Something from nothing

Long ago, President Daniel arap Moi decided that Kenya should stop being a third world country, and like all the other world powers start to make cars. They would be called Nyayo, his national slogan. The staff of the Nairobi technical university were instructed to develop the prototype, and sure enough a boxy Fiat 124 lookalike was duly produced, and driven around the Nyayo Stadium by His Excellency himself.

I, I’m sorry to say, sneered at the idea, knowing it was a waste of money, and that Kenya would never be able to compete in the car business. When it fizzled out, it wasn’t even worth saying “I told you so” because it was such an absurd project. And that was my reaction a few years later, in 1992, when the first mobile phone masts were being erected in Nairobi. “Ridiculous,” I said, “who on earth will be able to afford them?”

How wrong can one be? A little wrong? Just wrong? Completely wrong? Wrong wrong? I was all of those, because now Kenya’s mobile phone usage is so widespread that everyone’s got one. What’s more they are being used to incredible effect – for banking and money transfers, market information, following government expenditure – you name it, Kenya’s got an application, often homegrown, for everything, which makes the little devices almost indispensable.

The Congo has got a long way to go before it reaches that stage. The country is so vast that coverage will be totally uneconomic for many communities. But in the main towns and on the main routes, they are universal. Many people have two or three, and the first thing everyone does in a meeting is to lay their phones out on the table in front of them. It is not just bureaucrats who have them: everyone does, from the smallest market woman or farmer, to the taxi drivers and building labourer.

But there’s one big problem. If you don’t have electricity, how do you charge it? It’s strange that there has been almost no penetration of solar chargers here, probably because they are so expensive. Instead, people have to snatch charging time whenever and wherever they can find an electrical outlet. The first thing that people do when they come to the office is to ask for somewhere to charge their phone. People on the move, like drivers have a particularly difficult time: ten minutes here, thirty minutes there.

So along the street, there are people who sell charging time. Their presence is advertised by huge boards with about 30 socket outlets on them. You simply pay 100 francs (10 US cents) or so, and plug it in for however long you need.

But the charging stations also need electricity. Where can someone sitting at the edge of the road get it from? No problem: most of the main roads have street lights, and even if the lights themselves aren’t working, which is normal, the electricity in the lamp poles is. So, the cover is gently removed from the base of the pole, a plug is fitted, and hey-presto, there’s the power for your charging board. And while you’re at it, you might as well use the power for other stuff, such as a photocopying machine.

It’s not just phone chargers who “borrow” electricity. Householders do too. Right next to our office is an army camp. If you live there and want electricity, you have only to ask the local electrician (who maintains his monopoly status by any means necessary) to make the connection for you. For his normal fee he will take a wire from the local substation and it will be draped over a variety of walls, through trees, this way and that until it reaches your house. Little coloured scarecrow indicators of plastic are tied at intervals on each wire so that you know whose is whose. A very satisfactory arrangement. And when the electricity company starts to disconnect all these wires all that is required is a tiny show of force by the “customers” with machine guns to put an end to that nonsense. What’s the point of being in the army if you can’t play with your guns?

Unfortunately, the monopolistic electrician isn’t that careful. Often his wires droop very low, and are hit by a passing lorry or bus. Sparks fly and people get nasty electric shocks. Traffic is blocked for hours while he is hunted down to sort it out.

Taking a flimsy wire (very flimsy) for a couple of lights is one thing, but sometimes bigger fish try to do the same. They dig up the road, and secretly try to attach their grand house to the main cable, bypassing various safety devices. The results are usually disastrous. Three weeks ago there was sparking and arcing in the street like a firework display, followed by blackout. Last week-end someone else tried the something similar and the wires of the main fused together, thus putting out of action one phase of the supply to our office.

Getting something for nothing is an attractive proposition, but sometimes amateur electricians get fried. Mortally fried. Maybe someone upstairs has decided that there should be limits to what you should get from nothing.

Snacking

Street food says a lot about a place. The ubiquitous hot dog stands in New York, the little bicycle kitchens in Bangkok, the chip stalls in Germany and the chestnut sellers in London’s winter all bring character to a place.

There’s something similar here. At each street corner there will be several woman with mini-baguettes in a metal bowl. For people who cannot walk to get their food, such as security guards and maids, there are ambulant ones too. Their equipment is very simple: margarine, a huge jar of peanut butter and a knife. So you can buy your bread with or without filling. Less common are the mobile sandwich makers. They carry polony sausage, and for some reason seem to always be men.

