Two tribes

Every weekend, I try to fit in a couple of exercise sessions at the American Recreation Association gym in Kampala. It's a quiet gym, often unoccupied, which gives me the opportunity to listen to BBC World Service while cross-country skiing or walking briskly on an inclined treadmill. And, during one such session earlier this month, I was lucky enough to listen into an interesting 30-minute BBC documentary covering the annual Royal Economic Society meeting, focusing on the future for the dismal science.

As an exercise in pontification and speculation, there was much to admire: in particular the chutzpah of the speakers in their rebuttals of the suggestion that economists (if not to blame for the financial sector meltdown) ought to have detected warning signs in advance. Yet the most interesting features of the discussion were the omissions. There was, for example, little mention of the unrelenting growth of the financial sector, especially in terms of its ever-increasing share of total profits derived from business activity at the expense of employees dependent on salaries and wages. Or the incorporation - through globalisation and the increasing economic power of China and India  - of a huge amount of cheap labour into the global economy. Taken together, these facts can only lead to one conclusion: namely that the exploitation of the global workforce by the owners of the global capital markets is accelerating at a rapid rate. Yet, Marx was absent from the discussion.

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire 20 years ago, the stealthy march of capitalism now dominates the entire globe. Its leaders - whether by design or by accident - have discovered the power of the media to colonise and dominate the mind. They have muzzled alternative political views through the marginalisation of the "loony left" and the rubbishing of Marx. They have poured scorn on the study of the liberal arts, and replaced education with the training of workplace skills, once the responsibility of the employer to deliver. We are now engaged in a race to the bottom where the losers are the poor. There are now some signs, especially in south-east Asia and continental Europe, that growing inequity is leading to social unrest (see the pictures in this BBC link http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-17904743 ) but the strangle hold over the media and the systems for political command and control is becoming ever-stronger.

And what are the implications for Africa?  Well, despite the good news being peddled by many African governments which focus on economic growth rates, little is being said about the distribution of wealth. I suspect that the GINI co-efficient (which measures the unevenness of distribution of wealth) is rising in most countries. And, of course, Africa's abundant natural resources are up for sale to both old and new sources of capital....... It's hard to see how inefficient African economies can compete in global markets, except by reducing the only cost under their control: the cost of labour. Add an ever-increasing supply of school-leavers to the supply of labour, and the message becomes clearer: either accept a very low-paid job, or don't enter the labour market and go back to the land.

Received wisdom suggests that George Orwell's timeless satire, Animal Farm, is a satire on the corruption of the communist state in Russia - and the parallels are easy to draw. But Orwell himself refused to endorse this conclusion. I re-read this great book recently, and was struck by its simple treatment of the triumph of greed over innocence and idealism, and of the corruption that power brings, and of the sameness of people in power. Its immortal final sentence reads: the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. A couple of years ago, Lucy Oriang wrote a thoughtful column in Kenya's Daily Nation. "There are" she wrote "only two tribes in Kenya: the rich and the poor." She might as well have been writing about the whole world.

Glowinkowsi on leadership

The qualities that create a good leader are hard to define. We bandy about words like "charisma" and "vision" and "gravitas", but, when pressed, we find the definition of these qualities both elusive and highly subjective.


I was fortunate last week to attend a fascinating presentation by the highly experienced UK-based human resource consultant Steve Glowinkowski (pictured) on leadership. Glowinkowski was visiting Kampala to train and accredit a new East Africa-focused HR consultancy firm, The Leadership Team, in the use of a proprietary diagnostic tool for the assessment of the organisational climate within organisations.


Over many years, Glowinkowski has focused his attention on researching and understanding the factors that drive high-performance organisations, and to condense his theories into a few paragraphs would do them a great disservice. Suffice it to say that leader behaviour is a key element of determining organisational climate, and that the most effective organisational leaders are those who demonstrate behaviour which is at the same time "directive" (ie communicating a clear vision and set of priorities) and "concerned" (ie focused on understanding how best to motivate and reward staff at all levels of the organisation). In turn, this behaviour would help in the development of a organisational climate in which staff, inter alia, felt empowered to take responsibility and in which recognition and rewards were closely linked to performance

While listening to Glowinkowski's presentation, I was struck by how interesting it would be to apply this thesis to entire countries, rather to discrete organisations. I often read articles in the East African press lamenting failures in political leadership. These articles have often seemed to me to be craven efforts by the writers to attribute poor economic and social performance to deficiencies in political leadership, when actually many issues could be massively improved through individuals taking more direct responsibility for action, but, applying Glowinkowski's theories, it suggests that leader behaviour will disproportionately affect the national climate. Certainly, when looking at East Africa as a whole, it is clear that high-level corruption has a corrosive effect on national climate, and that tolerance of (and indeed participation in) corruption by political leaders has broken the links between individual effort, performance and reward which are so essential to a positive climate.

