New Year's devotions

Forget the Christmas updates - they can wait until a day when I'm not frazzled from year-end audits and the dire necessity of closing almost 2,000 dormant accounts before the end-of-year processing starts.

At the office we draw lots to decide who leads office devotions each Wednesday, and I've drawn next Wednesday, the first working day of the year. (I have previously drawn several other Wednesdays, but always been able to wriggle out of the duty, by travelling to Nairobi or being obliged to fix a server during the meeting.) I'd be most grateful for suggestions from anyone who has the power to comment as to what I should present for New Year's devotions.

(I'm sorrier than ever that the ingloriously inventive Beck has lost that power - her employer wised up - but probably best that she doesn't give me ideas.)

Feliz aniversário

An overdue post, due largely to the second server crash in a fortnight. Neither one should have been a big deal, but the various failovers and standbys which we have in place didn't rise automatically to the occasion as they should have. At the IT managers' meeting in Nairobi in September, Diana had to explain the concept of "Murphy's law" for those who hadn't encountered it before; I complicated the issue by adding that I called it "Mozambican law".

Anyway, my supervisee Carminda (Nilza's replacement) was highly amused to find on her task list this week a request that she write out the words to the Portuguese version of Happy Birthday. You will see that it assumes rather more intellectual capacity than does the English version. Memorising the words is one of those small jobs which I keep forgetting until someone here has a birthday and I have to stand and listen as everyone else sings it. I take the opportunity of my brothers' birthdays on 8 December to rectify this situation, after almost six years.

Parabens a você
Nesta data querida
Muitas felicidades
Muitas anos de vida.

Tenha sempre do bom
O que a vida contem
Tenha muita saúde
E amigos tambem.

Translation, belatedly addressed to Morgan and Brendan: on this precious day, congratulations, much happiness and many years of life. May you always enjoy the good that life contains, good health and many friends.

The rainy season

The rain was thundering down when I woke at 5.00 this morning and hadn't stopped when I finally managed to get into the office at around 9.00. João and Theresa, who sit at the front desk with a view over Avenida 24 de Julho, inform me that it's been pouring continuously since. This is unusual, even for this time of year; there are usually breaks between the downpours.

The lengthy trip to work was due mostly to searching the avenidas around my apartment building for pools less than ankle-deep. I had naively put on waterproof leather boots, and then had to remove them and empty them out on the chapa, much to the amusement of those sensibly shod in rubber flip-flops and presumably carrying their office shoes in their bags. To add to the entertainment, the traffic lights at Eduardo Mondlane and Karl Marx were out (again), resulting in a Nairobi-standard traffic jam, and two motorcades passed us (when a top official drives through town, surrounded by outriders on siren-blaring motorcycles and carloads of security guards - or maybe secretaries, or even mistresses, as one can't tell through the tinted windows - everyone else has to pull over and stop).

How conditions must be in the dirt-paved bairros, I don't like to think. I was about to write that at least the bairros don't get motorcades, but an occasional motorcade through the poorer parts of town would no doubt be a good thing.

An email is circulating, telling the story of Noa, a fisher living in Vila de Pescadores, just to the north of Maputo. The Lord speaks unto Noa, telling him to build an ark, to load aboard two of each animal, etc. Noa objects: but, Lord, I'll need more than forty days and forty nights to get a permit from the Department of Forestry to cut the wood, and then I need a permit from the Department of Industry to transport the wood from Gaza province to Maputo, and I need permission from the municipalidade to start a construction project, and from the Department of Agriculture to import non-native species... and so on. And the Lord decides to spare humankind another flood, thanks to Mozambican bureaucracy.

Short post

I feel compelled to explain recent lengthy silences and the perhaps meagre previous post. While I'm very occupied at the moment, that's caused less by work at the bank than by having wrestled my writing habits into order and putting in some serious hours on a manuscript. This is not the best thing that could happen, as it means going from hunched over a computer at work to hunched over a different computer at home. However it's a temporary situation and should be over in a few months.

In the meantime I shall cultivate the art of short posts. Fr'instance.

During regular weekly office devotions this morning the CEO Ben read from Luke about the distinction between material and spiritual riches. It led to a discussion about a sad phenomenon recently observed in Maputo: the theft of metal plaques from graves, presumably so that they can be sold for scrap. This may happen elsewhere, but it's particularly disturbing in Africa, where respect for the dead is such an important part of life, and where a poor family may go to a lot of effort to pay for such a plaque. The thefts could indicate a desperate need for cash on the thieves' part, but even if so, it still means someone else is paying money for the stuff of others' reverence.

Evening on Martires de Machava

Photo taken from my kitchen balcony last week, looking down from my third-floor flat into Avenida Martires de Machava.


Everyone's waiting for the chapa home. The people in the middle are sitting on the edges of a knee-deep pothole which functions nicely as a bench. This is about as close as I can get without people jumping up from their places, standing tall and wiping the smiles off their faces so that they appear dignified for the camera.

You know that summer is coming in Maputo when the jacarandas drop their flowers and the acacias break out in coral-red. Also when the markets are crammed with mangoes, kamikaze flying ants drown themselves by dozens in the thin film of water left behind after you shower, and you wake up at 4.30 every morning because that's when it gets light.

Subtle xenophobia

And now, something for my fellow citizens to ponder the next time anyone in a government role starts pontificating about tourism's vital role in the economy, the need for Australians to welcome tourists, etc. My colleague Trudi, a South African citizen, says that yesterday she would have cancelled her planned holiday in Australia had she not already paid for it, due to the hoops the Australian government expected her to jump through to get a 3-month tourist visa.

The first annoyance was the usual requirement by the high commission in Pretoria that Trudi send her passport to the embassy in Harare for processing, because Harare, according to the rule book, takes care of Mozambican residents. (This is the requirement which got me struck off the electoral rolls at the last federal election. I had to send more supporting documents to Harare than was worth the risk. Does DFAT not watch the news?) Being unwilling to lose her passport in the morass of Zimbabwe, Trudi evaded that one by arranging to have the passport sent from and delivered to the addresses of friends in South Africa.