The other main snack is boiled eggs. These are always carried piled high, like a pyramid, on top of egg crates, which are in turn carried on top of the sellers head. It looks incredibly precarious, but you never see any accidents.

For the more serious snackers, there are omelettes. Your typical omelette stall is a tiny table on which is a cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box is a primus stove, or possibly a gas ring. It is kept inside the box to prevent it being blown out by the wind, and the omelette is served on a metal plate with salt and chilli sauce.

And then, of course, there are the two stand-bys: bananas and peanuts. The peanuts are sometimes raw, but usually have been roasted in a dry frying pan and then salted. Their skins are slightly blackened.

The great thing about street food is it’s cheap and fresh. But for us high-end earners it’s not something that we often try, though I have a fairly regular stop at one of the bread sellers on my way home from work. She’s one of the few who gets her bread in the afternoon, and it is simply delicious.

Talking of snacking, there’s a very good bakery near one of the supermarkets where we often go for a post-shopping cappuccino and an almond croissant. It was after such a pleasurable, if expensive, break that she who must be obeyed was propositioned by the manageress when leaving: “you have to try our new bread,” while handing her a little piece to taste. There was something about her manner which suggested that everybody who is anybody was buying it these days.

The loaf was in complete contrast to the pure whiteness of a baguette – roughish in texture, brown, and even slightly burned at the edges, with strong peasant grooves across the top. (See the photo, with the standard street mini-baguette alongside it). The sales patter continues. The flour was made by a specialist miller in Belgium, and the loaf contains nuts.

“Delicious,” she said, and before you could say Jack Robinson was walking out of the shop with said loaf. That was when reality struck: looking at the change it was clear that she had been overcharged. But no, there it was, in black and white on the sales slip: one baguette, $1; two croissants, $4; one special loaf of bread $10. That makes it 50 times more expensive than the mini-baguettes that I buy. You cringe when you think about prices like that: it is almost wicked to spend so much on a mere loaf of bread, and not a big one either. But was it worth it? If you compare it with a bottle of wine of the same price, for some people the choice might be difficult. But will we buy it again? What do you think?

The Good Old Days - Don't Cry for Me, Likasi

Almost a year ago I wrote of a mining township on the edge of Likasi which one of my colleagues described as paradise: it had a civic grandeur, it was clean and there was a timeless sense of order. It was set in beautiful rolling green countryside. A combination so rare in the Congo that my colleague was tempted to somewhat exaggerate.

In massive contrast to that paradise, the next day we were taken to see the municipal swimming pool – abandoned for almost twenty years since the pillages.

How much more poignant it is to see jolly places in ruins than government buildings. The design speaks of afternoons of gaiety and fun. One imagines the delicate colonial wives in the one-piece swimsuits sitting under the broad veranda drinking lemonade, with their little children running around boisterously.

At week-ends a band would play on the little stage, and the careworn population would let their hair down, metaphorically, in the form of a thé dansant. During the holidays the youth would spend most of their day there, playing basketball, swimming and eyeing the opposite sex with a great deal of interest and hope.

This pool was long and deep enough to allow serious swimming and diving competitions, and one imagines that every three months or so they had galas, which everyone who was anyone attended.

It was a place of escape and fun.

After Independence, the clientele changed in colour but the pool retained its role as a popular spot, especially at the week-ends. That was then.

And now? Hens play on the bar, a couple of pigs root around on the basketball field. The walls are crumbling, the windows are all broken. Goats feast on the grass growing along the front. Four rusting vehicles adorn the parking lot in front: tyres flat, windows broken. Ghosts, like everything else, of times gone by. Squatters inhabit the staff accommodation.

But yesterday we held a session to invite private investors to redevelop the place, and bring it back to its former glory. The process had been a long time in the making – feasibility studies, training on public private partnerships, advertising for expressions on interest and so on.

And now was the moment when these hard headed businessmen were going to be shown the project, and sneeringly turn away, muttering “what do you take us for?”

Could or would they see the possibilities for making something really fun, an absolute first in the cultural and entertainment desert which is Likasi. Were they willing to take the risk?

“Yes, we love it,” they said, not just one, but all of them.

There’s hope yet.

Goma

This is a tourist entry. At the north end of Lake Kivu, 2 ½ hours by speedboat, lies Goma – the site of the massive refugee camps after Rwanda’s genocide, and home to one of the world’s full-time active volcanoes.

