Yee-hah!
At last someone has taken notice; and it’s none other than Mr Robert Kiyosaki, he of the ultimate capitalist bible, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The property tycoon and real estate mogul has sent an invitation in my name. Count me in!
This particular missive is addressed with my very own website (apparently they can do that!) and a very personal method; David, it reads, “no matter what happens….your financial crisis could come to an end”
Hallelujah!
I have become fascinated in past two years by what I can only term capitalist literature. I am currently reading Warren Buffett’s biography. And Mr Buffett makes money like he is picking leaves. He makes money as a full-time pastime – a maths genius who has constructed the ultimate money-making machine – find a company that is struggling, buy it, and build it up.
I am also reading Trump’s money making ideas and philosophies. Rambuctious and loud, bordering on the obnoxious, Donald Trump is one of my favourite guys. On a recent trip to New York I made sure to glimpse his various towers, like a pilgrim to the temple of the god Mormon, even if it was from a tour bus. It turns out that everyone in New York hates him; or maybe they are just envious of his success and can’t bring themselves to love him.
I am sure my grade 7 teacher, one Mr LT Zungunde must be shaking his head in disbelief and consternation. It was he who indoctrinated our pre-teen minds with communist nonsense. In those days we would walk to Queensway, the road leading from Harare International Airport into the city and line up to wave “revolutionary and warm greetings” to visiting heads of states – KK (Kenneth Kaunda), Mwalimu Nyerere and, Mr Zungunde’s favourite, Comrade Samora Machel. In all fairness we also went to greet Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and she sat there in her cavalcade under Zimbabwe sun, her radiating royalty in the open topped vintage Rolls Royce (the very one that takes Robert Mugabe to the official opening of parliament where he invariably rails against all things British, except the royal family).
So, the morning after Samora Machel’s death in a suspicious plane crash, Mr LT Zungunde came to class very angry and aggrieved. After a whole morning of hearing him harangue and condemn the apparent “perptrators” of this “heinous and cowardly act” which had “prematurely and tragically” ended the life of “one of Africa’s greatest revolutionary sons” we were ready to take up arms against the “apartheid regime”, South Africa. I sometimes remember those times when I see the ingratitude that South Africans show to Zimbabweans. Yes, we also fought for their freedom, even if it was in the classroom (but that is another story for another time).
Mr Sharples was Scottish and he kind of just appeared at the school one time – almost from nowhere – a gangly silver-haired white man with an easy smile. Later on we understood that he was Nasho’s “father”. He had adopted Nasho and his brothers after their father, Mr Sharples’ gardener died, and he lived with them in his own house like his own children. Mr Sharples had had his own children but he was estranged from his wife. Mt Sharples, tall and slender and with an easy toothy grin was also a keen golfer who mentored and coached Nasho Kamungeremu to the Zimbabwe Junior Open championship and beyond. In time, and for about four years, he was to be “father’ too, paying my way through secondary school in my father’s absence.
He must be chuckling in his grave, Peter Sharples, at my apparent conversion to his capitalist way of thinking. He once asked me that if everyone is equal and paid the same (like in the communist state that I was a disciple of), what would be the incentive for people to work. I didn’t understand that question but I blurted out an answer that convinced me…
Mr Sharples was a counter-poise to Mr LT Zungunde’s revolutionary zeal, and thank God for that. He probably thinks that it was all that counter-revolutionary propaganda that saved me and has me bowing at Rich Dad’s knees, but actually it’s just reality that has bitten me, and the poverty that has me beaten! A little more money never hurt anyone.
And a lot of money will probably save the world. Warren Buffett, the wealthiest self-made millionaire (nay, billionaire) in the world teamed up with Bill Gates to launch the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince fellow billionaires to give half of their wealth away. In the US there are 403 of those super-rich persons. Already Buffett, a key funder in the Bill and Melinda Gates (BMG) Foundation, has previously said that his is to give away 99% of his wealth before he dies; he is making a difference in many ways. The Gates Foundation gives money to education, health, the arts and every aspect of life you can think of both in the US and across the developing world. The recently announced breakthrough in the anti-HIV microbicide owes it’s success in part due to funding from these philanthropists.
And this is my new ideology – no more of that comrade stuff – I now believe in philanthropic capitalism. It seems to be that the fallacy that it takes a village to the change the world, an African truism we are told, is perhaps incomplete. Rather, it takes one man, or one woman, one individual with a singular vision (and bagful of money) to save the village first before it can save the world.
So…Mr Kiyosaki, sir how can I can I be a rich papa..?
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Zimbabwe at the end of 2010
Zimbabwe’s so-called recovery is now visible on the streets of Harare. Plastic bottles and all manner of discarded packages – evidence of increased consumption, perhaps, and reduced desperation.
There was a time when there was so little that even rubbish was scarce. Also in the growing behinds of Harare’s women, jeans being the newly found fashion and the sagging bellies of the city’s gentlemen, is a tale of improved conditions. The women on the streets are mostly young, some made up, all with fashioned hair – a boon to the Korean fake hair / horse hair / human hair traders. In America, they have made their millions from the African-American women who never thought to take over that trade and keep the money in their communities (but that’s another story, and it will probably get me in trouble anyway).
The men on Harare’s streets are also dressed better than last December, when I was here last. There is a newfound bounce in their step. All in all, despite the internecine wars raging in this wildebeest (GNU) of a government, there is a quiet confidence pervading Harare and the country. We the armchair critics would have preferred not the GNU but a big bang, a tsunami to sweep away the old and usher in a new republic. But things seldom happen that way….