I recently heard the likely Republican presidential candidate in the USA, Mitt Romney, talking about his political values. He spoke powerfully, contrasting his belief in what he called the "culture of opportunity" with what he represented as President Obama's sympathy for the European "culture of entitlement". Sadly, in many countries which are substantial recipients of foreign aid, the sense of entitlement to assistance further corrodes the establishment of a climate in which performance and reward (ie opportunity) are strongly correlated.

Another of the key variables that Glowinkowski aims to measure is the individual tendency towards "incremental behaviour" (ie building on what has been done before) and "radical behaviour" (ie seeking new ways of doing things). To drive change and create Romney's culture of opportunity, we all need a healthy dose of radicalism.

20 years too late

Uganda's in the news again, due to the extraordinary reaction to Invisible Children's You Tube video, Kony 2012. Most of the people I know in Uganda are bewildered. Northern Uganda has been more or less peaceful for the last 10 years, since Joseph Kony's rag-tag band of thugs disappeared into across the Ugandan borders into central Africa, so why now?

I thought Kony 2012 was pretty awful. Voyeuristic and mawkish by turns, tasteless in its use of Jason Russell's son as a holy innocent, and, quite frankly, another patronising example of the way in which Europe and America love to portray Africa as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except with black Kony replacing white Kurtz as "the worst". Let's be honest here. To elevate Kony to the evil stature of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot is absurd. Kony was a failed local political leader who, unwilling to admit defeat, took to the bush with a group of poorly-educated supporters (which, in an insult to armies everywhere, he called the Lord's Resistance Army). He then began a lengthy sequence of violent crimes in Northern Uganda, including murder, rape, and child abduction. His activities destabilized and impoverished the region. A terrorist without any coherent agenda, yes. A thug, yes. A pyschopath, probably. But a systematic mass murderer like Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, definitely not.

Having said all that, if this video accelerates the capture and trial of criminal Kony, then it will have achieved something that, to their enduring shame, the international community, the African Union and national governments have failed to do for the past 20 years or more. 20 years too late for a lost generation in Northern Uganda.

Protein and the price of virtue

There's nothing quite like the smoky scent of meat, chicken or fish being cooked over a charcoal brazier. Often, on the drive home from work in the evening, I pass through Kabalagala and Kansanga, where my nostrils are assailed by goat or chicken muchomo along the roadside. Deep fried whole tilapia is also widely on sale.

But there's something very unusual about the Ugandan market for animal protein. As a general rule, the price of animal protein ought to correlate closely with the cost of producing (or catching) that same protein. The main driver for the cost of production of animal body weight is, not surprisingly, the cost of feed inputs, and the industry generally measures this through the Feed Conversion Ratio. How many kilogrammes of animal feed is required in order to produce one kilogramme of animal body weight.

The smaller the animal, the lower its feed conversion ratio. This is not exactly surprising. Large adult mammals have to consume large quantities of feed simply to maintain their body weight. Think of elephants, for example. Apparently an adult elephant needs to eat an extraordinary 200 kgs of vegetable matter per day! Blood temperature also affects the amount of energy required by an animal in order to maintain weight. Hardly surprising, therefore, that fish are the most efficient converters, requiring a mere 1.7 kgs of feed per 1 kg of body weight, followed by chickens, at about 2.2 kgs, pigs at 4.1 kgs, with goats and cattle (like these splendid long-horned Ankole cows) coming in at about 10 kgs of feed per 1 kg of body weight.

And yet, in Uganda, beef is the cheapest meat on sale, followed by goat, pork, chicken and fish, in that order. Of course, there's an explanation: beef and goats forage for their food so it is, effectively, free, apart from the costs of herding and paying vet's bills. Pigs and chickens are often fed on household waste or home-blended feeds. And fish has become a premium product due to over-fishing in Lake Victoria. Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is a considerable business opportunity for efficient livestock and poulty farming and aquaculture, and for a more professional animal feeds industry.

On a more humorous note, I was recently reminded (by a billboard in Muyenga advertising a local Ugandan magazine) of Proverbs 31, 10: "Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies."

The glamorous Kampala socialite and Beyonce-wannabe Zari Hussein (pictured) doesn't seem to subscribe to this ancient wisdom. According to a local magazine, Zari proclaims herself to be worth at least 300 cows, a reference to her lavish kwanjula (traditional wedding) in late 2011 where her bride-price reportedly included 300 head of cattle. Now, using the feed conversion ratio above, and assuming a conservative body weight of 500 kgs per cow, that comes to a total nutrition requirement of a colossal 1,500 MT in feed. The equivalent in chickens would have required a delivery of 75,000 chickens or 330 MT in feed. Yet it would have cost the groom a good deal more to supply 75,000 chickens than the 300 cows. Bizarre.