Our journey, in the cool sunshine of the early morning, is uneventful. The boat is modern, with about 70 seats in the interior. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to sit outside: I think I understand why, as the boat goes really fast.

When we arrive at Goma we drive up a really rough farm track to reach the main road, which, much like all the roads in Goma, is also something of a farm track. This takes us along the edge of the lake where hundreds of women are doing their laundry while small boys are playing in the water. A timeless view at any waterfront in Africa.

Then into the town. With one or two exceptions the buildings all seem half finished or seriously dilapidated. This, combined with the swirling dust of the road and the lack of anything which you could consider modern, gives it an almost quaint atmosphere of a frontier town – 1880s style.

The hotel – called the Cap Kivu – is in complete contrast. It’s got a beautiful snack bar at the edge of the lake, a fountain graced by real live crested cranes, and looks really attractive. Inside the floors are marble and the rooms are large.

BUT. And this is where the Congo lets itself down every time. The shower system seems to rely on a lethal system by which you, the guest, are supposed to stuff naked electric wires into a socket, and presumably hold it there while the water gets hot, because if you don’t hold it it falls out. So, in effect, there’s no hot water. Very strange when the owners have spent a fortune building the place.

But there are other things are clearly much more important. The hotel wants to distinguish itself from the frontier town atmosphere of “anything goes” so there’s a helpful list of do’s and don’ts, (in French and English, no less), which includes the normal requirements to register with the front desk, and the need to hand valuables into the reception.

And then:

1. Customers of the same sex can not share the same room.

2. Any customer with a woman must submit an identity card which proves they are married.

So, there may be a lot of killing going on round here, but at least we don’t have to worry about immorality.

By the way, this is blog number 150!

Bukavu

It was only just over a week ago that I was quoting from the report of our office in Bukavu, and here I am.

This is the third visit and I’m amazed by the obvious prosperity. As you drive on the (new, chinese-built) road from the airport you are struck by the lush fields, the beautifully dressed school children, and the newly painted houses in the many villages on the way. From time to time you come across the ultimate symbol of success, Bukavu-style – an elaborately dormered, steep roofed, caricature of a Belgian farmhouse. You can sense the pride with which the owner ambles around it in the evenings, and the elaborate respect that the other villagers must give the owner of such a building.

Like Uganda – which is just round the corner, so to speak, the area is blessed with an all year rainfall in which bananas grow like weeds, so no one need ever grow hungry. But yet, this lush Garden of Eden is poisoned by rampaging bandits, violent militias who will stop at nothing, and out of control armies. They rape, they pillage and they destroy, making whole areas uninhabitable. So what has happened it that people are increasingly coming to live in the town, simply for security: and in so doing are turning themselves from self sufficient peasants to refugees begging for their next meal.

Just in front of our office there is a grocer’s shop which stocks goods imported from Europe – so it proudly says on the shop front. Every Friday, this shop is the magnet for all poor women in Bukavu: the proprietrix has told her staff that no matter how many there are, everyone who is in need must be given a food parcel. It’s not much – some rice, salt and oil, maybe – but it means a lot to the destitute refugees. What, I asked, is the story behind this generosity? I was told that the woman came from a very poor family, but as a girl she managed to get accepted into an excellent trade school, where she trained as a carpenter. She then worked in a furniture factory in Bukavu, where she met a Belgian. Remarkably, for those times, they married and ended up in Belgium. He later died, leaving everything to her, and with some of that money she started her shop.

Yesterday, as we drove out of the office, I was overcome with admiration: both at the women waiting for their food, and for the owner. The beneficiaries were sat in neat, flawlessly neat, rows on the ground, just waiting and waiting, probably about 70 of them. There was no doubting their poverty: their clothes were torn, thin and grubby.

So yes, there’s poverty. But there’s also no denying the prosperity. Where does it come from?

The moment you arrive at the airport you are made aware of the magnitude of the UN peace-keepers’ presence. There are Pakistani camps, Bangladeshi camps, Guatamalan camps. In town there are huge UN facilities to manage logistics, vehicle maintenance, and so on.

And in the main hotel, the world is buzzing with international experts, all spending their easily earned cash with abandon. Their 4 x 4s fill the car park, proudly proclaiming World Food Programme, Medecins san Frontiers, Oxfam, Save the Children and the International Red Cross.

Along the main street, it’s the same: you see sign after sign of NGOs.

That’s it, of course. It’s not the work that we do, but the money we spend which has brought the prosperity. Aren’t we useful?