The arrival in the post of a smudged, dubious looking photo-copied form from the Department of Immigration - the sort of escape document produced by Allied prisoners at Colditz, informing you that your self-employed work permit renewal application has been denied on the grounds that 'the business is not viable', suddenly stills the wind and dims the lights of sunny Lusaka.
Your immediate thought is that it is obviously a put-up job, a fake, sent to you by a practical joker, or more likely, sent by one of the people thwarted by your campaign on behalf of poor villagers to protect their land. How, you say to yourself, earnestly striving to discover some Cartesian logic while all about you so clearly reveals its absence, can the Government turn down a self-employed permit renewal application from a major shareholder and managing director of a company holding an investment certificate that has so far invested over a million dollars in a trust dedicated to ushering in investment to a rural area. But they have. And the chap sitting at the end of the corridor in that splendid Kent House, surely a film set for a re-make of a Graham Greene Haitian novel, is quite serious when he says that I should appeal at once to the Minister of Home Affairs, 'otherwise the next step will be that we deport you".
A visit to the Zambia Development Agency, mandated under the Investment Act both to provide an investor with a self -employed permit if one brings in $50,000 (now overtaken by the higly flawed Zambia Development Agency Act requiring $250,000 and the employment of a minmum of 200 technical and managerial workers) and to ensure that international investment agreements are adhered to, mutters someting about, 'those immigration people are very difficult'. So I write a letter to the Minister of Home Affairs, a rather stern chap who recently deported a few people on the grounds that they were a threat to state security (one of them being a Dane who was an honorary police officer and had the temerity to order the Deputy-Minister of Home Affairs driver to move out of a disabled parking site), and deliver it in person to his secretary. Then I am told to fork out $500 for a temporary permit while I await the Ministerial decision. Meanwhile, the other two directors, my wife and son, have received no such letter of refusal and spend days lined up at the film set hellhole in wind blown corridors reeking of leaking sewage and jack hammers tearing away at the entrance way. Its a long business: files are lost, files are found, company accounts are handed over to unwilling recipients, letters from accountants shrugged off. After all, the Department of Emmigration - masquerading as Immmigration, does not give a fig about the Zambia Development Agency - a rather weak quango placed in the Ministry of Commerce. Everyone knows that Home Affairs with its police and security apparatus has all the power.
More trips to the film set reveal that my son will soon get his letter of refusal, and that my wife, irrespective of the fact that she is a shareholder and director, being on my file, has also been refused. No reply from the Minister of Home Affairs of course; so I fire off a letter to the Director General of the ZDA and to their legal counsel. And of course, lest I forget, to a couple of safari clients and television documentary makers, cancelling their trip and promising to send back their money. Its safari season after all, and our safari company - just one of the things we do, is gearing itself up with hundreds of villagers clearing tracks and building camps. But the machine, not very well oiled obviously, eructates briefly and falls silent. We are now becalmed, our community partners bemused, our agents - already got to by the enemy, doubtless feeling vindicated in their withdrawal of support. The enemy, sitting back, licks the collective moustache, letting forth agreeable goatly burps of satisfaction at the progress of its campaign.
