-Pesa and Zap, becoming a money transfer medium. Sending airtime - and using the transfer of airtime as an unofficial currency - has been used for some time, but Safaricom's ground-breaking M-Pesa in Kenya has enabled goods and services transactions to take place through telephone transfer. This promises to have a major impact on rural communities, in particular, by accelerating the velocity of money - effectively, increasing money supply.

Taxes on airtime and on company profits have provided Governments with substantial increases in tax revenue - wth very little extra work! Service providers collect and remit duties through the sale of airtime and - due to their size and scale - are examples of good compliance with revenue requirements. In many African countries, cell phone providers top the list of annual tax payers (though collectors would be more accurate) - a remarkable feat given the fact that inefficient state-owned fixed-line monopolies collected and paid a tiny amount of tax until the dawn of the cell phone era.

Popular culture has also benefited enormously. Competition among service providers in the industry for advertising and sponsorship activities have resulted in a stream of sponsored concerts - the latest and most-hyped of which will hit Kampala in late January - the R Kelly I believe concert supported by Zain - but which also benefit the local music, dramatic, fashion and artistic scenes.

And, better still, the cost of communication - domestic and international - has fallen steadily due to competition. The transformation is complete and provides a great example to anyone who doubts the potential of the African market to adopt new technologies and offer investment opportunities.

Banana

2009-12-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

My father was very fond of bananas. He once told me that, during his childhood in Salisbury, bananas were his greatest treat. The supply of bananas to Britain was severely interrupted by the Second World War, but the return of bananas was one of the few bright spots in post-war food-rationed Britain. At that time, of course, few people, if any, gave much consideration to contemporary food supply issues, like food-miles, fair trade, and so on, and the role of companies like the United Fruit Company in Central and South America (subsequently giving rise to the description "banana republics") was largely unknown. The important thing was the supply of yellow Cavendish bananas. Certainly, during my childhood, it was unusual for us not to have a bunch of bananas in the fruit bowl.

I first visited Uganda in 1994. On the long drive from Entebbe to Kampala, I remember being struck by the colossal number of banana plants along the side of the road. The following day, I had my first taste of matooke, steamed pulped bananas served wrapped in banana leaves, resembling a yellow mashed potato. I wasn't too impressed: it seemed bland and tasteless to me, and I was surprised to learn that many Ugandans, especially the Baganda, do not consider a meal to be complete without matooke.

Since then, as I have travelled more widely, I have become more and more aware of the cultural significance that so many people attach to their core staple food - and how difficult it is to change preferences. In retrospect, my father - along with many older British people - had a powerful preference for potatoes and bread, and he did not really consider a meal to be satisfactory without one of these. In Ethiopia, the Amhara prefer Injera, in most of East and Southern Africa, maize porridge (ugali, sadza, pap) is essential, and in West Africa rice and cassava (gari) are most popular. One of my Board of Directors, Walter Vandepitte, underscored the strength of cultural attachment to a staple by telling me that in his experience Rwanda was one of the very few countries he could think of where the core staple had changed (from bananas to potatoes). I am not sure that I agree with him - maize, potatoes and bananas have all been imported to Africa in the course of the last two millennia and must, therefore, themselves have taken the place of other indigenous staples - but certainly changes in staples are rare and take place over a long time.

Since moving to Uganda in 2005, however, I have come to appreciate matooke as a staple food: indeed, it has become unusual for me not to have matooke at least once a day. I have also come to appreciate the banana far more than as a sweet yellow treat. It is fibrous, non-allergenic and packed with potassium. It grows and reproduces rapidly. It produces fruit throughout the year (provided there is sufficient rainfall). Its leaves have many uses. And it has numerous varieties - from the starchy matooke to delicious, sweet, small "apple" bananas - unknown to consumers of bland plantation-grown Cavendish bananas.

B is for (Ugandan) Banana.

An African Alphabet

2009-12-04T02:27:00.000-08:00

In recent years, I have rediscovered the Yaya shopping centre in Nairobi. When living in Kilimani about 13 years ago, I often used to walk from home to do some weekend shopping there, often hand-in-hand with my eldest son (who cannot have been more than 2 at the time). Since then, vast numbers of new shopping centres have sprung up: the Village Market, Adams Arcade, the Junction, and so on, but the Yaya centre remains a great place to shop.

