Green Lubumbashi

Un Eléphant dans mon carburateur | home

Green Lubumbashi

Old China was used to famine; Farmers had a golden rule :

<< It does not matter how bad the situation is

<< you do not eat next season's seed

If you open the jar where the seeds are kept, this means that death is no longer more than a week away, that the old people, who are anyway useless, have died, that the young people, who can anyway be replicated, have died, that the remaining adults are dying.

In Lubumbashi the rule was not as strict as in China, if you eat the seeds you can still forage in the town and in the bushes. But the chances of survival are slim.

You can also hope that buying and stealing from nearby Zambia will give you enough to plant a maize crop for next season.

You can also wait for other farmers to plant their maize and go at night and dig up their seeds.

I arrived in Lubumbashi 2 months before the rain season. The situation was normal, meaning by that, desperate. The seeds had been eaten, the garbage cans from Lubumbashi emptied both inside and outside.

To speak of farmers was a misleading term.

Farmers where old ladies, so tired and hungry that they could barely lift the hoe to prepare the fields for planting.

The men had been killed, whatever was left of them were running around in the town looking for any kind of odd job.

Planting a maize field means anything.

If you have nothing left, you take a broom and sweep all the corners, under whatever is above ground, dig in the dung heap, and you collect a half bucket of rotten seeds that you plant in a field so small that you can spit from one corner to the other.

That year, the World Vision was the only Organization able to bring seeds and fertilizers to Lubumbashi.

Under normal circumstances I would not even have bothered with such small quantities, according to our calculations we had enough to provide 4000 farmers with one bag of seeds and one bag of fertilizers.

One bag of seeds is enough to plant a field one quarter the size of a football field.

The World Vision bought the seeds and fertilizers from Zimbabwe. Those were the days when Zimbabwe was the golden land, the bread basket, the place where everything could be bought, even washing power and tyres. We could have bought them from Zambia but it would not have been wise, we knew that any deal with Zambia could as well be honored or not honored.

This meant that the trucks had to pass through the Zimbabwe/Zambia border control, which is not a real problem, and then cross the border between Zambia and Zaïre, using the umbilical road linking Lubumbashi to the world of abundance, road on which anything could happen.

The border guards, being no fools, demanded that the trucks park overnight at the border. Once the trucks had been pilfered at the border, they would drive into Zaïre where the first Armed control would be five kilometers from the border and the truckers could deem themselves lucky if it only ended with their passports being confiscated and a fine imposed for some implausible contravention to a newly invented road traffic rule. If they were unlucky the trucks would be impounded and the drivers jailed. The only protection they had was that we would be patrolling the road as much as we could with World Vision marked cars, which meant than anything which went beyond the accepted limits would be reported to the Governor. On the other hand this could easily be prevented if we were to disappear and our cars sold over the border. As our book of internal rules stated, the World Vision would pray for us.

In this deal, the big looser was the haulage company. The seed and fertilizer suppliers were selling FOB, which meant that their responsibility ended once the seeds were on the trucks. We were buying on the spot, meaning that we were paying for what was unloaded. Whatever pilferage took place between de departure point and the arrival point was a loss for the trucking company.

Four thousand farmers to receive seeds and fertilizers that was four thousand out of 40.000 farmers. Who would receive and who would not?

So we went into what is one of East Africa's most beloved occupation, making lists.

The field officers of the World Vision and the Village Chiefs, the school teachers would draw up list of the lucky farmers. What was quite strange is that never did anybody propose to simply distribute the seeds to the church goers.

There was no way to control that the receivers did not happen by some statistical hazard to be the Chief, his sons, his nephews, his friends. Nor was it possible to control that one farmer would not collect a bag at one delivery point and then travel 10 miles and collect at another delivery point.

For me this was the most interesting part of the project as it meant driving round and round the Province and visiting as many farmers and groups as possible, discussing with their leaders, finding relatively safe delivery points. By that time I was already used to not eating nor drinking, it is surprising how easily you adapt to facts once there is nothing you can do about them.

It was not much of a surprise to find that old maize stalks had not been cleared out, that the fields had not been hoed, that the farmers were too tired to bother, and in spite of this misery to discover that we were at all time totally safe and undisturbed.

For the infrastructure and storage we had to totally rely on the only existing power of Lubumbashi, the Greek grocer.

He rented a huge hangar to us and as the trucks were coming, we would drive to the Greek shop and collect 15 casual workers to unload the trucks. Again the problem was, if you have a mob of 200 people waiting for a job outside the grocer's shop, how do you select the 15 lucky ones who will be paid today? Well, you use the old mafia way, you have one man who designed who is worthy of working for you today and you try to forget that he will in the evening take his percentage for that privileged selection.

While waiting for the Zimbabwe trucks, we had to prepare for the local haulage. This means making deals with anybody claiming to have a truck. As you may lack experience in this job, you may be under the impression that a truck owner will also be the owner of a truck with fuel. This is totally wrong. You are supposed to provide the truck driver with diesel. Then you have to hope that he will not sell your diesel to his most trusted friend. That, before hauling your load, he first uses the newly received diesel to haul whatever he considers more urgent, you just have to accept. That he is using your fuel at night to run some kind of taxi business is also understood and accepted.

A local truck is some kind of four wheel flat surface with an engine. That the engine does not work when you need it and that the four wheels only have three tyres, that is just normal.

Here it is my duty, as reporter, how much painful it may be to me, to bring you up to standards on the philosophical implications depending on your answer to the following basic ethical question:

<< do you believe there will be diesel to-morrow?

It takes great faith to believe that there will be diesel to-morrow, yet basically I cannot remember having been one day without fuel.

