Woolgather Wednesday: Innovation, Passion and Zambia (MUNTU Zed Series)

A couple of months ago, I went to another BongoHive Insaka, this time featuring Ceasar Siwale of Pangea Securities as well as Fresh View Cinemas and Mugg and Bean franchisee.  I went in large part in support due to the fact that a coupla months later, e18hteam would have a theatrical release due to his commitment to showcasing Zambian filmmakers by easily providing a platform for their films through his theatres.  You can watch the full video above but here are my takeaways from his talk and my thoughts:

1.  The Diaspora are key to Zambia's development.

We in Africa are constantly complaining about brain drain but there are ways to overcome that.  The Diaspora do not have to be terrestrial to have an impact.  The skills they acquire abroad can affect home remotely or on the ground.  A lot of the time frustration causes many who repatriate to return to their expatriate ways.  Things in Zambia can be at worst bureaucratic, convoluted and sometimes so illogical, slow and unnecessarily complicated and time consuming you just want to shoot yourself to end your misery.  But the rewards for taking risks are unparalleled.  And if you don't have the stomach and patience for such, there are options: Zambians abroad can invest and provide financing for business ventures from overseas. Expertise can still have an impact through mentoring and being role models by making a difference from afar with the effects being felt at home.  Be creative.  Figure it out.  And returning home can be done as Ceasar pointed out when I asked him how the transition for the diaspora can be made, and he looked at me and said well you are here, you have managed. Touché... 

2.  The Zed Zim complex is fed by our own insecurities.

In part due to the legacy of colonialism, with Southern Rhodesia aka Zimbabwe being the jewel of the British Empire's Southern Africa and Zambia being an afterthought: a consequence of land grabbing to show the rest of the European powers their might and was therefore less developed until copper was discovered and industrial mining started in the 1920s, we Zed folk have always felt a little, okay, very inferior to our cousins further South.   Despite being a rock for Zim after we got independent in 1964 and being a refuge for Zimbabweans in the 1970s as Ian Smith waged war with Britain and Mugabe fought for the indigenous to gain independence and self rule, we still feel like they have more to offer.  It is true that for decades Zim had better infrastructure, was able to market their 200m of Victoria Falls better than we do the 1 Km (yes you read right, we have 5 times more Falls than Zimbabwe) but in the 21st Century, we have taken strides to catch up.  There is nothing to separate us now really than attitude.  We need to believe in ourselves.  Forget what they have, lets work with what we have got proudly.

3.  Zambian education system is broken.

I lament the loss of the days of my parents.  They were youngsters when Zambia became independent and the Founding Fathers really focused on education.  They used the infrastructure set up by the British to create great schools that were some of the best in the region, and many were sponsored by government scholarships to go abroad, mainly in Europe, Russia and Cuba to get educated and were encouraged to come back and help build the nation.  That time is gone.  Now children are taught rote, and are chastised for questioning, lambasted for not towing the line.  When a child is stifled and learns that the only way to get ahead is to give the required scripted answer, how are they foster innovation in the future?  If their imagination is quelled before it is ignited, how can they dream?  How can they envisage a better tomorrow?  How can they have agency in developing the nation? Exactly....

4.  We should be the hub of Southern Africa...

Most obviously because we are bang smack in the middle of the region! We should be the go-to SADC destination with flights to every single country.  We should be THE connection.  We keep going on about being a landlinked, not landlocked country but are we doing enough to ensure that?  We also keep looking outward for FDI, calling for people from the outside to come in and help.  There is a lot of money in Zambia already.  We should also look inward and LDI should be a focus in conjunction with money from abroad.  How can we expect people to believe in us and what we have to offer if we don't invest in ourselves?  To truly be a hub, we need to be attractive for people to flock.  It is time to woo people, we need to find our little black dress and flaunt our best assets to attract suitors by showing how well we are doing on our own but are perfectly happy to partner up if lucrative for all parties.  We need to have faith in ourselves but not whore ourselves out.  We need to develop with dignity.

5.  Be passionate about your work and fight for what you believe in.

Ceasar talked about how noone thought another cinema chain would work in Zambia but he was passionate about bringing the blockbuster experience full throttle to Lusaka and succeeded.  Unfortunately we are known to be naysayers, to shut an idea down before the seed of possibility is even planted.  We need to give space for ventures to germinate and need to be okay with failure as it is just a bump in the road to success. If you truly believe in your business plan you should back it with your own money (how can you expect others to invest without being able to lead by example if needed) and be willing to do what it takes (without compromising your principles and selling your soul) to make things happen.  There are no shortcuts to making it, you have to put in the hard time and be ready to sacrifice in the short term, to move forward and have staying power in the long term.