It is blessed with what, in my opinion, is the best bookshop in East Africa: the simply-named Book Stop on the second floor. I regret that I don't know the owner's name, but it is a real pleasure to visit his shop with its great collection of fiction and Africa-related books, both new and second-hand. Yesterday, while en route back to Kampala, I came away with books by two of my favourite authors, Bamboo, by William Boyd and Waiting for the Barbarians, by JM Coetzee, plus a request that if he came across a book entitled Gordon: Misfit or Martyr he should let me know. I have no doubt that he will do so. It is how bookshops should be: owned and managed by book-lovers.

I descended to the ground floor (the Java coffee house) and immediately set about Bamboo, a miscellany of Boyd's experience, reflection and opinion. A tool that he uses in his writing is an A to Z of observations, designed to give the writer some discipline in marshaling his thoughts and the reader the opportunity to assemble his own Gestalt of the subject. There are several examples of this in Bamboo, my favourite of which amounts to a short biography of another of my favourite authors, Anton Chekhov.....

Since for some time I have been in search of a theme for this blog, I have now decided to write my own A to Z, my own African Alphabet, and this is a suitable first post: what better then this for the letter A? In the series to follow, I shall be mindful of the pointedly sarcastic advice provided by Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, to non-Africans entitled How Not to Write About Africa (which can be found on fellow-blogger Holli's Ramblings). While I can't promise to follow his advice - Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces - I can undertake that this will be a personal journey through the continent which I now think of as my home.

A is for Alphabet.

That's how the life gets in

2009-11-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

Almost 30 years ago, over lunch to a group of fellow students, my confession that I liked Leonard Cohen was met with derision. "Oh God, he's so depressing" shrieked the post-punk throng. I was silenced, lacking the confidence to argue with the popular perception. But Cohen's insights and poetry still enthrall me, whether in the magnificent rendition of Lorca's Little Viennese waltz, or the haunting Hallelujah, or in one of my favourites, Anthem, with the following refrain:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

I have just completed an extended journey to the UK, where I attended a Private Equity conference focusing on emerging market opportunities, and to Canada for a long weekend with my two sons. Normally, this would be a bad time of year to visit, but I was lucky enough that my stay coincided with clear, warm and still autumn days. The clear weather provided me with what is probably the best view I have ever had of Essex and London on the incoming flight, looking out at a landscape shaped by humanity and its inventions. Orderly, neat, organised - even the small pockets of woodland apparently planted. The contrast between this landscape and Uganda's - indeed, most of Africa's - is considerable. Red earth, green vegetation, trees apparently scattered randomly across a landscape which bears little evidence of human activity. An occasional village, a marram road, and little more.

One of the blogs that I follow, Hollis ramblings, contained a reproduction of a piece entitled How Not To Write About Africa - in which all the cliches and stereotypes of non-Africans writing about Africa are listed with brutal accuracy. These include talking about wide and empty landscapes, huge skies, sunsets and wilderness, and so on. But the fact is that humans are yet to shape the African landscape to anything like the same extent that we see in other parts of the world. This is partly a function of a lack of large-scale mechanised agriculture, but also due to the disruptive force of nature. The absence of winters, the strong sun and heavy rain create an environment where human works breakdown far more quickly than in a colder climate - and where micro-organisms and vegetative growth flourish. The beauty of the African landscape is created by the powerlessness of man to dominate and control nature.

To paraphrase Cohen, there is indeed a crack in everything. It's where the life gets in.

A liberal's dilemma

2009-11-01T21:01:00.000-08:00

Kampala traffic is often bad. Like most cities everywhere, the hours between 7 am and 9 am, and 5 pm to 7 pm, are to be avoided if at all possible. The worst habit, beloved by minibus ("Taxi") drivers, is to drive down the wrong side of the road past an impatient line of vehicles and cut in. This infuriatingly inconsiderate behaviour (which is by no means exclusive to taxis) often results in blocking the road for oncoming traffic. Another unwelcome trend on the increase are VIP convoys, preceded by a siren-blaring police escort, which breeze down the wrong side of the road, usually with at least two or three opportunists in tow behind, compelling drivers to take rapid evasive action. The net effect of aggressive and poorly-supervised driving is that it is by no means unusual for my 11 km journey to work to take an hour or more.

