Anchor Tenant Defined

In 1996—upon completing the ‘seamless services’ project at Spoornet—I landed myself a lucrative job—as Business Manager: Multipurpose Terminals—at Portnet. Back then Portnet was both the port authority as well as conducted port operations. I joined the operations part of this South African supply chain system and was located in the port in Port Elizabeth.

As Business Manager—some mouthful term for General Manager for those who are into simplicity—I had the opportunity, among other things, to be involved in the process of deciding on the location of a new deep sea port at Ncquka—some twenty kilometers outside Port Elizabeth. Why would Port Elizabeth need another port nearby? Was it sheer wastefulness among those who already have?

No. Rather, it was in response to competition from elsewhere. That right! When under attack defend yourself not otherwise—as Malawians are wont to do. For instance, once upon a time—when Mugabe got busy getting rid of white tobacco farmers—I wrote [while in South Africa] to certain political figures; advising on how we could capitalize on that error of judgment. The response was—instead of ‘grabbing’ the white farmers—Malawi got busy empathizing with Mugabe. A Malawian President flew across and feted Mugabe for his anti-colonial stance! On the other hand, the Mozambicans [and indeed the South Africans] had no such compunctions. They took in the farmers. To this day, Mozambican tobacco is doing roaring business while Malawians scratch about in this self-made economic confusion.

So, it happened that in the early 90s South African ports, on the eastern seaboard, came under attack from Port Louis, in Mauritius. From the South African shores we watched deep sea ships bypassing South Africa. Traffic was being lost and those fickle ship captains—once they get into a habit of ignoring you—take some doing persuading back. So, the South Africans visited Port Louis NOT to praise the Mauritians for such an economic ‘coup de etat’. Instead, secret missions went in to study what it was that ocean-going vessels found attractive about that island port. The answer came.

Port Louis was situated out at sea—enabling massive 500,000+ toner deadweights to anchor and release their cargo from out there without the hassles that Port Elizabeth—ensconced in the shallow waters of Algoa Bay—had become. Hence to win back the traffic—disappearing towards Port Louis—a deep sea port was needed in and around Port Elizabeth. After some brain scratching, Ncquka—a salt mining village some twenty kilometers away the existing port—was finally settled upon.

That’s it: ‘Build a port at Ncquka?’ The political decision was convinced this was a simple ABC process. Indeed, some black elephants, within the new African ruling party, truly promoted this thought. Clearly, a white elephant was in the making. However, some of us—with some business thought between our ears—began to ask questions. A deep sea port—yes. Steal back traffic from Port Louis—may be. But, what else after that traffic has been won back?

You have, by now, heard of the arguments that were put forward in support of the ‘Nsanje Port Dream’. The figure of two thousand containers per year and some indeterminate regional traffic and nothing much else was bandied about. People in the civil services cheated their way into having their petty ‘David Livingstone’ project developed.

Now, having worked in the ports in South Africa, I happen to know that two thousand twenty-footers are the stuff you put into one ocean-going ship and go to lunch while tugs push the thing out of harbor and into the high sea! So, someone in the civil service of Malawi had lied to whole President that we would set up a port on the basis of a single ship load! Just as well the Mozambicans decided to be ‘nasty’. Can you imagine the kind of egg we would have had on our faces for the other 355 days that the Nsanje Port would stand idle?

At Port Elizabeth and Ncquka we got busy thinking deeper: how would we keep Ncquka fully occupied; considering the port at Port Elizabeth was to remain functional for some time to come. Indeed, ideas of moving away traditional Port Elizabeth traffics—manganese ore [from Keetmanshof], fresh orange exports, scrap metal, ore scintilla, VW cars to China and containers carrying in VW parts etc—to Ncquka were bandied around. But, these ideas were soon rejected because they amounted to ‘moving around existing furniture’ and calling that development. We needed a real and visible bonanza!

Credit to my colleague, Kevin Wakefield—then Chief Executive of Eastern Cape Chamber of Commerce and later: because of successes at Ncquka Chief Executive of the South African Chamber based in Johannesburg—we had to think outside such narrow boxes. We needed to keep Ncquka busy for 356; if not 500 days of the year. Out of the numerous meetings emerged new thought processes and terms. One of these was ‘Anchor Tenant’.

What is an anchor tenant? Where did the term come from? What was its relevance to Ncquka? What is its application to a vibrant Nsanje Port? How can it be applied to processes of economic development in Malawi?

Back in mid 1996 the term ‘Anchor Tenant’ was not new. In fact, it is as old as the first viable supermarket and/ or department store in the USA back in the mid to late 1930s. In other words, it is a property development and/ or asset development term. The property development guys in NICO—in building a successful shopping complex at Chichiri had an understanding of what was involved. That is a thing that the old PTC Supermarket—and thus Kamuzu—on Victoria Avenue did not understand. It had no anchor tenant and expectedly it is closed, isn’t it? Indeed, I saw, in the late 80, a few such sorry shopping complexes in Liverpool, England; products of ill thought shopping complex development or disappearing local and regional anchor tenants.

