July 10th, 2015 - ZNFU Notes

Lately this has been making the rounds on social media

The guy in charge of load shedding at ZESCO:

I find it somehow fascinating that Homer was chosen, but it's somehow appropriate ... ZESCO's in a bit of an overwhelming situation where they can't fake it and make it.

The immediate issue is due largely to the poor rains the past rainy season vs. power demand. However, others I've spoken blame it on the short-term thinking chronic of parastatals (e.g., government run utilities) ... power generation capability of anything other than household scale (itself the realm of solar) in Zambia is still based entirely on rather dated hydro facilities, and that ZESCO is at fault for not following up on these opportunities in the past ... it means our forests will take an almighty bigger beating for charcoal as the farmers who were shorted by the same rains scramble to make up for lost money by turning on the forests. It may also push some positive change ... more fuel-efficiency, diversity of sources, etc. In the case of Conservation Agriculture, these are great years for getting farmers on board with the technology; it's literally a "join or die" mentality. It's either adopt CA or don't have food ... particularly with another ENSO event looming (see below):

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Excerpts from the ZNFU Weekly Agro Watch (Volume 27)
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El Niño threatens the start of 2015/2016 season in the region

The US Geological Survey has suggested a greater possibility of an El Niño by the start of the 2015/2016 season as sea surface temperatures (SSTs) continue across most of the Pacific Ocean continue to rise. Based on historical trend analysis, El Niño conditions would likely result in below-average rainfall. In previous El Niño years, countries affected include, southern parts of Zimbabwe, southern parts of Malawi, northeastern South Africa, and southern and central Mozambique. Based on recent experiences during the 2014/15 season (when similar positive SST conditions were predicted) several areas in the region ended up experiencing a late start of season and erratic rains during the October to December period, resulting in below-average rainfall. However, it should be noted that in some El Niño years, including the 1997/98 season, the region received above-average rains and above-average harvests.

MAIZE

• Zimbabwe is facing maize deficit of over 900,000 metric tons according to Fewsnet assessment in July 2015.
• Malawi, Congo DRC and Angola are facing maize deficits and will rely on informal Zambian maize grain imports between July and December 2015.

A September to Remember

We're having an odd (?) spat of wind and lightning. I have so long been blissfully ignorant of the contents of the sky above that upon leaving the office this afternoon, I revealed in the usual shock one gets from seeing clouds when so long without.

That's not quite right ... I was home for most of the month of August following my birthday and the CARWG conference, and it rained plenty a couple of times. However, I have so perfectly separated the here from the there that vacation seems as if it happened to another person. Simon & Garfunkel weren't kidding when they said "Michigan [and Indiana and New Orleans] seems like a dream to me now."

Back in the here, September has been somewhat ludicrously sweltering; by the time I got back to Mongu on the 8th, temps were starting to hit 35C; yesterday, it finally topped 40C. For the audience back home, that's 95F up to 105F. It is a dry heat, thank God ... and the nature of the soil causes most of the heat to radiate up and out an hour or so after dark. However, this large shoddily armored knight sleeps mostly on top of the bed's dust cover, alternating between fitful dreams of the Lake Superior shoreline and sweaty wakefulness staving off the ever-present specter of regret.

Eventually 5:15 rolls around about the same time I'm finally dozing off; the cell phone alarm ding-dongs a number of times before I roll out and mash the keypad trying to silence its blaring. Such a chump now ... used to roll out of bed instantly awake; now I feel like a tottering fool in the morning, unable to find my bathroom slippers (flip-flops) and stumbling barefoot to the bathroom. After hauling on my shorts and a t-shirt, stretching, I wake the guard from his deep slumber on my porch and head out for training.

Any time someone in Zambia is running with shorts and a t-shirt, people refer to it as "training" ... there has to be a point to running, such as an upcoming football match, or, ermmm, a football match. No one runs to lose weight in this culture; why the hell would someone not want to be fat? I plod along and think of little other than the fire in my lungs and avoiding the invariable gentlemen steering their bicycles home to the village with the rolled up corrugated steel sheet strapped perpendicular to the long axis of his bike. Or the taxis, which believe they'll get better mileage if they don't turn on their lights. Or the Chinese ...

