Psychophant's Rants
1.5.13
Africa Notebook: Reflections, Angola
My main impressions of Angola are guns, cars, and multitudes moving around (usually by car). But also smiles, the soft sound of Portuguese, humidity and beer in the evening.
Luanda is difficult to describe. Take a moderately big city, half a million people. Add four million more (in the same place), half a million cars (mostly off-road, as the potholes can be over 20 cm deep) and a hundred skyscraper construction sites. Mix with a nominally communist government taking its clues from China but with most companies being Portuguese or Brazilian.
Everything, or almost everything, is paid up with oil money. Even a recently publicized car plant is just assembly, with all parts, including all the complex elements, shipped from China.
From a business point of view it is madness. It takes two hours to get to an industial area 17 km away from the hotel, or twenty minutes to get to a ministry you could walk in five minutes (but our minder indicated that it would be better to stay in the car). Containers take between 20 and 30 days just to bet processed through Luanda's port, because 90% of everything pass through it (and roughly 30% of the loads are lost along the way). Almost everything is imported, and expensive. The city is terribly expensive because there is only a half dozen of hotels and they are all full. Private security carries Uzi submachineguns, the police and the army, that are everywhere, as it seems all young males from 18 to 21 are in uniform sporting automatic weapons, Kalashnikov automatic rifles. Even so we saw the tenants of an squatter building, close to our hotel, gang up and beat up a police patrol, that shot their way out and did not return before we decided to leave the hotel for a while in case things got more "interesting". You could spot the veterans as they took cover behind columns instead of looking through the windows. That explained why one car in ten (rough statistic) has repaired bullet holes, with bodywork repair shacks around the labyrinthine huts that make up the neighbourhoods around the city centre. The only more widespread businesses were funeral houses and beauty parlours.
No business, from paints to detergents, manufactures in Angola, they ship bulk from somewhere else. So no business for us, except in water treatment. But that is state controlled. So we dealt with quite a few officials, from different ministries. As our local contact/guide indicated, "the price is not important, the important part is knowing who, and how much." The ratio here apparently is also 30%, but we will not need to deal with those aspects (and also will ignore who and how much) as we will be selling to an Angolan intermediary, someone both public and private. I felt he both wanted to improve the country and to get rich along the way, but I could not ignore that only the original half a million people have access to running water, and even that is not considered safe to drink, at least for unaccustomed foreigners. When you see mineral water is more expensive than beer, you start to see the connections, or all that beer is doing it for you.
Yet all people, from the waiters to the daughter of the owner of the biggest diamond mine, from officials to a girl selling cans in thue road, that I spoke to were optimistic. Things are improving, people see them improve, and they even see us, foreigners visiting Angola, as a good sign. I suppose that after thirty years of civil war it is easy to see things going better. It also helps that I could talk with most people, and most people were willing to talk, in that Spanish/Portuguese mix that Brazilians are spreading, not to mention the many Cubans still around. I have no idea what the people in the slums do, but they were all moving to one place or another, with shops and businesses everywhere, hand made signs offering food, oil services, the already mentioned car repairs, burials and make overs. But seeing hand painted signs of HP, Kyocera, Apple, bars with free wifi within the slums, or loads of food, you cannot help but feel it is lively. Maybe it is the youth of almost everyone you see, or the constant activity. You guess, and our guide confirms that much darker things go on inside, beyond the painted outskirts, that it is deliberate we have a bullet scarred companion and war veteran (though we cannot confirm if he is armed under his fitted Armani sport jacket).
We estimate that if all goes well in five years time there may well be some industrial structure to deal with. Or at least they will have taken enough mines out to allow access to several attractive touristic areas. In the meantime we might help improve water quality, which makes me a little warm inside, an improvement on most deals. We will see if the people still hope then.
¶ 10:28 AM
Africa Notebook: Reflections, South Africa
This last part has taken longer than expected, partly because I have been busy and in part because I needed some time to digest the impressions. It is somewhat overconfident to draw conclusions from three days in complex countries, but that is how I am.
South Africa, and that is a commonplace affirmation, suffers from great inequalities. The first tell-tale signs are the kilometres of barbed wire and razor wire separating the two parts, sometimes zigzagging in one street, sometimes isolating an enclave of one kind within the other. Even factories look like besieged fortresses, with the besiegers as a small army camped before the gates, asking for work, any job, even if it is a few hours cleaning or loading trucks. And yet, no matter that security and "armed response" is a big business, playing to the fears of the ones with the money, I did not feel afraid, even in a short foray through down-town Johannesburg (during the day), passing by gutted skyscrapers and impromptu marketplaces. I saw more fear and anger among the whites, though I also dealt with many more. There are signs of trickling down, of mingling, but very little, quite slow, and it is opposed by all that economy of fear.
There were quite a few European immigrants in management, dealing with people, if the people we met are a significant sample, because apparently they are better dealing more equally with all, and they are seen as more neutral than the different blocks that mistrust each other. That is becoming more important as one of the main targets is to become the industrial supplier in all the neighbouring countries. It can be done, as they have a well developed industrial base, with a few weird lacks that have to be supplied from outside, and outside for South Africa almost always means 30 days by container. Those foreign dependencies seem engineered by multinational groups, and exploited by the new wave of suppliers from India and China, and partly by us, even if we have been late to start selling there.
We have a certain advantage we lack in other countries, as the decision makers, even without reason, prefer European made goods (though some prefer Dutch, others prefer British, and all love German, but Spanish is quite neutral and after all we won the World Cup) even if they are more expensive, than others coming from Asia or America. They also have a more evident set of two or even three product qualities (with export being the lowest instead of the highest as we are used to), though with the current long term crisis this split in cheap and expensive products is returning to Europe as the hard-earned equality is eroded.
As this was a commercial trip, it is unavoidable I focus on commercial prospects. It may be I saw the country in a moment of relief, with Mandela just released from the hospital and a momentary end to the concerns to what will happen when he is gone. The crowds in Mandela square in Sandton posing before the giant Mandela statue seemed to do it in thanks to him for just being there, a symbol that peace is possible. Great place for people watching, from one of the Italian style terrace tables. And yet, the students coming from the nearby school or from the big library were segregated, I did not see any mixed pair or group, except where foreigners were involved, so every time I had my hopes up, they were American, or businesspeople from one of the nearby hotels.
Maybe Mandela will hang on twenty more years and the next generation will finally start building a common society... ¶ 9:29 AM