Horrible though this is, it does afford me the opportunity to listen to the car radio. I have become quite attached to a Radio 1 daily morning show entitled Talkback, in which a relevant and topical issue is the subject of a phone-in debate. Recently, however, the subject matter has been profoundly depressing. Over the past two weeks, the issues discussed have exclusively centred around public sector corruption in Uganda. For example:

How can head teachers be prevented from absconding with students' examination fees? (Many children have been prevented from sitting primary examinations for at least one year and cannot therefore enter secondary school)

What should be done about officers of the National Agricultural Advisory Development Service (NAADS) who are unable to account for funds provided to them? (Vast amounts of money have apparently disappeared from regional agricultural extension offices instead of providing much-needed resources to peasant farmers)

How can the Government recover money mis-spent during the 2007 CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting) event in Kampala? (The Auditor-General has reported that many large advance payments by Government for the completion of new hotel construction before the CHOGM conference have not yet been recovered from hotel proprietors)

Will the new National Social Security Fund (NSSF) board be able to curb corruption? (The previous NSSF chief executive resigned over a scandal involving alleged political interference in the purchase of high value land)

And, most spectacular of all, the question of what exactly the Executive Director of Uganda's National Forestry Authority was doing with 900m Ugandan Shillings (getting on for US$500,000) in cash, in his house, under his mattress, before it was reportedly "stolen" by his wife. This story, which defies belief, is covered in more depth at http://www.independent.co.ug/index.php/cover-story/cover-story/82-cover-story/2003-akankwasas-shs-900m-an-opener-into-huge-theft-of-nfa-forests and on other Ugandan media websites.

Generally, callers express a touching faith in the rule of law and the ability (and political will) of law enforcement agencies to prosecute offenders. The fact is, however, that cases are few and far between, and seldom result in successful prosecutions.

It was therefore interesting to hear the Talkback host last week advocating what he descibed as "the Chinese solution - shock therapy for offenders" - on the grounds that corruption had become so deeply entrenched in the public sector that public floggings and even executions were now absolutely necessary in order to change the prevailing culture. Rampant corruption is hideous: it distorts markets, steals from the people, stifles enterprise, creates a "something for nothing" culture, creates anger and discontent, especially among the youth.... the list goes on. Most liberals would recoil at such a suggestion : yet what is appropriate where the social consequences are so substantial and so damaging?

Almost at the same time, a bill has already been drafted for consideration by the Ugandan parliament that substantially increases the current penalties for homosexuality. According to a 2-page spread in last week's East African newspaper by a consortium of human rights NGOs, this bill, among other things, will introduce lengthy prison terms for doing anything that could be seen as condoning homosexuality - while in certain cases authorising the death penalty for practicing homosexuals.

Absurd, isn't it? Corruption proceeds unchecked while parliament debates homosexuality.

the bay leaf in Arusha

2009-11-01T00:06:00.000-07:00

Last week in Arusha, I had the great pleasure of staying in the Bayleaf hotel. I can unreservedly recommend it to anyone visiting this neat and tidy city in Northern Tanzania. Beautifully designed and decorated, excellent food and service - a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

It was also good to see that the short rains have finally arrived, albeit sporadically. There is a strong expectation that rains in Kenya and Northern Tanzania will be heavy due to the El Nino effect, but apart from some localised flooding along the Kenyan coast, these are yet to materialise. After two years of low rainfall, Kenya in particular is facing a food production crisis which is likely to continue into 2010, regardless of rainfall, due to a substantial expected shortage in the availability of quality seed.

Vervet and the Big Blues

2009-10-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's easy to forget, amid the turmoil of day-to-day working life, just how lovely our working environment is.

The AAC/Kilimo Trust office building is located high on Mbuya hill, Kampala, in a substantial and mature garden. It is cool, and removed from the bustle, noise and dust of the city. It is also endowed with a wonderful array of plant and animal life, including a substantial family troupe of Vervet monkeys (a bold member pictured, waiting for a chance to purloin any lunchtime left-overs). These monkeys are a mixed blessing: while they are a welcome reminder of nature's tenacity and adaptability to urban life, they also have the potential to cause significant damage. On two occasions I have found Vervets foraging in my car - on the second occasion the intruder successfully escaped with an apple -, and once there was a brief stand-off in my office over the sugar bowl before he fled, empty-handed, through the open window.

The real stars, though, are the birds. This morning, I was lucky enough to see a pair of crowned cranes over-flying the compound. Residents include two pairs of hornbills, numerous touracos, barbets, sunbirds and at least one pair of owls. And there are countless visitors, among which are my favourites, a pair of spectacular Big Blue Touracos,which occasionally crash through the treetops with their characteristically loud calls.