Now she has to complete an eight-page form, which comes with five pages of instructions attached and a two-page checklist of documents which need to be provided. The documents include certified bank statements for the past three months (requiring a trip to Nelspruit to visit her South African bank, as there's no point in entrusting them to the Mozambican post), an official letter from her employer stating her leave dates (must include a date of return to work), and evidence of her accommodation bookings, including a letter of invitation from her friend's aunt, with whom she will be staying some of the time.

I would issue an apology to the government of Mozambique for anything I may have said associating it with excessive bureaucracy - except of course that we all know what this intimidating form is about. The "Health and Character" section of the form contains the interesting question "Have you ever stayed outside your country of usual residence for more than 3 months?" (I suppose my mother doesn't have to worry that her lengthy visits to Indonesia make her a degenerate, or unhealthy - she will be protected by that same magic which permits her to give a SIM card to her research assistant on departure, without getting involved in terrorist activity.) Given that the worst overstayers of Australian visas are British and New Zealanders, I presume that they have to fill out a sixteen-page form to visit for the holidays.

In the meantime, I plan to visit Nelspruit this weekend. Visa issued on presentation of passport at the border. I am aware of the reasons, but when people to whom you've been rude are polite in return, it's embarrassing.

Mozambique wins again!

The local South Africans have all been trying to tell me about rugby. There seems to have been some kind of big match recently.

Of course the big topic of conversation for everyone else here this week has been the award of the inaugural Mo Ibrahim Foundation prize for achievement in African leadership to our ex-President Joaquim Chissano. The first thing we should all do in thinking about this is to set aside cynicism for a minute and give his ex-excellency a round of applause for behaving well where many people - including a lot of wealthy, educated and powerful Westerners - would have let him get away with behaving badly. News of the award must have given him a much-needed filip: when Kofi Annan announced it in London, Chissano was in the backblocks of Uganda, waiting for a notorious warlord who failed to turn up for scheduled discussions about a peace process.

I'd better summarise Chissano's claims to such an award, because I have no idea how this is being reported in the Western media, if it's been noticed at all. ("Who? From where? And what the blazes is governance? Nah, show that Mugabe clip - everyone likes thugs.") When I first learned of this I was told he received it just for leaving office gracefully, but after researching the award a little I was relieved to discover it was more for his overall career as President and after: he presided over a largely successful peace process at the end of the War of Destabilisation; he moved Mozambique from a one-party state to multi-party democracy; he abandoned the centrally planned economy in favour of more or less free markets (as a newly converted banker I think this is a virtue, though I accept that some may disagree); and since his polite and bloodless departure from office he has made use of his moral capital in efforts to bring about peace in northern Uganda and southern Sudan.

The upshot of most of the talk round here is that Chissano deserves the accolade, but the millions attached it could be put to better use. A lot of the cynicism I've heard about this award focuses on the notion that the millions are supposed to motivate the present generation of African leaders to behave better. I entirely agree with those critics that the prize isn't enough to tempt those politicians only motivated by money, and those politicians who aren't will act for the greater good whether or not there's a prize waiting for them afterwards. The composition of the panel choosing the recipient - which is heavy on Western bigwigs, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - rouses uncomfortable images of foreigners deciding what's best for Africa and patting the heads of Africans who comply with externally imposed standards. Some might find it embarrassing that African leaders can earn a rich prize by doing what leaders in the rest of world do as a matter of course. There are also reservations about rewarding only the leader when his behaviour depends so much on the behaviour of so many around him.

It occurs to me, though, that the prize makes much more sense when you stop thinking of what it's supposed to do for Africa and consider instead what it's supposed to do outside Africa. I recently read The State Of Africa by Martin Meredith, a history of Africa since the era of independence started in the 1950s. Mozambique hardly gets mentioned - which is to Mozambique's credit, as Meredith focuses on bad news. Mozambican governments have made bad mistakes, but haven't produced crazy dictators, or used ethnic violence to entrench their power, or stripped the country of natural assets to fill Swiss bank accounts (though I'm not saying there are no Swiss bank accounts at all). All these things are African phenomena and have to be studied and explained - and, yes, reported in the media. But they don't get changed without showing examples of how things could happen differently. Part of the problem of corruption in Africa is that Western businesses and other organisations come in with bundles of money and start bestowing patronage. If asked why, they'd answer that it's how you do things in Africa. I suspect that a large component of what Mo Ibrahim is trying to achieve with this prize is to show that it's not necessarily how you do things in Africa; that negative stereotypes are just that; that there are some good things happening. I understand Ibrahim to be a Sudanese businessman living in the UK; the stereotypes must annoy him more than they annoy me, and that's a lot. Even the millions make sense in this context - more likely to get headlines.

Having said that, I'm not very hopeful that it can do much against the barrage of negative images. I still think it's a worthy endeavour, though I hope there's some provision to withhold the award when there are no deserving candidates in any given year. Nor am I sure how it might strengthen Chissano in his work in Uganda, but I hope it does.

Another American escapes

Today - to spare you all further complaints about my workload - a photo from back in August, when I had the pleasure of attending one of life's great weddings. (It has taken me this long to track down the photos.) American Laura married her Australian boyfriend Mark at sunrise on the beach at Chimivane, about four hours' drive north of Maputo (or rather longer if you have to help push broken-down local vehicles out of the road along the way - all part of giving the numerous foreign visitors the authentic Mozambican experience).

Photo by my friend Minati Baro.

A local choir sang Shangana wedding hymns, whales broke the surface of the waves to see what the crowd of two-leggers was up to, and even this bitter confirmed bachelor teared up a little during the ceremony.

The wedding breakfast was an astonishing feat of organisation by Laura, who personally took care of details such as the sixty-plus champagne flutes from Ngwenya Glass in Swaziland. After the nerve-racking job of transporting them, she gave them all away to her guests. I must thank my boss Wesley and his wife Molly, who gave me the flute from the place setting of their three-year-old son Philip, so that I could take home a pair.

At about the same time, there was a discussion on one of my writing-based mailing lists about migration and U.S. isolationism. A Canadian-based U.S. citizen - who had previously lived in Scotland - complained about the unsympathic attitude of her stay-at-home fellow citizens. She quoted the statistic that at the height of the British empire, 15 million British citizens lived outside the British Isles. I don't have a date for that and thus have no way of knowing the British population at the time, but it's about 55 million now. The U.S.A. now has a population of about 400 million, and a mere 3 million of them live outside national borders.

