MAR-A-9
DEPARTING MALAWI AND SEPARATING
FROM
MY SAFARIING FRIENDS,
AS I GO FROM LILONGWE THROUGH NAIROBI TO
AMSTERDAM AND THEN RETURN ON THE LONG HAUL HOME—
FOR
THE BAREST OF BREAKS BEFORE DEPARTURE FOR CUBA!
Mar. 7—9, 2002
I am headed across to Central Africa, and then up the Great Rift Valley toward Kenya on Kenya Air KQ422, which I boarded in LLW. I was unaware upon checking in with my single Action Packer that I would be making an intermediate stop in yet another of the African capitals of basket case states, and flew an hour to Lusaka Zambia. So, I have just touched down in LUSA at 15* 19.33 S, 28* 26.39 E, as I return to NBO, my jumping off point for leaving the first of three continents for this series of flights to, and through home to a Caribbean fourth.
I left the Baptist Guest House In Lilongwe and said farewells to George and Betty Poehlman and Jon and Mary Bennett Poehlman and John Sutter to whom I loaned my Nikon N8008 with its 28—70mm and 70-210mm telephoto lens, so that they can do some serious wildlife watching and photography. Right about now they are boarding the boat to cross the Shire River to the Wilderness Safaris Wilderness Lodge, surrounded by hippos and crocs, and scores of tropical birds on their three-day holiday in Uvuu Reserve.
I visited briefly with Scott and Jennifer Rodehaver and their son Zack and daughter Hannah, with their new “family—a beautiful combination Great Dane, Black Lab and Rhodesian Ridgeback who has given birth to ELEVEN pups over the course of the last 24 hours. I dropped off with them my last Serial Letter B-5, and stored the incomplete Mar-A-series on his computer to be sent as emails when and if they get disconnected phone service restored, assuming you had received the completed Feb-C-series forwarded by Elizabeth as she left six days earlier from the CCAP coordinators’ house on her return to Washington.
PROUD TO BE A
MEMBER!
“HIPC” AND THE
MORAL HAZARD OF LOAN “FORGIVENESS”
Lilongwe is this
week the proud host of the
“COMMONWEALTH
HIGHLY INDEBTED POOR COUNTRIES
FINANCE MINISTERS’
FORUM”
The banners fro the “HIPC” conference are hanging over the streets of Lilongwe, in which each of the members of this elite club of permanent members can gather in style, to demand—of course—debt forgiveness. I would think that any kind of restructuring of a large debt would involve some form of guaranteed assurance that this deplorable state of affairs would not recur, but all the incentives are just the reverse. If this were done personally, I would imagine that some means would be designed so that someone would cut up their credit cards, restrain their lust after expensive outlays, increase their income by some effort and adapt an austerity budget, before anyone would consider doing business with them again. But, if the entity is a “HIPC” (what a great new PC name!), all the incentive is toward borrowing ever more money in a much bigger way as you come to the conference to demand that the loan be forgiven, since why should you be a piker to have a measly several billion dollar indebtedness forgiven when you could be a real winner with a trillion dollar jackpot? “Sin the more, that grace may abound!”
Why cannot I cut deals like this, but am supposed to instead be responsible for my actions which I cannot impute top others who foisted this strong drink upon me? That has been the American way, until the newer realities pressed in, with my status of zero indebtedness being positively un-American. Some examples of excess consumer spending on any desirable object through susceptibility to advertising are quite close to the family, when credit card debt can finance any style of living beyond current means. Here is the best example of “perverse incentive.”
The government of Malawi “purchased” 22 Mercedes limousines on the loan guarantors of the first world governments—the same organizations as have financed more than three quarters of all national expenditures in Malawi, more than 90% of Mozambique’s when I was there, with other even more egregious examples around the world, like Uzbekistan, somehow (read “graft”) over 100%.
It seemed a bit much for the next aspirant for the status of “President-for-Life” Mulluzu (to borrow a page from his 78 year old neighbor Robert Mugabe, or his predecessor the good Doctor Kumuzu Banda, or virtually every other “founding father” that defined power very simply as “mine forever,” to be passing out new Mercedes limousines to all his favorites of the Islamic faith and Yao tribe which are minorities but his own group. When this was decried in the public media, most of it from outside, for one of the few times, there was enough shaming of this egregious move to warrant that they postpone the lavish Eid presents. The Mercedes were garaged, and they were forced to put them up for sale at some discounted fraction of their purchase price, and one can only guess what the plans were for the cash proceeds.