Battle of the Sexes

2009-10-12T00:20:00.000-07:00

Next week, KADS will be staging its annual dinner theatre production at Open House Restaurant on Buganda Road. There's still an awful lot to do to get ready: programme, lights, some props and furniture and costumes - but somehow or other we will get there. And it will be very good!

The two main plays are by Chekhov: excellent, witty, 30-minute comedies belying his undeserved reputation for serious and formless drama. Both casts are extremely capable and highly motivated to do justice to the wonderful language and characterisation.

Where else could you go out and spend $15 for an evening's quality entertainment and a good Indian dinner?

Food for thought

2009-10-07T03:12:00.000-07:00

I have just attended a conference in Bamako, Mali, sponsored by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (specifically, AGRA's Program for Africa's Seed Systems). The conference brought together a vast number of crop scientists, plant breeders, soil specialists, seed producers and a few financiers like me in order to exchange information, build networks and devise solutions for the improvement of agricultural performance in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yesterday evening, a lengthy round table discussion took place on the thorny and perennial problem of how best to get quality seed into the hands - and fields - of smallholder farmers. The debate threw out lots of interesting points. I noted the following:

1. Plant breeders need to focus on research into use, develop links and relationships with seed companies, and increase the availability of breeder seed.

2. Large-scale seed production by competent and experienced growers was a serious constraint in most sub-Saharan African countries.

3. Greater product diversity - crops, varieties, seed pack size, etc - was essential for two reasons: first. the excessive focus on hybrid maize cultivation was threatening soil health and was unsustainable in the medium to long term; second, many farmers demand smaller seed packs.

4. Opportunities for seed companies are enormous. Global and domestic demand for food is increasing and, despite the difficulties in managing and financing business growth, new technologies and improvements in markets will stimulate increased demand for quality seed.

5. Cross-border certification and approval of new seed varieties is important. Governments also need to strengthen regulatory frameworks governing the seed industry in order to drive up quality and reduce the risk of counterfeit seed products in the marketplace.

6. The seed industry must focus on quality and look to increase the price of seed. Only by doing so will seed companies achieve profitability and sustainability - and generate income for reinvestment in growth, research and development.

This final point lies close to my heart. It is almost invariably the case that price competition - while good for the consumer in the short run - is the quickest way to create stagnation in an industry. The economics of seed purchase for the African farmer remain favourable with prices two, three or four times above current price levels. If short term price subsidies are required in order to stimulate increased demand for quality seed =- then that is fine - as long as these subsidies are paid to seed companies and the resulting profits ploughed back into expansion and growth.

Industries grow when they are profitable and their participants compete on product quality.

_________________________________________________________

Despite an element of inconvenience, I also think it was very good to hold this conference in Bamako. Far too many conferences take place in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Cape Town, (where, admittedly, airport, conference and hospitality infrastructures are much better), but it is entirely a positive thing to use facilities available in other countries. And I for one have enjoyed my short walk from the Hotel Salam to the CICB (conference venue), through a shady plant nursery with a wonderful collection of tropical trees, shrubs and succulents, with a view of the river Niger across the main road.

Carbon

2009-09-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I received a lengthy essay on the crisis of responsibility, entitled "No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood". The essay deplored the tendency in modern society to shuffle off responsibility for collective action. It was primarily directed at financial regulators, politicians, economists, bankers and all those individuals whose collective actions (and inaction) plunged the global economy into recession.

It might, however, also have been directed at all of us who, through inaction, are plunging us into rapid and irreversible climate change. While numerous models of change and consequence exist, what is unarguable is that climate change is upon us, and that humanity probably still, just, has the power to curb its excesses.

There is an often-repeated wisdom that Africa will be particularly affected by climate change. I find this a little bit hard to understand – it seems to me that, just as in the recent economic turmoil, wealthier countries will bear a much higher cost, though I acknowledge that superior material and technological resources may lead to greater resilience. Having said that, one cannot but think back to the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to the droughts and fires which are destroying so much of Australia, and wonder that a movement in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from 0.03% to 0.04%, (of 100 parts in a million), could result in climate change so destructive that it threatens human life on earth. Yet this is what our scientists tell us and, in general, scientists rarely make professional statements that are unsupported by rigour, research and evidence. The climate change campaigning website http://www.350.org/ actually proposes that 350 parts per million (0.035%) is the maximum level of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere at which life – as we currently know it – can continue without major irreversible change.