Ceasar with Anja Savic aka the Letterist
at e18hteam Premiere, 16th October 2014

Lastly I would like to thank Ceasar for being supportive of my documentary film.  I first approached him last year to let him know I was working on the film and he kept to his word and I was able to Premiere the film in October.  Fresh View Cinema staff were so obliging and made the theatre release a breeze.  We also got an extension from a week to a months screening of the film.  I am glad to be able to provide proof that Zambians ARE supporting Zambians through our collaboration.  

For more information about the Zambia Investment Conference that Ceasar mentions in the video, visit their website and register for the event happening the first week in December.  You can find out about the latest local and international films showing at Fresh View Cinema here.

In the mood to start something?  Register for BongoHive's Startup Weekend starting this Friday in Lusaka.  You can also find out more about future talks by following them on Facebook and Twitter.

Want to know more about the film?  Follow e18hteam on Facebook and Twitter to find out about our global film festival run in 2015.

Zed Culture Part II: Happy 48th Zed!

Me flying like the youthful Zed Nkwazi (eagle) I am over the Mosi-Oa-Tunya aka
Vic Falls, Livingstone.  That flimsy contraption aka microlight was the one of
best and worst experiences of my life!

Today marks Zambia's 48th year of Independence from the British Empire, and the day it changed it's name from Northern Rhodesia to Zambia.  It was the 9th African state to free itself from it's colonial power.  Did you know that it was almost called Zambezia, (after the Zambezi river, 4th longest river in Africa and the water that creates the Mosi-Oa-Tunya: The Smoke that Thunders aka Victoria Falls), which is now the name of a Hollywood CGI animated film starring the voice talents of Samuel L. Jackson set at the Falls and is of course about animals!  There's a random nugget of useless knowledge for you.  Another less useless and more interesting nugget, (I hope), is that we have 19 national parks, the largest is Kafue: it is the size of Wales and is the second largest in Africa.  And today is Pele's birthday too, no wonder we are football crazy!

Our country is still young, and though we started off well, being one of the richest countries in Africa in the 1970s thanks to our copper and our first President, Kenneth Kaunda, investing in education and providing youth with educational opportunities around the world, and coupled with them repatriating to bring the skills they had learnt abroad back home, we have now done a 360.  Many of our educated have flown the coup, and there are no longer the ready opportunities our parents enjoyed.  However, instead of being pessimistic, nihilistic and Oscar the Grouch about our situation like this dude who glibly and speciously wrote a piece titled Zambia's 48 years of dependency, how about looking at why we have regressed/ stagnated and how to move forward?  I really can't stand people who whine and complain and offer nothing to rectify the situation.  They just want to stew in the smell emanating from the poop they are talking about and watch as the stench chokes the hope and optimism out of people.  That is not patriotic.  Patriotism is love for one's country, and sometimes it has to be tough through constructive criticism that aims to foster and catalyse positive change through progress.  Listing all our problems is not criticism, it's compiling a list.  Not looking at what is working means that that list is incomplete, unbalanced and negatively skewed.  Not seeing the potential that exists in so many areas of society, culture, business and development here in Zambia is short-sighted and unpatriotic.  You should want to improve what is wrong with your country, not just point and cackle and watch as it goes down in flames because if we are a Christian country, that is what Jesus would do - he'd step up man!  More on that in Part I, where you can also find links to Zambian blogs written by people who actually love their country and are proud to hail from it.  Clearly this dude falls in the former category I was talking about :(.  If he wants to talk about how our issues and what we can do to fix them, he should have a chat with this dude: This is how you write an Independence post that challenges the status quo while hoping for a better future and wishing the country well!

What I wish for my country over the next two years leading up to our 50th anniversary is the potential of our youth to be realised.  We are going through a renaissance that is evident in other African countries too.  We can see youth leading through mobile technology in East Africa, particularly Kenya with Ushaidi that is now the go-to global platform for emergency and disaster reportage and has gone beyond that with out very own girls here in Zambia using it to map out all the female tech orgs on the continent.  Or how about those Ugandan med students that figured out a way to do ultrasounds with a basic mobile phone and our West African friends who are leading the way by culturally embracing their Africaness creatively with fashion, music, tv and film? Or our North African brothers and sisters who used social media and protests to enact political and social change?  Or how about here in the South - former war-torn countries like Angola and Mozambique are moving on up the development scale quicker than you can say what I just wrote peacefully?  And how about the youth that comprise our national team stepping up in Gabon and winning AFCON, realising the weight on their shoulders and stepping up to ensure this momentous event in our history occurred.  Today we will forget how they have haphazardly performed since he he he he. We shall remember again tomorrow though...