Putting up a shopping complex—the brick work—is a simple exercise; just as putting up a port is. The challenge is figuring out who the anchor tenant of that shopping complex—in our case the port at Ncquka and now Nsanje—would be. It is not by some nomenclatural accident that Chichiri Shopping Center is also called Shoprite Shopping Center. Shoprite is the ‘anchor tenant’ of that complex. Take out Shoprite today [while not making arrangements to bring in another major operator of similar caliber and operations] and Chichiri Shopping Center would be on its way to death. It may not be immediate but that is the final outcome. This is where ‘economic euthanasia’—as I wrote in an earlier blog—may become necessary.

So an anchor tenant—to use a shipping terminology—is the ‘anchor’ that ensure that the ‘ship’ does not, during heavy weather, float about; hitting itself and crushing to smithereens expensive quay walls. Indeed, one of the reasons why all ports [until Port Louis refused to buck the trend and was built in open seas] are situated in a bay or mountain alcove. This is to provide additional controls against such weather vicissitudes. The idea is to make sure the ship is not overturned or run ashore during a storm. So besides deadweight anchorage, ships need physical shelter or break winds.  I am not sure what kind of anchors and wind breakers the architects of Nsanje Port designed for ships in the port in case of a dangerous storm?

An anchor tenant [plus the wind breaker] is the economic institutions in a port and/ or economy [including shopping malls] that ensure that the economic viability of the complex is sustainable throughout its economic life. Indeed, in property development business operations such as Shoprite generally occupy over 30% of the floor space of the complex. Yet, they have enough clout or power to negotiate down the rentals to less than 10%; while the small or subsidiary anchor tenants [those shops that come to the complex to assemble around the ‘anchor’] end up meeting 90% rentals and operating costs of the center! Unfair but a necessary evil for those who will make money from the traffic that the anchor tenant attracts!

So at Ncquka we needed to define an anchor tenant—the big guy that would attract continuous and year-long traffic to the port after the Port Louis traffic was won. We embarked on finding such an anchor tenant. The first lesson came from Richards Bay, in Kwazulu-Natal. Originally, a coal ‘conveyor belt’—nearly 350 million tons of coal is delivered into this port for shipment into the global system—Richards Bay was a sleepy town because the coal operation involved handling of coal into ‘pre-stacks’ in between ship arrival and loading. To generate continuity, an aluminum processing plant was established at Richards Bay—just outside the port area. Consequently, a comprehensive support industry—supplying both the port and the aluminum plant—has emerged. Additional ships, collecting aluminum ingots into the global market, now ply in and out of Richards Bay on a daily basis. Now, a beehive-like city—including the old Empangeni Town nearby—has grown behind the coal port.

Ncquka needed a similar industrial base around so as part of the Eastern Cape Chamber we went about attracting Billington HBP of Australia to establish and aluminum processing plant at Ncquka. Today, Ncquka, Port Elizabeth and the VW Assembly city at Eikenhof are fast coming together as one unified Nelson Mandela Bay.

Similarly—something those who developed the Nsanje Port concept failed to appreciate—there was [is] a need to define an anchor tenant. A viable and sustainable economic activity is needed to sustain Nsanje for the other 355 days of the year; long after the two thousand twenty-footers have left for Chiinde. How do we avoid creating a ghost town out of the Nsanje Port dream? It is a frightening specter but we already have such things around Malawi. For example, if you want to see a port without an anchor tenant take a lazy ride to Chipoka, Chilumba or even Monkey Bay when the Mtendere and/ or Ilala are not in port. Dead, aren’t they?

Nsanje needs an anchor tenant within the port itself. We need to get organized and approach the Billingtons of this world to establish an anchor tenant at Nsanje. The answers are there. The bauxite coming into Richards Bay and Ncquka is fetched from as far as Tete in Mozambique. Don’t we have bauxite right here—in Mulanje?

But more importantly, Nsanje needs an economic miracle in-country—somewhere in the Lower Shire or beyond. My suggestion that we persuade the-powers-that-be to establish a Nsanje Port Development Authority [NPDA]—responsible for formally and actively promoting development for Nsanje Port has met with wane smiles from certain technical authorities: nothing much else thereafter! Besides, the bauxite in Mulanje and an aluminum plant in Nsanje Port, the NPDA wo and the potential industrial complex around it. The traffic from theuld be responsible for resuscitating the mothballed Bangula Dam industries would keep Nsanje Port night and day!

So are anchor tenants only for Nsanje Port? In my next blog I link this argument to my earlier blog on economic engines; developing the thesis that even the national economy needs such anchor tenants.

The author can also be contacted at zivaiclaude@gmail.com

Cascading Malawi's Economic Development on the Cheap

I wrote the ‘Gander is the way’ blog way back in 2004—long before I had ever heard of blogging and while local news editors played marble with critical decisions—I also wrote this article: here it goes

 Imagine my sense of awe when I learned some American film star garners over US$100 million in one film appearance! Later I learned that certain low budget films—shot at under US$30,000—had made it to Cannes and managed to beat some mega million-dollar films at Emmy Awards!