But, how many buyers of Mercedes would you imagine there to be in a nation where 70% are in this minute in immediate danger of starvation, and at the time of the Mercedes scandal, the nation’s main road—the M-1 I have just come down—was not paved and was nearly impassable in the rainy season? The Mercedes were garaged and guarded for two years as they devalued, awaiting presumably better times. My own guess as to when better times come to Africa you may already be able to guess, since my mark of progress in foreign aid remains to postpone yet another day the entropic collapse of this entire continent.
Now comes the Finance Ministers forum of the HIPC group of winner states. Bingo! Each of these wunderkind from this series of basket case failed nation-states needs a prestige vehicle! So, in setting a good example for the austerity they should impose on their own credit card debt consumers for such wild luxuries as Nsima, each of these HIPC finance ministers can now be seen cruising around the “new capital” city of Lilongwe in one of 22 like-new Mercedes limos with the red license tags of diplomats rather than the yellow license tags of Malawi. This goes on the expense account of gathering these finance ministers to Lilongwe to demand debt forgiveness as a way of balancing the next budget of almost all foreign donor aid.
I understand the welfare state, particularly when it is writ large, even though I have never been allowed to practice it when applied personally. Seeking a reliable, increasing and entitlement residual income as a permanent dependent seems to be one of the higher ambitions of many individual Africans I have met as mendicants and almost all of the HIPC countries whose whole goal is to get to latch onto the biggest purse, and suck sterling from the Commonwealth, Euros from the EEC, and/or—saints be praised—dollars from the single Super Power to be found anywhere into the predictable future.
So, the HIPC Forum is meeting in Lilongwe—in style. I have passed through Lilongwe, and spent the night in a rather comfortable, if Spartan, Baptist Guest House off Selous Road (imagine that!—a street named after the famous big game hunter abutting with Kumuzu Boulevard!) I paid for this out of personal resources (my last Kwachas) a whopping total of 650 Kwacha for the night—and that included a 20 Kwacha coke and was split with roommate John Sutter. This means I paid about five dollars for my Lilongwe night, and to the Guest House at Embangweni $75.00 US for fourteen days room and board in quite comfortable surroundings amid friends. The four hour night’s stay layover at the Intercontinental Nairobi for which I had been booked in my transit on the way here was a credit card guarantee of $290 until I found that charge item on my itinerary and “expunged it with prejudice.” Those same HIPC ministers might prefer to stay at the Intercontinental on the donor agencies credit line to straighten out the financing of their basket case ersatz states, but I had figured that it would require me to immigrate into Kenya on a separate visa from the transit lounge for the night, which would also require two taxis for round trip to downtown Nairobi (and not by Mercedes limo) and then averaging per hour of my stay in this pre-booked accommodation, less than the rest of my accommodation and board in Malawi cost! One of these extremes must be the real cost of living in a nation where a “postcard salesman” pursued me down the Lilongwe street desperate to sell me four mass-produced photo prints that he said were cards, starting a 100 Kwacha each and ending with the plea that he would give me four for five Kwacha (6 cents) because he was hungry and this would feed him for the next two days. The real costs of things against their prices are very different in this world as well as the developed one.
My seatmate who joined in Lusaka is a fellow who is going on to Uganda to help privatize their electric power company. He told me that the mark-up in oil is so high that it can be used for manipulation in political power. Due to the efficiencies that come from the economies of scale, the real cost of production of a barrel of oil in Saudi Arabia is 17 cents US. They cap any well that produces less than five thousand barrels per day as uneconomic. That kind of mark-up sounds almost like pharmaceutical company margins!
Almost all the fellow travelers on this flight are Moslem-dressed men with a few Kenyan women as well, with several high volume and high pitch business deals going down in the aisles, including one raucous scruffy looking “wired up and strung out” fellow jumping from seat to seat in his Pakistani costume and Moslem hat accosting each business passenger with big deals going down. “How many cell phones can you deliver to me? I know a fellow who is very well connected and can move all of them at a 2,000% margin, and we can split these profits 3:1. What’s that? You say you have photocopiers? I will make that 4:1 on the same deal?” OK, now I have seen the other side of this “balance” in the free market, but at least a half dozen other small time dealers ought to be able to quench the excesses of this fellow without calling in a government sinecure in a Mercedes limo at the Intercontinental!