That ties in with reports - well, complaints - I've heard from American friends here about "mission people", that is, American embassy staff. "Mission people" not only close their social events so that even other Americans can't attend, but have a curfew which pretty much prevents them attending outside social events. And it occurred to me that the Americans I know here - with the exception of Wesley and Molly, and with not a single "mission person" among them - are all either married to or living with non-Americans.

I prefer to report my observations rather than make sweeping statements about what this or that group of people are like - but I'm fairly sure that most of my readers are thinking what I'm thinking.

With the Sacramentine Sisters

The training group, more or less. These are all colleagues of mine, mostly from various partner banks across Africa. Standing, left to right: Felix from Rwanda; Valeriu the trainer, from Moldova, wearing the Masai blanket we gave him as a souvenir; Sophie from Kenya; Isaac from Ghana behind Mphatso from Malawi; Mike from Ghana behind Diana, my boss and the logistics manager of the training, originally from Romania and now living in Nairobi; Robert, head of the IT support centre, from the USA (not part of the training, he just dropped in to catch up). Diana is seven months pregnant but Robert isn't. In front, left to right: Erick from Kenya; a skinny fake Moçambicana; Lumbani from Malawi. Missing, due to an early flight home, are Ermelinda and Marin from Albania.

The garden belongs to the Emmaus Centre, a retreat run by the Sacramentine Sisters. Every second house in the leafy suburbs of Nairobi seems to be a religious institution of some kind (I mean "leafy suburbs" in much the same sense as the term is used in Australia). Apparently this flowering is quite recent - most are less than twenty years old. Many of them offer accommodation and make a cheap option for groups with a studious purpose. We had to be home by 10pm every night (not everyone in the group managed this consistently) and generally behave - not a big ask when there was so much to learn. There was no internet available, which no doubt contributed to my unwontedly serene and contented state of mind.

Michael, the cook at the Emmaus Centre (very good at his job) vanished partway through our stay there, and we later discovered a child of his had died. He returned in time for some of us to contribute money to his funeral expenses, as is the custom in much of Africa. It was his nine-year-old daughter whom he'd lost, and her death adds one more to the toll of al-Qaeda's 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi. Michael's wife had been riding past the embassy in a matatu (minibus) with her new baby girl in her arms when the car bomb exploded. Both survived, but the impact of the blast somehow damaged the baby's body so that she never thrived. Even when she was eight or nine, Michael told us, she looked no more than a baby. At length the insidious damage caught up with her and she died.

"God gives us these crosses to bear," said Michael with a sad smile.

Two chapas

Some days ago now, I was riding to work on a chapa (minibus - pronounced shapa), as I do every day. To set the scene for those who have never had the pleasure of using third-world share-taxis, the joke is that being on a chapa (or bemo, or matatu, or whatever the beast is named in other parts of the world) is like being at a disco: it's crowded, hot and sweaty, you sway and slide about as the vehicle swerves all over the road, and there is invariably deafening music playing.

For various reasons I was going to work around 10am, so the chapa was less crowded than usual. I had an aisle seat, and the first thing that struck me as odd was that the man strap-hanging at my elbow didn't take any of the empty places. I didn't think much of it, though, until the chapa pulled up at my usual stop, and the straphanger didn't move aside for me. My "com licenças" became more and more insistent until I realised that his hand was inside my backpack (which I was holding on my lap). The hand was quickly out again, but my cellphone was in it.

It so happened that I was between the idiot and the door (a classic opportunistic theft made with no exit strategy in mind) so it was no great effort to wrest back the phone, while shouting Ladrão! Ladrão! (Thief! Thief!) in his face. Absolutely no response showed in his expression. Nor was there any response from anyone else on the chapa. I complained to the cobrador (the man who stands at the permanently open door, shouting the chapa's destination and taking the fares), but he ignored me too; one paying passenger's the same as another. Nothing for me to do except stuff my phone back in my bag and stalk through the market on my way to the office, glowering over my shoulder at every step and fuming at the pit of sleaze that is Maputo.

The very next day, as the chapa on which I was resentfully riding to work pulled away from a stop, a woman across the aisle from me called out to the driver to wait. She waved a silver bracelet which she'd just picked up from the floor and which she said had been dropped by another woman who had just alighted. The cobrador asked the women waiting on the pavement, but none of them laid claim to it. A debate amongst the other passengers ensued, and the general decision agreed on that the woman who had found the bracelet should take it home and give it to her empregada (domestic servant). Very hesitantly, with a very recognisable middle-class need to have her reluctance noted, she put it away in her handbag.

That happened between 7 and 8am, my usual time for catching the chapa to work, when many of my fellow passengers are salary-earners like me, dressed up for the office. It's relatively easy for such people to be delicate about other people's property. The 10am crowd is more likely to include men running errands for very temporary employers, or travelling between markets in search of what work is available that day.

Mobile in Manica

I promised to go through my notes on the mobile bank's debut, but that's just more pain than it's worth. My fortnight in Chimoio consisted mostly of worrying about hardware and software. I felt that my shortcomings as a project manager were on very public display. I shan't attempt to revisit that nightmare now; here you will get only a straightforward commentary on a few of the photos.

North of Inhambane, the EN1 - the main north-south highway - moves away from the well-watered coastal strip. The landscape dries out and the vegetation gets shorter and thinner, with a lot more of that dull olive-green which signifies drought-resistance. The soil turns red and, after you cross the suspension bridge over the Save river, you start to see huge granite inselbergs dotted about the plains.

The road to Sussundenga in Manica province, one of our mobile bank locations. One of the unforeseen problems we had to deal with was the large amount of dust that crept into the work area whilst on the road.

An abandoned house, built into the side of a granite cliff along the road to Sussundenga. Most likely the Portuguese owner abandoned it at independence, or perhaps during the war of destabilisation which followed. The war was extremely hard-fought in Manica province, with Renamo trying to cut off the Beira corridor, the main transport route from Zimbabwe to the coast, on which much of the local economy depended. When the war was at its hottest the Mozambican government controlled only the towns and narrow zones along the main roads.