Zambian youth have a lot to offer, they want to improve themselves and they believe they can do it on their own soil.  Unlike the troll who wrote that article, they are optimistic despite what seem like insurmountable problems.  They may have been disappointed that what they voted for last year has not come into fruition, but every day I hear of some enterprising youngun looking for a scholarship, starting a small business to get them through school and trying to find a way to make their mark by improving themselves.  We need to encourage these kids, not give them reasons to give up hope and eschew optimism.  We need to keep our future bright and hungry, like these guys who made a video of their rendition of our national anthem, proudly donning Zed football paraphernalia:



There have been times I have wanted to give up, to stay out in the West or defect to Kenya or South or Nigeria but I haven't because in the end ndi mwina Zed! I am a Mwana ba Afrika who is proudly Zambian.  This is the time to be here, there is so much to be done and so many ways to make a life, to travel new paths and explore new possibilities.  There are endless things to discover due to the diversity in ethnic groups and we can look at ourselves from other angles too: what  does our national identity mean today, what is our role in SADC and and what do we offer to the African identity?  We need to get rid of people like the dude who wrote the Watchdog piece, looking to outside with rose-coloured glasses, ignoring the fact that Europe and the USA are going through a serious financial crisis that has made many of their people instantly poor and that many are struggling too. Like I have said, no one has THE answer, the magic pill, the silver bullet. There is nothing I hate more than a colonised mind.  I wonder if he has ever left the country.  Having spent the best part of 2/3 of my life in the West, from what I can see, things are not necessarily always better, just different.  Different climate, different cultures, different peoples, different priorities that bear different problems and solutions.  But we have many similarities too - we are all trying to make our worlds better, and sometimes we make them worse.  We are all flawed and WE ALL HAVE THE POTENTIAL FOR GREATNESS IN OUR OWN WAYS.  What we need to do here in Zambia is stop looking outside for answers, but look within, because they are there for the taking! We need to take contolol! I leave you with two songs: one by Cactus Agony that I just love because it is such a patriotic song with soul and profound insight into who we are and how confused we are as a nation and what we can do to rise up and take control of our Zambian identity and the other is my favourite song right now, and the best song that Zone Fam has done in my eyes that is Proudly Zambian in every shape and form. It's a party-starter and today is a day of celebration :)

Actually before I do that...

One Zambia, One Nation! Nafuti Nafuti! Donchi Kubeba! Whether we are governed by UNIP, MMD , PF or who knows in the future, what is important is that we as a people band together and rise up as a nation, become great again and soar proudly like the eagles we will always be, coz don't tell anyone, Zambians are on the move baby!

Ummm yes I made sure that all the colours of our flag are in this post and talked about eagles to make sure that element of the flag is included as well he he he...Okay I'm done ;}

No I'm not he he he. Added a new tag and theme to the blog: Y Zed ie. Young Zambia.  To kick off I have added a new section on the right-hand side with links to Zambian websites and blogs belonging to Zed youth.  And check out my views on Zambia over the years he he he he.

New video! Kabungo Precious Mumbi-Habeenzu's MUNTU Zed Series 3-4

The MUNTU and Zed Series has officially popped its cherry! I thought I would start off MUNTU nestled in Africa’s womb, Zambia aka Zed. This birthing has required me to indulge in nepotism, a truly African move, by cajoling my Aunt to be my first interviewee.  Luckily she has forgiven me for almost drowning us both in a pool as kids as I coaxed her to venture to the deep end with me.  I haven’t lost my touch he he he he ;}.  She hasn’t forgotten though and reminds me of this whenever she has the chance. A fellow biophiliac and partner-in-crime, I am honoured and proud to present to you the beautiful, passionate and talented Miss Zambia 2005, mother, wife, advocate and proudly Zambian, Black and African, Mrs Kabungo Mumbi-Habeenzu.

3 places and/ or things that make Zambia special:

4 experiences that Kabungo has learnt from:

For the rest of this interview, please read Kabungo's 10 Questions here.

This Is Ridiculous!

The Christiano Ronaldo baby mama daddy story just gets stranger by the minute.  Why does he have black toenails? I think my sister and I should stop digging for clues because we just find nonsense instead!

Another bit of ridiculousness!! Nadal passed by the Victoria Falls on his way to watch La Furia Roja!!! Of course he would have to visit my country while I am stuck overseas! I am not a happy puppy bob, not a happy puppy.

And all of you who know my love for Nadal please stop telling me about this.  This coupled with not being able to be in SA for the World Cup has completely ruined my summer.  Je suis tres upset.