Bank President offer to end company closure - just a silk purse from a rat's ear solution!

“You cannot make a silk purse out of sow’s ear!” so says the common sense adage. Zimbabweans, out of stubborn stupidity, have been pouring millions of dollars and breaking their backs trying to do just that – make a silk purse out of sow’s ear! No wonder the country is in a total mess, of course, but worst of all is stuck there!

I had first-hand experience of this mentality of make a silk purse from a pig’s ear. In the early 1990s Zimbabwe had its first serious load shedding because ZESA could not supply enough electrical power to meet the demand hence the need to cut off supply to some of the consumers.

That year Angola, the catchment of the Zambezi River, had poor rains and therefore the inflow into Kariba Dam was going to be the lowest in decades. The total amount of power generated from the Dam was therefore going to be the lowest in decades too. Me and a select few other ZESA middle managers who cared enough to be concerned took it upon ourselves to warn senior managers of the situation and recommended that ZESA should start planned and managed load shedding in which customers will be asked to switch boilers in their houses, domestic consumers will be switch off in batches, etc.

The Minister of Energy in his infinite wisdom, we were told, had issued a directive that there was to be no load shedding, ZESA was continue to generate to meet the country’s demand for electrical power. 

So the nation continued to consume electrical power as if everything was normal until water level in Kariba Dam dropped to the level where the operators had no choice but to stop the generators.  One third of the generation capacity was taken off the system at a flick of a switch. The morning Kariba Hydro was first taken off the grid an number of generators at Hwange Power Station and other thermal power stations dotted tripped out on overload and the whole country had no supply for three or four hours.

When power was finally restored whole blocks of consumers were switched off to prevent over loading the system again; the beginning of unplanned, chaotic and wholesale load shedding. Most companies in this day and age require electricity in their production process and so production fall significantly because of ZESA’s load shedding. Switching off whole blocks of consumers without warning, which ZESA was then forced to do because of the force reduced generation at Kariba,  made an very bad situation a lot worse.  What a fcuk up!

So the Minister of Enery’s directive was more like make a silk purse out of a rat’s ear!

Following the countrywide blackout Zimbabwe’s parliament met and, in their infinite wisdom, the politicians issued a directive to ZESA to look into “installing pumps downstream of the generators to pump the used water back into the dam so it would not be wasted”.  Those pumps will need electrical power to operate them and so all the output from Kariba will have to be taken off the grid to supply the pumps. Indeed given the generators losses plus the pump losses, additional power will be required from the system to pump all the water back. Kariba Dam was built to supply the nation with electricity not to use up electricity. This was one directive that was immediately filed straight in the bin with the accompaniment of a loud NXAAA!!

Chaotic load shedding is now a permanent feature in Zimbabwe’s chaotic economy, chaotic politics and chaotic everything! New generation projects that should have come on stream decades ago have yet to start because of political interference and indecision. ZESA management is yet to come up with a well-planned and managed load shedding so the nation can make the most of what it has.

Zimbabwe is in this economic mess because so many Zimbabweans have for years been trying to make silk purses out of rats’ ears, especially when that comes as a directive from the government. After 35 years it is shocking that there are still some people still burning the midnight oil and breaking their backs bend double over a rat’s ear!

Bankers Association of Zimbabwe (BAZ) president Sam Malaba said ailing companies must approach their bankers first for assistance before applying for judicial management.

“Please do not rush for judicial management, talk to us before rushing to the courts. The courts won’t be your salvation,” he said, addressing captains of industry at an economic symposium on Thursday.

“Our solution is not to close your business.”

Here we go again; we are still trying to make an unworkable system work.

Companies have been closing in Zimbabwe because government has repeatedly failed the problems of mismanagement and corruption in the bloated public sector and parastatals which wastefulness has become such a burden too heavy for the private sector to carry.

The root cause of the mismanagement and corruption is the army of MPs, CEO of parastatals like ZESA, etc. who are corrupt and incompetent; they do not have a clue what they are doing. Fire these useless busy bodies! None of them have ever been fired of course because they are the product of the Mugabe’s political patronage system; they are in these positions as their reward for keeping the tyrant and the regime in power.

Mugabe and Zanu PF’s primary goal was back in 1980 and still is today to establish a de facto one-party (Zanu PF) and one-man (Robert Gabriel Mugabe) dictatorship and the political patronage system is the vehicle needed to make that possible. The down side of the system was that it has resulted in the criminal and economically unsustainable waste of human and material resources. But instead of dismantling it Mugabe has dictated, in his infantile wisdom, that we all make the unworkable system work.

Of course Mr Sam Malaba KNOWS mismanagement and corruption are the milestones dragging the Zimbabwe economy into the abyss and forcing companies to close. As president of BAZ he would have heard this said to him a million times in the last year alone. He also knows dismantle the political patronage system behind the criminal waste is a political untouchable and so he is doing his best within the matchbox confines dictated by Mugabe.

As long as the underlying problems of mismanagement and corruption remain, there will be more company closures, regardless of BAZ president Sam Malaba’s promise to stop further closures. Instead of taking the opportunity to remind Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa and all the other government of officials who attend the symposium of the desperate need for government to bite the bullet and end the mismanagement and corruption Mr Malaba want to impress the Minister by assuring him he can save company from closures even with the milestones round their necks.

So; drum roll! Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mr Sam Malaba, the president ZAB, the man who stop further company closures in Zimbabwe regardless of the country doing nothing to end the unsustainable waste of resources due to mismanagement and corruption. Mr Malaba has proven he can make the unworkable work; he has produced the world’s first silk purse from a rat’s ear!

Whatever next!? Sam Malaba could revive the MPs’ perpetual energy generating machine at Kariba Dam and solve all the country’s and world’s energy problems! With people like Mr Malaba still trying to do the impossible after 35 years of trying it is little wonder the country is not just in a mess but has no hope of ever getting out.