A view of Manica town (not the capital of the province), one our mobile bank locations.

My colleagues Magalhães and Belmira, just before opening the bank on the first day of operations. I pulled out the camera to pass the time while we waited for the local authorities at Sussundenga to give us the final all-clear.

I spent most of the time in the work area with the tellers, waiting nervously for problems to arise and pouncing on any that did. The result is that I have no photos of the bank with queues in front of the windows; I only ventured out during slow moments, like this one in Sussundenga.

The consequences of producing a camera in a public place in Mozambique - all the men want to pose for a photo. Women are less forward, even when a woman has the camera. It's rare to see Mozambicans smile in a photo. I have heard it's because they fear people will think they've been up to something bad if they are caught smiling.

Cold plenty

The overlong silence is obviously due to long days and late nights wrestling the components of a mobile bank into line, followed by a total mental shutdown while on leave. Blog posts about launching a mobile bank will follow, when I can make time to sort through my notes and photos.

Australia was a blur of leafless oaks against grey skies and warm shops selling amazing combinations of edibles, like roast pumpkin bruschetta or white chocolate and mango muffins. When an academic friend of my mother's asked if my bank's agricultural lending supported organic producers, I knew I'd crossed a major mental divide somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Industrial farming hasn't made a big impact in Mozambique.

I may have elsewhere been sarcastic about headlines like "President declares struggle against poverty major goal of 2007" in the Mozambican daily newspaper. I take back any superior tone I used, having seen the Melbourne Age's front-page leader about opinion polls, with its accompanying article comparing the prime minister's suits with the opposition leader's suits.

I am now back in the land of warm winter sunshine, crumbling colonial architure and men who sit with their knees half a metre apart on crowded minibuses. If another overlong silence on this blog follows the one just finished, the reason may be that some innocent senhor going to work got wallopped by the silly mzungu who doesn't understand the way things work here and who is therefore explaining to the police. I remember, on my previous visit to Australia, restraining my laughter on a crowded bus when a fellow strap-hanger apologised to me for brushing against the back of my hand.

The prospect of all the piled-up work waiting for me did make me melancholy on the way home, but a lot of the melacholy evaporated when I found myself walking in sunny Maputo wearing a t-shirt, skirt and sandals. Southern Australia is in the grip of a severe winter. Much of my limited mental capacity was occupied with figuring out which glove went on which hand and how quickly I could make my way to the nearest warm interior. A respected teacher of Australian history, Dr Tony Stimson, once told me that Canberra is located in the frosty heights of the Great Dividing Range because our forebears believed that the Anglo-Saxon mind functioned best in a cold climate. Perhaps so, but now that I no longer have to stay within a two-metre radius of a heat source, I'm getting a lot more done.

My three-year-old nephew Toby with his Mozambican-made wire aeroplane, concentrating on connecting the battery that makes the propellors spin. The toy was a huge hit with him. I tried to teach him to say "Moçambique" when asked where the toy came from, but had to be content with "Africa".

The big thing of beauty

(I gush? Of course I gush. It's been almost twelve months since I started on this project, and it's been dominating my waking hours since the end of last year. To justify all my time and effort, I have to talk it up.)

Yesterday was two months to the day since that six-hour border crossing with a large, mysterious object. It's taken that long for the Banco de Moçambique to decide it's good enough. That's two months of public statements from BM's governor about the urgency of taking financial services to rural areas - statements typically made when one the big commercial banks opens a new branch in Zimpeto or Benfica (outer bairros of Maputo) and invites the governor along for an approving speech.

Take, for example, Catandica in Manica province, a substantial town - big enough to support two good-sized schools. There are no banks there, so when the teachers are paid each month, they depute one of their number to take all the cash into Chimoio via chapa (public minibus) and bank it there. The risks may be imagined. It's also another trip to Chimoio for anyone who wants to withdraw money. The chapa ride from Catandica to Chimoio takes a good two hours and costs 170 meticais (compare, say, the salary of 2,000 meticais a month earned by my house guard, bearing in mind that Maputo salaries will generally be higher than provincial ones).

Cue fanfare:

I present Mozambique's first ever mobile bank. (That dramatic golden stripe is, of course, no more than an artefact of the camera flash on the door's reflective marker. It doesn't actually glow like that. The Portuguese slogan on the front means "Taking the bank closer to you".)

It will spend every night at Chimoio branch, and every working day will drive out to one of five towns not presently served by a bank - including Catandica. It connects with the internet via GPRS - essentially, via the mobile phone network - and regularly sends to the head office an ordinary email with an ordinary text file attached. The file contains a coded version of all transactions performed in the mobile bank since the last file was created. Here at the head office, we import the file to our main banking databases, and all the account balances, loan contracts, and other financial arcana are updated accordingly. Needless to say, it took a lot of complicated work to create such a simple process.

It's worth noting that this couldn't have been done this time last year. GPRS was not then in place in the rural towns.

When we arrive at the location for the day, the canopy goes up and the tellers open their windows.

These photos were all taken today at our exposição for benefit of media and donors. The elegant blonde in this photo is American Laura, the HR manager and tireless squirer of donors and other notables.

Entertaining and informing donors at a classy Maputo exposição.

Speaking of donors, most of the funding for this project comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I mention this for those who were wondering what happened to all that money they shelled out for MS Vista.

The interior. This photo doesn't give a very good idea of how snug things are, but no doubt I'll get the chance to snap some crowded moments back here during the next fortnight.

Pretending to strut my stuff for the cameras. The laptop batteries had run down by this point, and we didn't want to start the generator for fear of filling our tin shed with fumes and suffocating our donors.

Sr André, the driver from Chimoio branch, arrived in town today. On Friday at the crack of dawn Trudi, André and I will start on the drive north. We expect to spend Friday night in Vilankulo, and we hope to arrive in Chimoio on Saturday night. The branch staff will join in for a few days of "dry runs" - that is, pretending to operate the mobile bank, with a test database and some staff role-playing clients. On Thursday or Friday next week we take it out to Catandica for its first real day of operation.