To understand the carbon cycle, it is hard to think of a better introduction than the final chapter of Primo Levi’s astonishing autobiography, The Periodic Table. Levi’s spare and scientific style is shown to great effect in the 21 element-episodes which comprise this wonderful book. The final chapter is simply entitled Carbon and it charts the progress of a single atom of carbon. Critics consider this chapter heavy-handed and fanciful: it is anything but. As Levi says “It is possible to demonstrate that this completely arbitrary story is… true. I could tell innumerable other stories and they would all be true….. The number of [carbon] atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story”. The atom is present in limestone (calcium carbonate] – itself an ancient product of the continuous calcium cycle in the oceans – it is then liberated through roasting in a lime kiln as a carbon dioxide molecule; it whirls around the world in the atmosphere for 12 years before being captured through photosynthesis; it is converted into glucose, consumed, digested and released once again as carbon dioxide. The cycle continues.

In the narrative, other facts emerge. Levi remarks that carbon exists in the atmosphere in tiny quantities - 0.03% at his time of writing - and from this impurity proceeds all life on earth. He comments briefly on the miraculous nature of photosynthesis – chemistry at the minuscule atomic level in which the carbon atom is freed from its pair of oxygen atoms and converted into organic compounds which support the chain of life.

The chapter which immediately precedes Carbon is entitled Vanadium. In truth, the metal Vanadium is tangential to the story, which focuses on the subjects of responsibility and acceptance so brilliantly dealt with in If This is a Man and The Truce. In Vanadium, his search for the obscure compound Vanadium Napthenate led Levi to make contact with a German scientist who –during Levi’s imprisonment in Auschwitz – had briefly been his employer as a chemist attached to an IG Farben Buna rubber factory near the concentration camp. They exchange letters but, before they can meet, the scientist dies. Levi is therefore unable to tell him that it is not enough to be honest, unarmed and a non-participant:-

“In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them: therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed, every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed”.

No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.

As a postcript, I am glad to report that in our own small way at African Agricultural Capital we have decided – with the support and advice of the Uganda Carbon Bureau – to become a carbon-neutral organization. This entails a detailed estimate of the carbon produced from AAC’s organizational activities, followed by the purchase of offsets through financing carbon uptake projects – either through increased energy efficiency, reforestation or other qualifying projects.

But it is not enough.

Norman Borlaug

2009-09-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

One of the giants of the 20th century passed away this weekend. His is not a household name, but it should be. Dr Norman Borlaug's work in breeding new crop varieties was directly instrumental in creating food security for countless millions of people, especially on the Indian sub-continent. It is no exaggeration to say that without his work (and the development of the Haber process for manufacturing inorganic fertilisers using atmospheric nitrogen), crop yields would have been insufficient to feed the global population.

Among his numerous achievements, perhaps the most significant was the breeding of dwarf wheat varieties. Through selective breeding, wheat stem length was reduced and thickened, thereby enabling the stem to support higher seed yields without lodging (toppling over). These varieties massively increased crop yields - and the technology has subsequently been transferred to rice varieties with significant yield benefits. Borlaug's work was, especially in its early years, heavily supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, whose philanthropic investments through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (and, on a very small scale, through African Agricultural Capital), continue to support essential agricultural research and development in the developing world. Borlaug's contribution to food security and, indirectly, to peace was recognised with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Inevitably, Borlaug had his critics, especially among the environmental lobby, which, inter alia, deplored the reduction in biodiversity resulting from large-scale monoculture, opposed the use of inorganic fertilisers and crop protection products, raised doubts about the impact of genetic cross-breeding, and objected to the potential destruction of wilderness to make way for crops. Borlaug responded to this criticism with a robust defence. "Some of the environmental lobbyists ... are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world ...... they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"

And that's the truth. We can look back at the apparent idyll of traditional agriculture - through nostalgia-tinted spectacles - and lament its passing, but we must accept that that time is past, and look to the future. Our planet supports 7 billion people and that figure is expected to rise by a further 2 billion by 2050. Increased agricultural efficiency is the only way in which humankind will feed itself without the desperate consequences of deforestation, climate change and conflict. Without Borlaug's work - and that of the tens of thousands of unsung and unheralded plant breeders around the world who continue to develop new crop varieties - this will be impossible.

The great architect Christopher Wren's epitaph translates as "If you seek his monument, look around you." Norman Borlaug's legacy is much larger.