Fuel is something that appears to be distributed, well correction, the term distributed implies some kind of fairness and sharing, totally misleading; fuel is a vital life creation fluid that is pumped into you. If you have fuel, you have life for a couple of days, if you do not have fuel the only thing you can do is wait for fuel.

Normal, slightly important people have fuel. Lower class people do not have fuel. It reminds me of Alabama in the seventies where drivers would stop when they saw my wife walking with her shopping bags and offer her a lift, the first question being how her car had had a breakdown?

So the lower class people have no fuel. Suddenly there goes a rumor through the town to the effect that the Central Petrol Station has received a tanker of diesel. Then everybody will rush to the station (how do you rush your car to the petrol station if you do not have petrol?).

Let us make the first stupid assumption: fuel has been delivered to a petrol station. It is obvious that any driver seeing a fuel delivery lorry will immediately turn round and follow the tanker to see where it will unload, thereby, after half an hour, the tanker is followed by a queue of faithfuls.

So first you have 50 vehicles jamming the station, then 200 then 2000, until a queue is formed along the main road.

Most of the fuel is pumped with slow snail delivery pumps, even if the owner, to increase the flow has added some detergent to the fuel to make it bubbly, which greatly increases the rate at which the fuel meter is turning.

Let us say 10 minutes to fill a tank, that means that every quarter of an hour the queue would advance by 5 meters. As you could not keep the car with the engine running, it meant pushing the car every quarter, it is said that this is an excellent cardiac exercise. All the drivers are calculating in their head their chances of arriving at the pumps before the station is dry.

Mostly the process is peaceful.

It is even accepted as normal that services that are important do not have to queue and go ahead of the queue and get immediately delivery.

Are important:

Any vehicle carrying gun holding men with something having some resemblance to a uniform.

Any vehicle related to the Provincial Governor's Office.

Any Party (which party?) member.

Any vehicle looking as if the owner might have more power than is good for you to try and test.

All the family member of those working at the filling station.

Any body who thinks he is important and is willing to defend that opinion.

What really upset the queuing line was when a small truck would arrive at the station and claim that they should fill the 6 fuel drums at the back, meaning more than 1000 liters, meaning waiting for more than one hour. I cannot remember ever having seen the drum trucks paying any money after having filled the drums.

After we got fed up of wasting our times and getting daily nervous breakdowns, we decided to let the power of the dollar speak and we made a deal straight with the Main Petrol Company, paid in advance and had therefore access to 2000 liters of diesel.

As always AWA ( Africa Wins Again), this implied that we trusted that:

our diesel had not been sold (it was)

the man delivering the diesel was on the spot (he was not)

We could unload the diesel drums (200 liters) without killing anybody.

That solved the diesel problem.

Normally we would have one man of our team accompanying the local truck during the delivery. It would even have been easier to accompany the truck if it turned up at the meeting point, but most mornings we would have to tour the town trying to locate our trucks and find out which new story had been found to explain why they were not at the working point. Either the truck was missing but the driver available or the truck available and the driver not to be found or to be found in jail where we could recover him for a very small fee.

To start a working day we needed :

our World Vision staff;

Our vehicles;

The loaders which were to be collected at the Greek store;

The key to open the main hangar which was kept at the Greek store, meaning that we would have to drive to the store, find that the man who had the hangar key was not available at that moment as he had much more important business to attend to.

We were in a lucky day if we could see the first local truck start it's delivery run by 11 o'clock. Which meant that the farmers, the local important men, had been waiting at the delivery point for more than 5 hours. You would expect them to show some irritation when we turned up sometimes 5 hours late, sometimes two days late, yet they never showed any irritation.

When we started the distribution I was in great fear of what would happen at the delivery point. Some 200 farmers would be waiting, most of them would claim that they had been listed, and this was not totally untrue as in most villages, the Chief had drawn his list, the school master his list and anybody else his list. Do I need to state that at the delivery point you would find as many farmers who had not been listed on anything by anybody but were just turning up on the chance that may be; so, we would have 200 farmers gathering and why should they not fight?; after all their life and the life of their family depended on getting the seeds. I should not have worried, never did we have any fight.

During these three months I had to believe that daily miracles were possible, even a due that was delivered daily to us.

The fertilizers and seeds normally should never have reached us from Zimbabwe, but been hijacked on the road.

The local delivery should never have worked. Try to load a truck with a faulty engine and a brother of the wife of the driver replacing the official driver and instructing the team to deliver to the village which is one hour to the right after you pass the burned out house? Yet the truck reached the distribution point.

Normally the farmers should have been killing one another, there was nothing to prevent them, yet they behaved in a very civilized way.

Once the seeds and fertilizers had been distributed at the local meeting point, the problems started for the farmers.

What should they do with these seeds and fertilizers?

The most obvious use is to plant the seeds and add the fertilizers and go hungry for another 6 months.

Why then not eat the seeds immediately? They had been told that the seeds had been treated with chemicals, so they washed the seeds and then prepared the mealy-meal. At least they would not go hungry that week; next week is so far away while the hunger is so very real.

A good business was to soak the seeds and brew them in the 24 hours process for making local beer. The profit was much higher than just selling the seeds.

Selling the seeds on the market and along the road was the easiest way to get money, with money you then get anything.

As a result we found the World Vision Seeds and Fertilizers on the market and on the small selling places along the road. It did not really bother us as we realized that anybody buying the seeds and fertilizers was most likely to use them for planting.

You may wonder how all this worked so easily?

Probably because we were keeping to the rules.

The Governor got his car load of fertilizers; for him it was more a courtesy than a need, nobody would expect food or goods to be distributed without the Governor getting a share.

The Greek Grocer's family tried to convince us to sell the whole consignment to them. For reasons I could not understand they were unwilling to import themselves while they were in a much better and powerful situation than we were.