In other, not completely unrelated, news, yesterday I handed an inch-thick wad of meticais to an Indian gentleman (the Indian community has Maputo travel agencies all sewn up) and received my ticket to Australia in exchange. I'm due to arrive in Adelaide late on 3 July. (Beck, please write!)

The third event of note yesterday was that I was poleaxed. In the classic style, the blow fell from the hand I least expected to strike - that of my unfailingly good-humoured and hard-working assistant Nilza. She and I have been dividing three jobs between us since the departure of Gildo earlier this year. Lately I've been quite proud of having reduced my working week from 60 to 50 hours whilst keeping her overtime minimal.

Now Nilza's husband-to-be has been transferred to Nampula, and she's going with him. We don't have any operations there, so she'll cease working for the bank from 1 August. After that it will be me and whichever likely tyros we can recruit between now and then.

People here are used to me complaining that whenever I start to get my job under control, some emergency strikes, or some new project falls from the bosses in heaven. I take it this poleaxe is punishment for having thus wasted breath moaning about flea-bites. At any rate, I will need some serious rest while in Australia in July.

Another reason to stay at home

From the Only In Africa department comes the news that the runway lights at Nampula airport - Nampula being the third city in the country, the commercial hub of the north - have all been stolen. All of them, by persons unknown and for reasons which will no doubt fuel loud debates in barracas (shebeens) up and down the country, at least until the weekend soccer fixtures.

I don't remember Nampula airport very clearly - I was probably too nervous to pay attention, as it's certainly surrounded by steep-sided granite hills which oblige dizzying take-offs and landings - but it's no doubt one of those lengthy runways built during the post-independence socialist era to accommodate colossal Soviet cargo planes. So there are plenty of lights involved, and presumably a large truck to haul them around, and quite a bit of time and muscle.

Today's issue of Notícias ("Yesterday's news tomorrow") reports that two 737s - the Air Corridor and LAM flights, with a total of 114 passengers between them - landed on Sunday night by the headlights of numerous cars, parked alongside the runway for the occasion. You have to get to the bottom of the second column of the article before you come to the interview with the AC pilot, in which he says (freely translating) "The same thing happened last night, but it didn't matter because the skies were clear. As you can see, there's a lot of low cloud tonight." So one of our two main carriers landed a big bird by moonlight on Saturday (LAM landed discreetly at another airport). "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time," said the pilot. And "Why does this always happen to Air Corridor? Excuse me, but it smells like sabotage."

No word from Notícias on any resulting police enquiries, perhaps because those same police are responsible for patrolling the runway 24 hours a day. Presumably one of them has invested in a discoteca in need of renovation.

Big thing status: no joy. I should emphasise that we are driving to Chimoio.

It's been too long since I posted a photo. Continuing the nocturnal theme, here is a shot of our elegant old railway station (the initials stand for Caminhos de Ferro Moçambique). It now houses a jazz club, though much of the building stands empty. Valentin is behind the camera.

Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible

The longer than usual interval between posts is not owed to taking the Big Thing to Chimoio, alas. It's merely due to failure to notice anything other than bureaucratic incompetence and geekery.

I did get as far as Beira last week, an unscheduled whirlwind trip to resolve a stubborn network outage. Not only did I get the branch back online, but both Beira and Chimoio branches report that their network connections are much faster since I worked my miracle. I'd feel so much better about this if I could explain why.

Big Thing status: approval has been granted and the inspection happened on Wednesday. We now await the letter from the Banco de Molasses giving the result of the inspection. B. de M. explicitly requested that we not do any publicity until it issues the letter, so we can't unveil in the meantime.

If we receive the letter Monday or Tuesday, we unveil on Thursday and head for Chimoio on Friday.

Not the news we wanted

Yes, I said I'd reform, but I'm having a final fling.

Banco de Moçambique placed a full-page advertisement in yesterday's Notícias to inform us all that exactly thirty-two years had passed since its foundation. I feel like I've been waiting a lot longer than that. The advertisement would have looked much better had it included the line "We just approved the first ever [CENSORED] in Mozambique". I suggest that they could appropriately celebrate their thirty-second birthday with some thirty-second approvals.

Short break for high living

Last weekend I bowed to that law of Mozambican middle-class life which periodically compels you to go from wherever you are to wherever the shopping is better. You must do this at intervals to retain your middle-class credentials. If you live in the backblocks of Zambézia, you exert all your efforts to get to Mocuba or Gurué; if you are in Mocuba or Gurué, you do your utmost to get to Quelimane; if you are in Quelimane, you strive for Maputo; and if you are in Maputo, you run the gauntlet of the choked border crossing at Ressano Garcia and the assorted hazards of the N4 (speed traps, bandidos, South African drivers) to get to Nelspruit.

I'm on the edges of respectability, unable as I am to bother with cars or televisions, so particular gusto was called for. I did my best, guzzling delicacies like mushrooms and inch-thick steak (the Portuguese-style steak of Mozambique is paper-thin) and lingering too long beneath the extravagant hotel shower. I fear I failed the most important test, however, by restricting my purchases to goods not for sale in Maputo - things like herbal medicine, cotton underwear and English-language books (eight of them, the tallest stack I could carry to the counter at Exclusive Books whilst encumbered by my other purchases). I felt humbled at the border on the return crossing, waiting with the local matrons in their gold earrings and stylish sandals, among their sacks of rice and towers of egg cartons.

Taking the theme of consumption to another level, Nelspruit is one of the locations where games of the 2010 World Cup will be played. I understand (from various word-of-mouth reports) that a complete community - a black neighbourhood, naturally, including two schools - was relocated to make way for a new 20,000-seat stadium. My informants were mostly concerned about what would happen to the stadium after the World Cup, given that Nelspruit doesn't support any sports teams that could draw a crowd that strong - would anyone at all be interested in its long-term upkeep?

Other plans are afoot to build five big hotels with a total of over 2,000 rooms. I assume those hotels will be easily folded up and stored until the next big event, because there's seldom any trouble getting a room in Nelspruit's present complement of hotels and guest houses. Trudi says she won't be returning to South Africa until after the World Cup, as there should be plenty of cheap property on the market then.