The Virtuous Burglar

2009-09-14T00:30:00.001-07:00

I was lucky enough, while visiting Nairobi last week, to see the Phoenix Players perform Dario Fo’s farce, The Virtuous Burglar. This is a richly entertaining short farce in the best tradition of the genre: a burglar arrives at a well-appointed residence, only to be telephoned by his wife, anxious about his well-being. The burglar, having assuaged her fears, is then disturbed by the man of the house unexpectedly returning with his mistress. An absurd telephone conversation then ensues between the man and the Burglar’s wife…. and the chain of coincidences continues with the return of the man’s wife…. The humour is savage, and shows us how fragile our world of manners and polite conventions can be when we are at risk of exposure.

This farce is close to my heart, as I have twice performed it (and once directed it) in amateur productions in Harare and Kampala. Perhaps inevitably in my eyes, the Phoenix production left a lot to be desired. First, the production was one-paced. The best farce relies on the creation of a breathless pace, interspersed by sudden silences as the characters scramble for ever-more-improbable explanations of their behaviour, and this production lacked the changes in pace necessary to make the most of the intrinsic comedy of the situation. Second, the device of positioning the Burglar’s wife behind a backlit screen was poorly executed. Third, while the acting was in general, especially among the principal characters, competent, there was little warmth in the interaction between the characters on stage.

Having said that, it is wonderful that the Phoenix Theatre continues to flourish and bring quality drama to the Nairobi audience. It is almost unique in Africa to find repertory theatre, but the resilience of the Phoenix in the face of competition from TV and cinema is testament to the unalloyed pleasure still derived by audiences from live performance in the company of others. Long may it last!

Big Brother returns.....

2009-09-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

It's back. Bigger and brasher than ever. Big Brother Africa returned to M-Net tonight with 14 new hopefuls in the running for the $200,000 prize and the promise of celebrity status. It is strangely compelling entertainment, though its launch yesterday was rather spoilt by the device of filling the house entirely with men - of whom presumably half will be evicted within the first week to make way for women.

When George Orwell, in his classic novel 1984, developed the Big Brother concept: a world in which all communication media is subordinate to the government's interpretation of reality, and where television is the principal means of thought control, could he have imagined that people would compete, voluntarily, to surrender their privacy, dignity and liberty for the pursuit of, let's be honest, a substantial (but probably not life-changing) sum of money. I doubt it very much: my guess is that he would have been deeply saddened - if not surprised - by the triumph of greed over basic human values.

In defence of shows like Big Brother, it is sometimes argued that it's fine - the participants have voluntarily surrendered themselves and that they can exercise their right to leave the house at any time - but is this really the case? These young contestants are products of a new consumer culture, where traditional values are meaningless, image is everything, and the ideals of consumerism and fame walk down the aisle together in a marriage of convenience. Any normal sense of good judgment is quickly lost in the cauldron of the house. Big Brother can ask the contestants to do anything and they comply. In so doing, they push themselves beyond the healthy limits of normal behaviour....

Entertainment? Of a sort, undoubtedly. but a deeply unpleasant, manipulative and voyeuristic sort.

A glorious victory

2009-08-21T02:09:00.000-07:00

Only a pub quiz, it's true, but with thanks to three students of Notre-Dame University (pronounced Noder-Dayme) and a PWC consultant working for the Uganda Revenue Authority, our bizarrely-named team "She Kisses Giraffes" triumphed last night in the Bubbles O'Leary quiz. The quiz was punctuated by great excitement and cheering as Moses Kipsiro, Uganda's leading track athlete, won his 5000m heat at the World Athletic Championships.

Our prize: as usual, to set the next quiz on 3 September.

Ggaba Market

2009-08-17T00:36:00.000-07:00

Just round the corner from my home is Ggaba Market. The market is right on the shores of Lake Victoria. It's a hive of activity from daybreak to dusk: every morning, fishermen arrive with their catches of tilapia, nile perch and mukene (a sort of freshwater whitebait). At the same time, fresh produce is ferried across the lake every morning: piles of mangoes, potatoes, pineapples, tomatoes, beans, water melons and a surprisingly wide variety of other fruits and vegetables. For anyone brought up on European or North American supermarket fare, the produce looks sub-standard, imperfect, but it is wonderfully wholesome, tasty and fresh.

