By Dr Lubinda Haabazoka
About doing business in Zambia
When you see a person doing business in Zambia and they are paying salaries and affording to make statutory payments and making some sales, you need to give credit to those people because business in Zambia is hard!
This article focuses not on the administrative or economic barriers to doing business but on interpersonal relationships in the business arena.
Why it’s difficult to do business in Zambia?
1. We don’t own the economy. Business in Zambia is controlled by foreigners so Zambians usually stand no chance in the big deals area! Such deals are either settled abroad in Europe or in Sandton out of the reach of hard working Zambians! We are relegated to bread crumbs!
2. Favouritism. In the bread crumbs arena, Zambians are “in charge” and such deals will only go to people they know or people that come with political influence. An average citizen stands no chance here!
3. Suspicions. It’s very difficult to pitch ideas to a Zambian! Unlike our foreigner friends who trust themselves, Zambians are very suspicious of each other! You have to explain 9 million times for someone to see an opportunity! This discourages people from creating synergies and stops money circulating among the Zambian folks because we don’t like doing business with each other!
4. The colder shoulder treatment. Even after pitching ideas to a Zambian who agrees to look at the issue, they will just start ignoring your calls, emails and messages! This trait is the most frustrating when doing business in Zambia! We should have the courage to say No or Yes! When you ignore someone and you need them in the future, the humble pie will be difficult to chew!
5. Hot air. Most Zambians are full of hot air! They over promise, agree to something, you build expectations and you even invest your time, energy and resources in the promise only for them to ignore your calls!
6. The jealous factor. In Zambia you can agree on a deal with a company but when a brother working in that company calculates your possible profits, they will just block that idea for fear that you will become big! This jealous component has to be eradicated if we have to succeed! To create wealth, money has to move amongst ourselves 90 times before it leaves to other groups!
7. Lack of trust in ourselves. Even after noticing that we don’t get big deals, there are other assets which we control that can give us big deals. But in Zambia, we don’t trust ourselves. We think Zambians are made for small deals of supplying toilet paper. Zambians cannot do big contracts or run big projects. For example, we can identify Zambians running businesses in an area and fund them. Instead we feel comfortable giving that money to foreigners. Our own money! For the dual carriageway, we could have chosen a consortium of Zambian contractors to do it. Money would have gone to the locals big time. In the energy sector, Andrew Kamanga’s North western energy could have benefited from a $200m capital injection for a coal power plant. That’s creating instant multimillionaires! But eish!
8. Colonial mentality. We still have a colonial mentality. We are not ready to own wealth. We are comfortable being workers and not masters. Even where we are the owners, we think we are great when associated with foreign companies and not locals. Do you think it’s normal for foreigners to create funds of giving tuma $5000 to our local businesses in a country that has so many resources?
9. We suck when given the opportunity. When we finally get a chance to prove ourselves, we sometimes suck at performance! Some don’t meet the deadlines and you have to send constant reminders to come and install even small things such as billboards! When some people underperform, you destroy the reputation of the whole group and then you create a mentality that Zambians can’t perform! You kill others by your behaviour!
10. Finally when a Zambian creates wealth, politicians go to him for money. He might give both those in the opposition and those in government. But when governments change, that’s the end of that business. Just by virtual of sponsoring the opponents, Law Enforcement agencies will be sent to kill his businesses. With such mentality, we create fear in the locals to create big companies. No one wants to go through the bad things they read in the media. Elon Musk condemns Biden everyday but he won an over $650m contract from NASA to bring down the American segment of the international space station. In Zambia that cannot happen. Zambian businesses who fund political parties are helping in the growth of democracy in the country! That’s how it is everywhere. They are donors! When political parties are funded by foreigners they no longer serve the interests on their electorates! They become foreign agents!
I promise colleagues that one day this won’t be the case. It takes a powerful few to put trust in their own to be able to achieve wealth creation for the locals! We need to empower ourselves. Without money, we shall have no respect from anyone. The little resources we have, let’s share equally amongst ourselves! Let’s give each other business and let’s improve our performance!
To those full of hot air, you shall eat the humble pie soon!!!!
Fully agree with you. We need to be adding such concepts including that of maintenance, hygiene, law and order in the education curriculum from nursery to secondary school. Then we will get somewhere. This form 6 initiative though good does not address the root causes of our underdevelopment.