The South African papers were full of photos of long queues outside government offices. It seems that the old motor vehicle licensing system has been upgraded to a high-tech centralised system, which crashes whenever more than one province comes online, and with a do-it-yourself interface, which bewilders that majority of South Africans who aren't familiar with personal computers. According to Mpumalanga newspaper, "For as many as four consecutive days, people have gone home with empty hands, sore feet and bloody tempers". I'll assume, perhaps charitably, that political forces overruled the cautions of the geeks involved, extend them my sympathies, and pray that I never end up in a similar situation.

(I detect a certain sameness of theme creeping into these posts. Lack of intelligence in government institutions is dominating my life at the moment, but I shouldn't turn it into a morbid fascination. I will try to be more positive in future.)

Vanishing bureaucrats

Yes, the dates of my proposed travel to Chimoio are indeed creeping further and further into the future. Now I wait in suspense for project approval from the Banco de Moçambique. "Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses" (Anonymous).

Last week, as I drummed my nails down to their beds and generally drove Nilza insane with my tetchiness (she took three days off to recover), I ran across the inspiring news that President Guebuza had made a speech calling on public servants to actually serve the public. '[Some] people even kept a count of the number of people whose requests they turn down, "and they're very pleased about it", said the President' (Agência Informação de Moçambique).

Such people are at least at their desks and sure of their duties. When Guebuza and his new team assumed government in early 2005, some of the ministers took to dropping in unannounced on their department offices. News agencies reported that they found armies of empty desks, or people who couldn't explain what their jobs were. We gobbled up the reports, gleeful and hopeful, but nothing seemed to come of it all.

Until now, perhaps, if we're lucky. In today's national daily, Notícias (essentially a government information sheet), we read that a census of government departments is under way, at a cost of US$1.7 million, which has discovered 34,000 people in "irregular situations" - that is, they draw a salary, but they aren't there.

Travels in the past

I can feel the circles beneath my eyes sinking deeper and darker. I won't go into the reasons for my recent long hours and lack of sleep, as those reasons are less Mozambique-related than geek-related, and I prefer to keep geekery out of this family-oriented blog. (Though I will mention I've spent the past two hours copying out long strings of hexadecimals from registry keys - because I just googled the keys I worked on and discovered, via www.windowsitlibrary.com, that "The keys can't be read by human beings". I knew Mozambique had changed me, but I didn't realise how much. Probably no one else will be surprised, though.)

Suffice it to say that anything exciting that happened to me in the past ten days or so shouldn't be mentioned on a social occasion, except when immediate solitude is required. So, I resort to past events for this post.

Erik's comment on my previous post reminded me of the best news I've had for weeks, which is that my friend Yerevan Laura, formerly Quelimane Laura (so called to distinguish her from American Laura, the HR manager here), will henceforth be Luanda Laura - having moved to Angola last week to take up a job there. Laura, bemvindo em África mais uma vez, and I'm looking forward to meeting you in Namibia or Botswana or any of the other interesting places that lie between us, next time you need a break.

Alexa with Laura in her Yerevan incarnation. Garni, Armenia, Christmas Eve, 2006.

Laura will recall Simon Norfolk, a long-time resident of Maputo, who after returning here from his first trip to Luanda first wanted to place a papal kiss on the airport tarmac and then to call on the mayor of Maputo to apologise for all the horrible things he'd said about this place for years. I am sure Laura will handle the place rather better: she will at least mix well with all the strong women Simon mentioned.

I just sent Laura a welcome message, which reminded me that she had asked about my visit in February to yet another of her previous locations, Rwanda. She's not the only person I know who missed out on hearing about that trip, so I'll post a quick report here. (In fact it will be mostly copied from the only email I sent which contained any mention of what I was up to in Rwanda. Apologies to those who have seen it before - but I've neglected the hexadecimals for too long already, and I don't have time to write a fresh piece.)

One of the headwaters of the Nile.

I took all these photos on the one day on which I was able to travel outside Kigali. I found a good, professional tour agency very easily, but wasn't able to access any money in my Mozambican account from Kigali, so was limited to the cash I had with me. I hired a car and driver, Gilles, and we drove for about three hours to get to Gisenye, in the west of the country, where the border with DR Congo meets Lake Kivu.

The Rwanda-Congo border post. You may observe how tense things are. When Gilles drove me there, I thought he'd taken me to a market - lots of women with buckets of vegetables on their heads and men pushing bikes with huge bundles attached, going to and fro. It took a while to notice the rope stretched across the road and the Rwandan flag. It's a border which the locals cross because they can get a better price for their produce, or their purchases, on the other side. I felt reasonably sure, though, that if a muzungu started walking around curiously with a camera, I'd have the place about my ears, so I stayed in
the car. The town in the background of the photo is Goma (DR Congo), which was affected by a volcanic eruption a couple of years back.

Lunch hour in Gisenye.

On the way back from Gisenye we heard on the BBC an item about renewed fighting in DR Congo near Goma, during the preceding couple of weeks. Gilles and I were, to say the least, nonplussed. We'd seen no evidence of particularly high tension - plenty of soldiers in Gisenye district, but all of them out on training runs or waving vehicles through checkpoints with no apparent concern for anything other than roadworthiness. We passed a refugee camp - lots of long white permanent-looking tents with "U.N." in tall black letters - which looked very well-ordered, certainly with no obvious signs of a recent influx.

Maize drying in a town on the road to Gisenye.

In three different towns we passed Gacaca courts in session - these are part of a traditional justice system which was revived after the genocide to deal with the huge numbers of perpetrators. They take place in the open air. The first one I thought was some kind of festa or official reception, with everyone dressed up to the nines, until Gilles pointed out the prisoners in distinctive pink uniforms. Thirteen years ago, it happened, and they are still trying the accused - an indication of how many people are implicated.

I must cut short this post now, if I'm to post at all this week. Other details about Rwanda - and past travels in general - will emerge in other dull weeks.

No news

I didn't intend this blog to be a commentary on Maputo news. It's merely for my family and friends who need to reassure themselves that I am still alive and complaining. Recent weeks have been uncharacteristically exciting in Maputo - and I don't mean that in a good way, as the Malhazine posts indicate. Please do not be disappointed if future posts are limited to reports on milk shortages and the like stories which don't lend themselves to interesting photographs.