Charcoal and firewood is delivered in overloaded Fuso and Canter trucks, along with fresh matooke (cooking bananas), luridly green. Old Corolla estate cars arrive, crammed with live "traditional" chickens and larger off-layer hens ready for the slaughter. And all around, ungainly marabou storks stand, stiff-legged, ready to flap and walk their way to any easy pickings.

From early, other traders set up small braziers and charcoal stoves to prepare fast food, Kampala-style. Fried fish, samosas, fresh beans, steamed matooke and the much-loved breakfast "Rolex" - a calory-packed chapati filled with fried egg and vegetables, rolled up pancake style for easy consumption.

I really enjoy my occasional visits to the market: quite apart from the unalloyed pleasure of buying fresh produce, it provides a valuable insight into real economic and business life. Yesterday I bought onions, pineapple, passion fruit, leeks, parsley, potatoes and spinach. But the drought in Uganda is pushing prices, especially of leaf vegetables and pineapples, high. Fish, too, has increased in price, with a knock-on effect on other meats. Lake fishing, like so many other activities, is poorly regulated, with the inevitable consequence of over-fishing. Uganda's fish export industry - once a source of valuable foreign exchange - is dying and catches are diminishing, and it is yet to be replaced by fish-farming on a significant scale.

In the midst of daily trading, it is hard for market stallholders to think about the long term: years of experience and intense competition ensures that only the best traders - who price competitively and estimate demand accurately - can earn a living, but there is a lot of anxiety about the future. Prices are increasing and money supply is not: these are worrying times at Ggaba Market.

Bubbles O'Leary

2009-08-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

Why is that almost every African capital city has at least one Irish theme pub? McGinty's, O'Hagan's, Finn McCool's, O'Tooles, the list is almost endless. A friend of mine suggested that their popularity has something to do with the widespread (but mythical) belief in many African countries that drinking Guinness increases sexual potency, but I think it has more to do with the famed Irish entrepreneurial and intrepid spirit.

Kampala is no exception to the rule. O'Leary's (fondly if inexplicably nicknamed Bubbles) has become the main watering hole for Kampala's expatriate community, plus, from time to time, a sprinkling of Kampala glitterati.

I frequent O'Leary's for the quiz night, held every second Thursday. The main prize for thiis rowdy event is to set the following quiz, but an alcoholic prize is also awarded to the winners of each round. Where two or more teams are tied in each round, a "Drink-off" is staged and the round awarded to the team whose representative is able to finish a 500 ml glass of beer first. Needless to say, the combination of cheap drinks, rowdy atmosphere, lack of enforcement of alcohol limits for drivers and a relatively young set of cash-rich expatriates ensures that the pub does excellent business well into the small hours.

Sadly, our quiz team disintegrated earlier this year, so we ploughed a lone furrow last night and did, at least, have the satisfaction of winning the "Dictators" theme round and, with it, six tots of Sambucca. Needless to say, the effort and effect of consuming the Sambucca resulted in a steady decline on the quiz leaderboard.....

The Last Africans

2009-08-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

This painting hangs on my sitting room wall. The image does not do it justice. It is beautiful: an untitled impressionistic oil painting of a nomadic group of people in Northern Kenya. I bought it about 14 years ago at a small exhibition in Nairobi entitled "The Last Africans".

My main memory of the Last Africans exhibition is a brief and impromptu introductory speech delivered by my friend and and former colleague, Matthias Schmale. Matthias was a compelling speaker, not least due to his sincerity, and he took this occasion to speak eloquently about his sadness that the era of the pastoralist and nomadic life practiced across most of the African continent was coming to an end: that the traditions and modus vivendi of the Turkana, the Karamajong, the Rendille, the Samburu and, most iconic of all African pastoralists, the Maasai, were dwindling into scattered tourist exhibits amid the farms, settlements and towns created through population growth, the march of technology and urban development. His lament was not romantic: it was for the impoverishment to us all brought about by the reduction of cultural diversity.

My reading matter over the past week has been a collection of papers selected by Nigel Halford of the Rothamsted Institute in UK, entitled Plant Biotechnology. For a non-scientist, much of this book has been extremely difficult to understand, but I was keen to try to improve my understanding of transgenics/genetic modification and its impact. Included in the anthology is a short paper published by researchers from the University of Cape Town on the potential for inserting a "water-efficiency" gene into maize, the staple crop for most of East and Southern Africa. The authors are in no doubt that this would be a positive move, as it would allow the cultivation of maize to spread into areas hitherto too dry for farming.