Ah ... the Chinese. I've not touched that hot-button topic much since I've started this blog. The Chinese are in Mongu for the same reason many Chinese are in Zambia or Africa as a whole: they are building something. In our case, it is a dual project; repair of the roads around Mongu town, and the road across the floodplains connecting Kalabo on the Angola border to Mongu, the rest of Zambia, and sensu stricto or otherwise, the rest of the world. The former is happening in a circle around my house, and as is their wont, the Chinese get the crews on the road early and keep them working late. It's been wonderful for the already staggering colloid levels in the air; their is a constant aura of dust that at times makes people appear as spirits emerging into and fading out of view. Most of the dust comes from their hauling clay out of Mawawa pan 14 km east of town in long, jolting convoys of Dong Fang tipper [dump] trucks and taking it out into the Barotse floodplains to build the roadbed.

Knock down those pronouns; "their" in this case is mostly China Geo's (the company's) local hires; it seems an essential element of this sort of work is to hire tons of guys at cheap wages; if you quit, there is always someone else who wants to purchase skinny jeans and soon-to-break oversized headphones who can lean on a shovel with the best of them. However, real Chinese employees are not few, and totally unlike most NGOs do not bother with the assumption or pretension that nationals will do the job. Each job has a Chinese supervisor somewhere, typically smoking, donning a boiler suit, and wearing a straw hat with an oversized brim (hence my disaffection of such haberdashery ... I got tired of kids calling me a Chinese, using the racial epithet "cho-choli", or shouting "shey-shey-shey-shey-shey" at me). One cannot figure how they supervise lacking either English or siLozi, but they accomplish much with pointing and shouting things like "you work!" or "you dig".

I can't wait for October to go by ... we need the washing badly.

Lessons learned [learnt]

Ugh ... time goes by like a spinning wheel while you feel like your spinning your wheels.

Neglecting a blog I guess isn't that big a deal, especially one as inspiring and as popular as mine. It's only the legacy that you used to post more often that drives you to post again, though with less frequency than before.

However, this is an agroecological blog; despite personal contexts being relative constraining to my particular holon, the universe that is Zambian agriculture stumbles along. May is roughly the beginning of autumn (if such a Westernization of the climate can be thus approximated) in terms of weather; however, the harvest started for most around the Ides of March. The above normal, but poorly distributed rainfall pattern crushed the maize crops in most cases; that three-week dry spell in the latter half of January and early February put away all chances of food security for the nonce. Most of the project farmers have called their conventional harvest a loss; the Conservation Agriculture was somewhat less so, but many of the poorest beneficiaries have already consumed whatever they grew and are already turning to other livelihood strategies, mainly basket fishing and piecework (food-for-labor). The groundnuts and bean crops were a failure as well; the groundnuts just can't find enough calcium in between the large particles of sand (not that it would matter anyway with the soil so dry that there was none in plant available form), and the beans were a magnet to every critter south of the Congo.

In the NGOs world, you never admit failure. Even if the walls are coming down around your head, you never say anything to the effect of "that was a big mistake" or "we shouldn't have done that". There is doubtless a great fear of failure, or admitting failure, because of the expectation that donor funding may   clamp down, shut off, end, etc. Instead, you refer to ongoing failures as "challenges" and confirmed failure as "lessons learned" [learnt in the Queen's Eng]). Some of our failures can be spun as follows:

Failure #1. Sugar beans should not have been selected as a third crop.
LL #1:       In future programming, sugar beans should not be utilized as a rotation crop.

Failure #2:  Selection of beneficiaries was incorrectly done and inadequately verified by staff and partners due to the high ratio of beneficiaries to officers, meaning numerous extremely poor beneficiaries were excluded from the programme.
LL #2:        Community leaders need to be sensitized in beneficiary selection criteria.

I could go on but I won't. This year logistically went the best of all three, but the heavens failed us. How do you write a lessons learned for poor rainfall distribution? Who do you blame? Where do you point the finger?

Oh well; I keep remembering what Grant said to Sherman on the evening of first day of the Battle of Shiloh (TN):

Sherman encountered Grant under a tree, sheltering himself from the pouring rain. He was smoking one of his cigars while considering his losses and planning for the next day. Sherman remarked, "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Grant looked up. "Yes," he replied, followed by a puff. "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."

Guess P.T.G. Beauregard didn't apply his lessons learnt. Now we just need to find our own Don Carlos Buell.