(Oh, yes, the milk shortage: last Saturday the Indian gentleman in charge of my local merceria was desolate that he couldn't provide my usual two cartons of skinny from the Parmalat factory down the road at Matola. There's a shortage throughout southern Africa, he tells me. I snagged his last carton of expensive Portuguese milk. It's like being back in Quelimane again, where milk drinkers had to hoard for the six months of the year during which the Zambesi was low enough to permit trucks from the south to cross easily.)

As a matter of fact I did get involved in something newsworthy last Thursday, involving a trip with Trudi across the border to Nelspruit to collect something so big and important that customs spent six hours inspecting it and bringing big men from remote places to set their seal on its papers. Trudi's near-perfect self-control in the face of bureaucratic provocation and her tireless polite cajolery are simply jaw-dropping. I took copious mental notes. This is the true sign of someone who knows her way around Africa.

Unfortunately I can't say exactly why we put ourselves through it all, as I've been asked to keep this matter under wraps until an official launch. That might take place next week, if I'm lucky. The secrecy is a little quixotic, considering the imported item spent Thursday night and much of Friday morning parked in front of our office on Avenida 24 de Julho, providing diversion for all the commuters from Matola and the outer western bairros. Suffice it to say that the project which has been dominating my life for the past six months is at last coming to fruition. I'll post the photos the instant I'm given permission.

A Deus, Eyesore

(Anyone who thinks I've made an error in the title is welcome to post a comment with a correction. Shouldn't it be "Ao Deus"? But I'm sure I've seen "Á Deus".)

Last Saturday, 31 March 2007, was five years to the day since I first set foot in Mozambique. The municipalidade celebrated by knocking down the Hotel Quatro Estações (Hotel Four Seasons), a notorious eyesore on Maputo's Marginal. (Every coastal town in Mozambique, and presumably in the Lusophone world, has a Marginal, which is the road which runs along the coast.)

This hotel was not yet complete at independence in 1975, when the Portuguese construction company left the country, abandoning the project. The story is told round here that the departing construction workers first poured concrete down the service shafts of the building, so that the new Mozambican government would never get any benefit from their work. I've walked to the top of the building, and I never saw any evidence of this.

Concrete wasn't necessary, anyway. The new government had no cash to spare to complete the work themselves, and as a socialist government wasn't attracting foreign investment. After a few years open to the elements, the building was in an irrecoverable state. My colleague Trudi, a South African who's worked in Mozambique on and off since 1986, says that ever since her first visit she was encountering teams of visiting engineers, comfortably ensconced in the Hotel Polana (the plushest in the country), whose job it was to determine whether the building could be rehabilitated. Every single team came to the same depressing conclusion.

So it became a well-known Maputo landmark, and, thanks to that urban legend about the concrete, an unofficial monument to Portuguese spite. One always took visitors to Maputo out along the Marginal for lunch at Costa do Sol, and every time, the visitors would crane their necks at the ghost building and ask what the blazes that was all about.

I climbed up the crumbling stairs to the 26th floor in the New Year of 2004 – a friend having given the guards a slab of beer to gain us admission. (The guards generally did a good job: I saw no squatters in the place, and it didn’t look lived-in.) The stairs were perfectly stable, but at every landing was a gaping floor-to-ceiling hole onto the void. They would have made pretty picture windows had the building been completed. As it was, remembering those open doorways onto a sheer drop still makes my skin temperature plummet.

So at 6.00 on Saturday morning I left my flat and enjoyed a leisurely walk to Praça de Destaçamento Femino (Female Advancement) at the edge of the exclusion zone. I’ll own up to feeling a touch of trepidation, after the recent disaster – and something in me quailed at the first explosion, but everything went according to plan.

(Valentin took an excellent video file of the implosion, complete with pretty girl cringing at the first explosion – it wasn’t me – and much colourful language in Portuguese. He promised to share, and I wanted to post it here, but he’s been in Mozambique too long. Rather than wait longer for the file, I’ll post now and hope he reads this and realises he’s developing a reputation.)

Ten seconds of thunder and dust, and it’s gone forever. It left a surprisingly small pile of debris. I suppose it was mostly air.

And it’s no longer possible to photograph views like this.

A small price to pay - except that the new US embassy is to be built at the site, helping the glittering white casino to turn that stretch of the Marginal into Target City (Bairro dos Alvos). (I don’t know if it still does so, but when that casino was located at the Hotel Polana it charged a US$50 entry fee for Mozambican women. Only for Mozambican women.) So we may expect the site to remain an eyesore, albeit on a lesser scale, tall rocket-proof walls surmounted by a forest of aerials. If the street vendors were left to themselves they would hide it behind mazes of seagrass furniture and bright patterned tablecloths, but I guess the marines will be keeping them away.

Malhazine Photos

I haven't been able to find out who took some of these photos; they've been circulating via email.

A photo taken in one of the poorer bairros along the Xai-Xai road, maybe two or three kilometres from Malhazine.

Since yesterday's post I've checked Google Maps - most maps of Maputo show only the wealthier inner suburbs, an area maybe five kilometres square - and discovered my idea of distances was completely naive. Our office is at least ten kilometres from Malhazine. The market where Catarina was dodging shrapnel can't be less than eight kilometres away from the site of the explosions.

The view from the bairro Coop, eight or so kilometres from Malhazine. See the shots below of damage to the Russian embassy, located at Coop.

I'm struggling to identify the location where this was taken, but I think it's Alto Mae, around the corner from our office.

I've no clue where this shot was taken, but I hope it wasn't too far from the site of the explosions.

(This photo and all those below were taken by my colleague Valentin Chernysh last Sunday.)

The psychiatric hospital at Infulene.

Another target was the electricity substation at Infulene, which provides power to much of southern Mozambique, including the northern bairros of Maputo. So to make matters worse for the people fleeing Malhazine on Thursday night, they did so in a blackout.

A petrol station in Malhazine.

Our operations chief Trudi told me yesterday about a client for whom she'd written off a loan. He had run a barraca, an informal restaurant, attached to his house. Both the house and barraca had been destroyed.

Damage to the walls and floor in the Russian embassy compound at Coop, about eight kilometres from Malhazine - an indication of the power of the explosions.