In this connection, recent press publications in Kenya have reported that considerable applied research in WEMA (Water Efficient Maize for Africa) is underway - with the potential to open up new low rainfall areas in Kenya for the cultivation of maize. Kenya needs it: the Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, recently forecast a shortfall of about 1 million tonnes (30% of Kenya's annual consumption requirements) due to patchy rainfall. This is nothing new: 8 years out of 10 Kenya struggles to grow enough maize for its burgeoning population - mainly due to reliance on rainfall for water requirements, depleted soils, and the widespread use of poor quality planting material.

Advances in agricultural technology over the last 100 years have supported massive population growth. Through effective selection and breeding programmes, plant breeders have produced ever more productive crop varieties. The Haber-Bosch process for utilising atmospheric nitrogen has provided the necessary source of nutrition for these varieties. And now, transgenic technologies offer the potential to accelerate conventional plant breeding through the production of uber-crops capable of resistance to herbicides, drought, soil salinity and who knows what sort of adverse conditions. But these advances carry a cost. One wonders what the consequences of WEMA's introduction will be for Kenya's pastoralists and biodiversity as the area under cultivation of maize expands.

Clinging on in ever more marginal areas, the pastoralist way of life appears to be an inevitable casualty of the modern world. As Einstein, in his wonderful 1949 essay entitled "Why Socialism" observed "The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient."

Kenya Organics

2009-08-04T06:12:00.001-07:00

For people interested in the organic movement in Kenya, here's a link to the Green Dreams blog.
http://greendreams.edublogs.org/2009/08/03/kibera-youth-reform-organic-farm-one-year-later/ It's a very interesting read.

The author, Su Kahumbu (pictured), also heads up AAC's investee, Food Network East Africa, which trades under the Green Dreams brand in Nairobi. Unfortunately, Kenya's organic certification body is not internationally recognised, which means that Green Dreams would need an internationally approved (very expensive) certifier to accredit its produce before it can gain access to high value export organic markets. Just another example of market barriers to African exporters.

The pursuit of happiness

2009-08-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

For a change, I watched a good film on DSTV last week. Normally, there's nothing but rubbish, so it came as a pleasing and welcome surprise to see a heart-warming tale of a salesman taking care of his 5-year-old while grappling with a host of day-to-day challenges - The Pursuit of Happyness.

The film's title reminded me of the following quote: Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig. (Albert Einstein)

A thought-provoking statement from a man whose contribution to theoretical physics and, indirectly, to the creation of the atomic bomb, assures his position as one of the world's greatest scientists.

The pursuit of happiness is the overwhelming objective of modern life. To confess to unhappiness is often met with derision or, worse, moral condemnation. And yet there is a contradiction: increasing numbers of people report themselves unhappy - and happiness seems to have little correlation with material wealth (at least after basic needs of food, water and housing are fulfilled). A few years ago, in the BBC's global poll, Nigerians (to most people's surprise) reported themselves the happiest nationality on the planet, despite all the manifest difficulties and challenges of living in a developing country. For anyone living in Uganda, the main surprise was that it was Nigeria - not Uganda - which boasted the highest happiness quotient. Certainly, I am yet to live anywhere with so much joie de vivre.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Einstein provides an explanation for the malaise of unhappiness afflicting society, contained in his marvellously crafted essay in the first edition of the Monthly Review in May 1949, entitled "Why Socialism?" (which can be read in full online at http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php) I have reproduced an extract, below, which serves to demonstrate his wisdom, foresight and continuing relevance to modern times.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. ............... ...... Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

A brilliant analysis! How did we let it happen?

The Bear and The Marriage Proposal

2009-07-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

Kampala Amateur Dramatic Society's next production will be a dinner theatre production in late October at the Open House restaurant on Buganda Road in Kampala.

In the absence of other offers, I will be directing two short Chekhov (pictured) plays - a pre- and post-prandial celebration of two of the master playwright's less distinguished but very funny plays. First is The Bear - in which a youthful and passionate widow encounters an angry and overbearing (pardon the pun) gentleman creditor, with unexpected consequences. The Bear will be followed by The Marriage Proposal - in which a hypochondriac suitor gets into furious dispute with the object of his affections. Between the two, we will have an excellent South Indian buffet dinner.

I'm looking forward to it (in theory), though it will really depend on finding a good and congenial cast. Auditions in a fortnight's time. Watch this space for more updates.