Either way, Zari's bride-price was still fairly inexpensive in comparison to the rubies of the proverb. Unlike most things in life, it remains impossible to place a price on virtue.

Far from the Madding Crowd

I was very happy to watch the classic 1967 film of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd on TCM last night. The closest I had been to Hardy in recent years was the 2011 film of Posy Simmonds' cartoon strip heroine Tamara Drewe (characters and story inspired by Far from the Madding Crowd), entertaining in its own way, but with none of the raw passion and drama of Hardy's novel.

Besides the grand scale of the story and the excellence of the four principal actors, John Schlesinger's direction and Nicolas Roeg's wonderful cinematography and use of the Dorset countryside make the film a joy to watch. Its slow pace and intensity of emotion, especially in Boldwood's tragic obsession with Bathsheba, made me appreciate the extent to which the breakneck speed and special effect of modern cinema is destroying it as an artform.

I was also very interested in the depiction of late 19th century agriculture in England. Many scenes from the film are very reminiscent of the manual farming techniques used by the vast majority of African smallholder farmers, except that oxen and heavy horses appear to have been used much more for soil tillage. Experts estimate that less than 10% of agricultural land in Africa is tilled using animals. Given the widespread ownership of cattle in East Africa, it used to baffle me why the use of animal traction is not more common. Recently, I found a plausible explanation in John Reader's excellent history, Africa: Biography of a Continent. He attributes this apparent mystery to the harshness of the East and Southern African environment. As temperatures increase during the dry season, both forage and water for cattle become harder to find. Cattle therefore are at their weakest when the planting season begins at the onset of the rains, and simply do not have the strength to provide enough power to till the rock-hard ground. Contrast this with the pre-mechanical era in Northern Europe, where fields could be ploughed at the beginning of winter using well-fed animals, ready to be manually sowed in springtime.

The Lady with the Dog

It's time for my annual eulogy to Anton Chekhov. While I was returning from Lilongwe to Nairobi last Thursday, I eschewed Kenya Airways in-flight entertainment in favour of a book of Chekhov's short stories. Is there a better writer of short stories? I haven't found one yet. The Lady with the Dog is a perfect example, available online at http://chekhov2.tripod.com/197.htm. Bittersweet, tender, and beautifully-observed.

Call me Mzungu

White visitors to East Africa will very quickly understand the meaning of the word "mzungu". For a long period, I assumed that it was a direct reference to skin colour, but in fact it is derived from the linguistic root zungu, which in most Bantu languages means to wander about aimlessly. A comment, then, on behaviour rather than skin colour. Not so surprising, when one thinks back to the apparently aimless wandering that characterised the early European exploration of the African interior.

Regardless of its derivation, there is no doubt that mzungu now means "white". A day seldom goes by when children in my neighbourhood (who must see me almost every day) shout "mzungu" as I drive past. It is common currency on the street and in the media. And mzungus (more properly bazungu) themselves use it playfully when referring to one another.

Much as it can be irritating at times, I was surprised when a Ugandan friend asked me whether or not I thought it was a racist expression. After a few moments' consideration, I replied that I thought it probably was. My reasoning was that just as in the same way that the English use of the word "frog" or "kraut" were derogatory slang expressions for French and German people, so "mzungu" probably fell into the same category. When I expressed this view, my friend disagreed, on the grounds that we had very different histories, and that I fundamentally misunderstood what racism is.

I was reminded of this discussion by a radio item covering the English football race-row furore when a former black Premier League footballer expressed his view that there is no absolute definition of racism: rather, it depends on the context of the event and the perception of the person to whom the event is addressed. That is to say, if I believe that it is racist, then it is racist. At the time, this seemed absurd to me - surely there needed to be an objective, rather than subjective, test of what constitutes racism.

Having thought about it in more depth, I am beiginning to understand. Racism is, in essence, an unpleasant form of bullying or harassment, which depends on context, on history and on individual perception. Just as bullying or harassment is generally directed by the strong to the weak, by the haves to the have-nots, so racism is directed by the majority to the minority, by the settler to the colonized, or by the slaver to the enslaved. While mzungu therefore might be a racial expression, to speak of it being racist could only be true under very particular circumstances of the abuse of power by the majority.

There are variations on the T-shirt pictured above, my favourite of which is "Don't call me Mzungu". I wouldn't want to wear it, though. Since my discovery of the derivation of the word, I feel very happy to be thought of as an aimless wanderer through life.