My Ukrainian colleague Valentin remarked acidly, "It's returning to its source." The Malhazine arsenal was originally built with Soviet expertise in the mid 1980s, and much of the weaponry stored there was obsolete Soviet-made munitions from the era of the war of destabilisation (1975-1992).

City In Shock

(I now understand why the journalistic cliché in the above title exists.)

Late on Thursday afternoon, while I hunched over my computer testing new offline banking software, occasional far-off rumblings and weird inner-ear sensations kept tapping at my concentration. I put them down to heavy trucks going past (our office is on the main road from South Africa) and focussed on my app. I had one "what the f was that?" moment when the building seemed to shake, but the software issues were a lot more pressing at that stage, and the moment didn't last.

Then around 17.30 I heard a terrific crash from the front of the office. From the CEO's office, in fact, and hearing our dignified CEO resort to body-function Anglo-Saxonisms probably did more to persuade me that an emergency was in progress than did the broken glass or the shaking building.

My first thought was that the building was under attack, and I joined my colleagues (by this hour just the overworked management remained in the office) in a cautious creep towards the front windows, expecting to see a small mob of disgruntled clients assembled outside, stones at the ready. There was indeed a crowd on the footpath and median strip outside, lots of them pointing at our shattered windows, some of them laughing, some of them frowning and frightened, but no one threw anything.

I could hear the CEO Ben explaining, calmly as ever, that his windows were broken but he was fine (it transpired that he was on a conference call at the time). Then the windows and the entire building shook again, and I felt the shock in my ears.

We all retreated from the windows, reasonably sure we weren't under attack, but not sure of what exactly was happening. My boss Wesley rang the security company and found out that the arms stockpile out at Malhazine was exploding. The crowds on the street were watching smoke and fireballs rise over the rooftoops.

Our office is maybe five kilometres from Malhazine, but the explosions were strong enough to shake the building every minute or so. The traffic outside the office was bumper-to-bumper - people from Malhazine and the surrounding bairros were crowding on to chapas (minibuses) out of the area to escape. Now and again an ambulance would go past with its sirens wailing, but compelled to crawl along, negotiating a path between trees and parked cars on the median strips. There are only three hospitals in Maputo (a city of over a million people) and each of them has (I think) only one ambulance, but the private clinics had sent their vehicles in as well. The Red Cross had drafted its project vehicles for ambulance use too - no sirens, but loudhailers informing everyone around that they were bringing the wounded through and would everyone please make way.

My colleagues and I were safe enough in the building, provided we kept away from the windows, and none of us wanted to venture into that traffic. Ben moved into an inner room and impertubably continued his conference call, I shut down the servers and other hardware to protect them from the shock waves, Laura from HR tried to contact the staff who lived near Malhazine to check that they were okay. This gave her a lot of trouble - the cellphone networks were choked. Our credit supervisor Catarina arrived from the field, badly shaken. When the explosions started she had been in a crowded market maybe three kilometres from Malhazine, negotiating with a defaulting client, when a piece of shrapnel fell out of the sky and dug a hole in the ground very near by. Fortunately no one was hurt that time, but everyone, sensibly, fled the market. It took Caterina over an hour to drive the two or three kilometres back to the office.

Eventually the traffic thinned enough for us to leave. I took a lift home with Wesley and Laura, driving down the main road of Avenida 24 de Julho. I couldn't at the time understand why there were so many people lining the streets or crowding into any open space - later I heard that everyone was afraid of being trapped in a building which was demolished by the completely random bombardment. (Residential buildings in this part of town are all multi-storey, so a building collapse isn't something you can expect to survive, but after Catarina's story I was still surprised. Everyone gazed intently in the direction of the explosions, even when their view of the smoke and fire was blocked; perhaps they thought they could see shrapnel coming and run from it.) There were plenty of other broken windows and lots of shattered glass on the pavements. Shops which are normally open were shut with doors and windows barred. Extra guards stood about with semi-automatics, motorists were twitchy, pedestrians even less predictable than usual. No police in evidence, though - one assumes they were all closer to the scene of the action, though in the general jumpy mood it still felt like a lapse to me. The guards at my apartment building huddled together, talking and speculating - we could hear the explosions from there, maybe eight kilometres away, and my windows rattled a bit. Later I went out to one of my regular cafés to catch the TV coverage, and the management had seen fit to post a guard with a hefty rifle at each door.

The explosions seem to have stopped around 23.00 - certainly I wasn't woken during the night by rattling windows.

Next morning I was in the office around 6.00 to do the end-of-day processing which usually happens during the night. I still had no idea of the scale of the casualties, until Laura, who drove me in, searched on the internet and found a death toll of 22. Theresa and Benedita who live out Malhazine way both turned up and reported that their immediate families were fine, but Benedita's cousin who also lives there had two children missing. Zela from the branch downstairs had given her empregada the day off so that the poor woman could go searching for her child in the hospitals. The credit officers ventured into the affected areas to see if their clients were still there. And so on. The death toll rose during the day as more information came in. People were ringing radio stations to ask if anyone had seen wives or husbands or children who hadn't returned home since the disaster. Probably many of those will eventually turn up; by all accounts a lot of people were afraid to return to the area. There's unexploded ordnance scattered through people's backyards out there. I haven't heard any count of houses demolished yet.

So. The official line is once again that the explosion was caused by the heat of the day. I say "once again" because this same weapons stockpile also exploded, on a much smaller scale, back in January. At that time we all thanked god that no one was killed and the responsible officials swore up and down that they would move the stockpile to a less populated area. When I heard about the explosions my first thought was they must have been in the process of moving it and someone got careless; instead, the powers-that-be trot out the old heat explanantion. I don't know much about munitions and can't argue with it, though I'm skeptical. While it was hot on Thursday, it wasn't a scorcher by Maputo standards - the previous few days had been cool - and there are other stockpiles further north, where temperatures get even hotter.

But there is absolutely no doubt that the appalling death toll was caused by locating this highly dangerous stockpile in a residential area. An hour's drive outside Maputo you can find largely undeveloped open spaces; if the weapons had been stored there, an explosion of this scale might have taken out a few goats. It was a completely preventable disaster, caused by bureaucratic inepititude.