The farewell dinner at Old Town and an Italian outdoor restaurant is another good example of a rather rigid market. I had said the farewell dinner of our gang was on me if we could find a place that took plastic. The restaurant said that they did, so we enjoyed a variety of pasta and drinks and then the bill came. I gave AmEx Gold. No go. I gave them Visa. No. MasterCard. No. It seems that the credit card they accept is a Diner’s Club and that only a local one. Well, can you take a check? Yes. On a US bank? No. What about US cash! Ah, that would be superb, let us go back and recalculate! They brought back the bill figuring that the exchange rate was 60K=$1.00 US, when the group had just got 74.5 at the bank downtown. So, the group ponied up the original bill in Kwacha and I contributed what the US currency would have been at closer to bank rates, which they banked in the fund for sundowners on the deck overlooking the hippo pool in my absence in the following days. So much for International currency exchange in the MicroEconomics 101
To recite a very old story in yet another setting, we went to the Unicom.net Internet Café for Jon to check his Internet email and—principally—to check on the basketball progress of March Madness toward the Final Four. He had trouble in a few tries. When he finished, I gave him the disc I had prepared to forward the Mar-A-series. “All we had to do is simply copy and paste the email addresses into the addressee and ‘attach” the Mar-A-series from the disc.” Right? That is what we did four times through three different servers with a net number of messages sent equal to zero—the same number of the vast majority of my Internet messages attempted from Dharamsala, Mindanao, and almost every other place that makes it “so very easy to communicate from almost anywhere.” This futility was operated by Jon Poehlman, not by me, and he is more Internet savvy than I using the Microsoft Outlook as his last attempt after the other servers failed him also. So, the storage of the same Mar-A-series with the second Cover Note (see Mar-A-10) in the Rodehavers’ email account on their computer awaiting the phone lines to be restored does not mean that it will arrive in your Inbox either, and my assumption that the Feb-C-series sent by Elizabeth with the cover note (see Mar-A-2) last week might have reached you already is also just a guess. I had received no incoming messages, at least, after forwarding the contact emails and faxes numbers through which I might be reached, but that may just indicate that there is less news transpiring there than there is here!
NAIROBI
KENYA
I am now on the ground in Nairobi, after looking from my window and seeing the “Roof of Africa” on which I had stood in 1996 atop Kilimanjaro. This might have represented my “Fourth Continental Roof” of the Seven Summits, although I am not yet advanced as far in the summiteering as I have been in the Seven Continents’ Club of the Marathon series! I had been reading about Mount Mulanje in Southern Malawi on the scarp that is piled up below the end of the Great Rift of Africa. The peak there is the highest in all of Southern Africa outside the Drakensberg in northern Umpulalanga, as northern Transvaal is now called. I must add the exploration of this scarp now to the other “next time” investigations into Malawi. That would add the tallest peak in Malawi—which even gets a dusting of snow here in the “Warm Heart of Africa,” south of the Equator by about 18* South—but of course, I was on an Equatorial Glacier on top of Mount Kilimanjaro in 1996 at 00*!
I have a very unique look here in the transit lounge. I am the one white face, and I have what might pass for an explorer/bushman’s look, with a white safari shirt (in substitute for my khaki safari outfit left for Embangweni distribution), so would probably not be taken for a European businessman. However, all around me, the look is not of the Bantu black African, but the Arabic, and even the Africans are dressed in Moslem robes and caps, with the women shrouded in burkas. The fellow right across from me is a long bearded Ethiopian robed Jewish monk—if there is such a thing, and an Eastern Orthodox prelate is also here. So, I am a very distinct minority here. This comes right after reading on the Kenya Airways flight both the Newsweek and Time magazine descriptions of the new world political order since 9/11 stating that not terrorism but an anti-modern anti-democratic brand of Islam is out of step with the march of man toward Francis Fukiyama’s “End of History” and that the Western mode will persist in triumph, if it is not annihilated by the destructive rear-guard sabotage of the reactionary Moslems who have about a 15% participation in the anti-modern revulsion. “If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, the new political reality is international relations in the global market of democratic states the US has fomented after 9/11.” Only one Islamic state has produced a democracy, and that has been Kamel Attaturk’s Turkey, which he made deliberately into a secular state. Saudi Wahabi reactionary Islam is to blame for non-liberal antidemocratic progress in the economic world, says Fukiyama, and if any nation could propose a modern Islam, it should be Iran, since no one there is a fundamentalist anymore except for some obsolete theocratic clerics in transient control of the government. Having hyperexcitable Moslem nuts like the fellow who kept jumping from seat to seat cutting deals after getting on the flight in Lilongwe passing my bag through an unattended X-Ray screening is now a spookier process than all of my previous travels through such places as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan. All the newspapers in this lounge have titles like “The Gulf Today”—of the non-Arabic titles I can read—and all the headlines are a body count of Palestinians killed today in yet another Israeli atrocity. That it is true does not change the reason they are the headlines. As the Time letters to the Editor stated about a fellow whom I just learned was George Poehlman’s Baptist classmate, the President of Enron, “Stating Kenneth Lake’s net assets without also revealing his liabilities makes Time guilty of the same “creative accounting” that it accuses Enron of in its collapse.” The same seems to be seen in the choice of headlines from different biases in reporting the same events here—and elsewhere.