The batwings to Kent House, Emmigration Lodge, now half ruin, half container shed, have moved their batwings to the side entrance where endless anxious souls wanting to live and work here, or just visit here, enter, milling about like sheep, trying - usually in Euriah Heep mould, or just striding up to a desk if not, oblivious of that ancient custom, the queue. No one helps with the traffice of course, nor seems to realise that this truly is bedlam, and the worst advert for this country possible - once one of the richest and best run in Africa. My wife, she of kindly christian firmness, waits patiently day following day for promised permits, or whatever; sitting in this office and that, until finally the promised letter she awaits informing my son that his self-employment permit has been refused, as 'our business is not viable', is really a letter for me from the Minister of Home Affairs informing me that my appeal to stay on in Zambia as a bona fide investor, supposedly protected by the Investment Act, let alone that old stand-by, 'good faith', has been denied, and that no further correspondence on the matter will be entertained. Game, set and match.
And so to the High Court, where, thank goodness, Order 53 rule 3 of the rules of the Supreme Court of England are enforced, and I have my stay of execution and judicial review in a month's time. But what of the many similar such ' your business is not viable' claps of gloom that fall about other investors' ears? I met the partner of an English chap who has invested $2 million in the country and they won't even give him a self-employed permit. And the word at the Zambia Investment Centre is that the emails pour in from my 'your business is not viable' fellow sufferers, now gone for ever from Zambia, their investment in tatters, or sold off for a pittance, or just left in the bush for someone else to sort out the mess, or, ominously, handed out to someone else 'administratively'. But, hang on, the Zambia Development Agency (which is supposed to have absorbed the Zambia Investment Centre by now) has just announced that it has issued another 53 investment permits. Do they give them out with a Kent House health warning?
There are of course Zambian laws for the protection of investors - even international agreements and conventions. And of course there are our mother countries, who pour the money in here daily. Will they help? Not much is my experience? But I will try; at least to warn some fellow Irishman about thinking it is all a cool Guinness here. I might even give Business Action for Africa a ring, the organization which negotiated with the G8 for Zambia's debt write-off. Our company here, Mbeza Safaris, is a corporate member, faithfully following the manifesto which is to help Africa in every way possible, including fighting corruption.
Well, we are over a million and a half dollars over our head already in our effort to partner rural communities in developing businesses and to look after the land, the widlife, with part of our operation a tourism business which now aestivates, for one can hardly bring in tourists now. And other plans to invest more money, to bring in other investors at the request of a number of Zambians who have Tourism Concession Agreements (TCAs) but no capital, will just have to wait, perhaps for ever.
It's sad, really. I've been here on and off since Northern Rhodesia days, served Government for three tours, came back to help the forgotten in the sticks - which includes the elephant now so mercilessly being extirpated by rotten officials and crime syndicates. But does anyone care? Of course not. Just bring in foreign investors under any old pretext, then when they have set something up, just give them the old heave ho; they won't complain, carrying all that guilt of the white man's burden as they do.