Seeing Zimbabweans walking with increasing levels of self-assurance (we have generally never been arrogant people), you thank God for where we are as a country; and pray for more peace; more power. Perhaps, I am tempted to think if the parties in this marriage could co-exist like all normal human beings in matrimony (holy or otherwise), coalition is not a bad thing. Look at Britain and how there is much less arguing and much more doing since David Cameron got ‘married’ to that Clegg fellow. Contrast that to Obama’s America where the partisanship is hurting the country and holding it back in many ways.
The self-assurance and confidence seem to also show up in the congestion of traffic – a metaphor perhaps to show that this country is on the move but is maybe caught up in traffic jam. The price of fuel has stabilized, the chronic shortages of 2 years ago seem distant memories. Where bicycles and pedestrians used to outnumber cars (an environmentalist’s utopia, no doubt) now cars, buses and mini-buses snake their way for miles on end during peak periods. A journey from the North to the Eastern suburbs took me an hour and half; previously it would have been half an hour. Not that it snarls up a la Chinese highway to Tibet, but with non-functional traffic lights and limited lanes, it’s bumper to bumper. But surprisingly good-natured.
The commuter taxi drivers dive in and out of traffic like heron into a sardine run, making their own rules as they go along. They make double lanes out of singles. One morning we were suddenly driving down a cycle track on the opposite side of the main road and none of the passengers was surprised or complained. Normalizing the abnormal, I thought, Masipula Sithole’s prophecy coming to mind.
You have to feel sorry for the pedestrian in all this. There are few pedestrian crossings at traffic lights, cars turn with no regard to the pedestrian’s supreme and universal legal rights over cars. Even at the few ‘Zebra Crossings’ where pedestrians should have supreme right of way, cars zoom past with no regard to the poor-destrain. It’s as if drivers will stop only if they saw a Zebra! This is Zimbabwe, you get out of the way or you get hurt!
So, Zimbabwe is on it’s way to recovery, in it’s own clumsy, unpredictable way. Really. Perhaps. For now.
Harare will probably never be New York, or London or Cape Town. It will certainly not be the city we knew growing up in the 1980s and which we all hoped and dreamt would grow up into a Geneva or an Amsterdam. It is Harare, and will always be. A vibrant African city, capital of a mediocre to average African country, post-colonial, post-conflict, struggling to go from bad to average and then perhaps, to good. (No “good to great” here Mr Collins).
And as long as political rivalries remain out of sight, all will be OK. For now. Maybe. It could all go up in flames with the heated talk of an election. And in the greater scheme of things, the world wouldn’t care a hoot.
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There was a time when there was so little that even rubbish was scarce. Also in the growing behinds of Harare’s women, jeans being the newly found fashion and the sagging bellies of the city’s gentlemen, is a tale of improved conditions. The women on the streets are mostly young, some made up, all with fashioned hair – a boon to the Korean fake hair / horse hair / human hair traders. In America, they have made their millions from the African-American women who never thought to take over that trade and keep the money in their communities (but that’s another story, and it will probably get me in trouble anyway).
The men on Harare’s streets are also dressed better than last December, when I was here last. There is a newfound bounce in their step. All in all, despite the internecine wars raging in this wildebeest (GNU) of a government, there is a quiet confidence pervading Harare and the country. We the armchair critics would have preferred not the GNU but a big bang, a tsunami to sweep away the old and usher in a new republic. But things seldom happen that way….
Seeing Zimbabweans walking with increasing levels of self-assurance (we have generally never been arrogant people), you thank God for where we are as a country; and pray for more peace; more power. Perhaps, I am tempted to think if the parties in this marriage could co-exist like all normal human beings in matrimony (holy or otherwise), coalition is not a bad thing. Look at Britain and how there is much less arguing and much more doing since David Cameron got ‘married’ to that Clegg fellow. Contrast that to Obama’s America where the partisanship is hurting the country and holding it back in many ways.
The self-assurance and confidence seem to also show up in the congestion of traffic – a metaphor perhaps to show that this country is on the move but is maybe caught up in traffic jam. The price of fuel has stabilized, the chronic shortages of 2 years ago seem distant memories. Where bicycles and pedestrians used to outnumber cars (an environmentalist’s utopia, no doubt) now cars, buses and mini-buses snake their way for miles on end during peak periods. A journey from the North to the Eastern suburbs took me an hour and half; previously it would have been half an hour. Not that it snarls up a la Chinese highway to Tibet, but with non-functional traffic lights and limited lanes, it’s bumper to bumper. But surprisingly good-natured.
The commuter taxi drivers dive in and out of traffic like heron into a sardine run, making their own rules as they go along. They make double lanes out of singles. One morning we were suddenly driving down a cycle track on the opposite side of the main road and none of the passengers was surprised or complained. Normalizing the abnormal, I thought, Masipula Sithole’s prophecy coming to mind.
You have to feel sorry for the pedestrian in all this. There are few pedestrian crossings at traffic lights, cars turn with no regard to the pedestrian’s supreme and universal legal rights over cars. Even at the few ‘Zebra Crossings’ where pedestrians should have supreme right of way, cars zoom past with no regard to the poor-destrain. It’s as if drivers will stop only if they saw a Zebra! This is Zimbabwe, you get out of the way or you get hurt!
So, Zimbabwe is on it’s way to recovery, in it’s own clumsy, unpredictable way. Really. Perhaps. For now.
Harare will probably never be New York, or London or Cape Town. It will certainly not be the city we knew growing up in the 1980s and which we all hoped and dreamt would grow up into a Geneva or an Amsterdam. It is Harare, and will always be. A vibrant African city, capital of a mediocre to average African country, post-colonial, post-conflict, struggling to go from bad to average and then perhaps, to good. (No “good to great” here Mr Collins).
And as long as political rivalries remain out of sight, all will be OK. For now. Maybe. It could all go up in flames with the heated talk of an election. And in the greater scheme of things, the world wouldn’t care a hoot.
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