How do they do it?

I have since thought of these stark contrasts in terms of the comparable cost of transforming our national development system. A question in a similar vein would be: How do we create a US$30, 000 NIC [National Irrigation Corporation] while avoiding the US$100 billion price tag that so called ‘experts’ generally bandy around? And I've been checking things too.

The Cannes film case shows that it is not the expensiveness of the means—i.e. paying some high class actor—that really matters. That is a cost that must be slated against potential revenue. Rather it is the final message: the results—the potential revenue—that is crucial. Will be movie be able to describe a beeline that viewers will follow? Big ticket films have flopped while low budgets have become financial success stories!

If such arguments—movie goers coming out for the message whether it is Tom Cruise or my poor uncle Ma'mwene who is the main actors—that must invariably work if we transferred the logic to other scenarios. Once you grasp this fine relationship correctly it becomes easy to understand why India—and not the obvious China—is now being tagged the next global superpower! And this Indian reputation has nothing to do with Indian prowess in the bedroom—i.e. comparing 1.8 billion Indians to 1.3 billion Chinese by 2030. That is a contributing factor but it is not THE factor.

Rather the Indians have figured—‘brain powered’—a cheaper way of getting ahead in a world where development "tradeoffs" and clever competence options are getting scarcer and scarcer. Did you get that right the first time around? Let me break it down into your size-bite: ‘In the Fashion Industry ‘Life is the Life’. It is the driver of fashion changes—fads and stayers alike. In fact, there is only one basic fashion in life—getting dressed! Yet, the clever ones have found ways of combining ‘acts of getting dressed’ into various permutation; coming up with new approaches to fashion and generally the cheaper the solution the bigger the ‘wow’ factor and thus the greater the money bank drawer factor! And ‘Life Goes On’! So what is the ‘cheap getting-dressed-fashion’ of Malawi’s national economic development priorities? So, people are running around digging holes all over the place looking for minerals. This is because we are so lazy to ‘brain power’ the cheaper approaches.

For example—because they have too many mouths to feed and no easy money to hand around—the Indians dig cheap water canals to trap water from the Himalayas and the Ganges River. Given Malawi have no geographical accidents like copper mines—e.g. some of our neighbors are luckier—it is expected that Malawi must quest for the cheapest and/ or lowest-input development strategies. Malawi cannot escape the Indian Conundrum Approach.

Yet check what we have been doing since 1947. Just because Kamuzu grew up in the USA and during the Roosevelt Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal era—that involved building roads across the USA as a Keynesian ‘supply-side’ stimulus to growth—Malawi has become victim of such economic misunderstanding. The ‘new-deal’ USA needed roads because it was already economically developed ‘stupid’! Even then Roosevelt invested in an expensive canal construction and irrigation program as part of that New Deal. What did we get as our political independence ‘New Deal’? Petty road programs leading to villages that were renamed ‘Capital City’ [new towns development programs]—all the stuff rich countries do for ‘dessert’; not for the main meal. Have we learned or changed much since Kamuzu?

In other words, no matter how politically expedient and given a finite bucket of NDR [national development resources]—Malawi does not need elaborate road networks at this stage. Opening up the Mid West and the Western seaboard of the USA was one slog with little investment in roads and logistics as a precondition. The USA grew rich on the basis of ‘mipita’ [rat tracks] for roads and the ‘pioneering’ spirit of its Capitalists. In short, Malawi cannot afford to build roads and irrigation canals at the same time. We have to make pragmatic choices and—as I said in the Gander blog—those choices are hard because our international partners are generally against them. They have to because they are using the New Deal Roosevelt model to develop a village like Malawi—and that is wrong development principles. As I have said elsewhere: ‘even Margaret Thatcher would have had a tough time transforming Malawi’. This is because the challenges are different. We start from the lower end of the development template. Put simply not every successful CEO of a business in Malawi or elsewhere can ‘start up and run a business’. Peddling a bicycle that is already mobile and balancing pushing one into mobility are two different things and we pretend not to know! Our international partners are generally dense and I won’t say anti-African but the facts are there:

Ever wondered why the World Bank [see Cernea in 2002] was funding irrigation schemes in Thailand and other Asian countries but downrightly refused irrigation loans to Africa and Malawi included? Check the pocket change they are still proposing to support irrigation initiatives today. They did do that elsewhere and why?

What is the choice then; if we are to go the ‘own-bootstraps’ route?

Given roads—ceteres paribus—are notoriously inefficient in creating food production opportunities. And given economic theory argues transport and communications are means to "scarcity surmounting" [bridge the distance between sources of plenty and points of deficiency] then scarcity is largely a production shortfall in one locality. Meantime, availability of "commodities" to be exchanged must precede such need for exchange processes otherwise two points of deficiency that are properly logistic-ed will hardly have anything to exchange. Therefore, it follows that hard-earned taxpayers’ money should first go to cheap irrigation canals in order to ensure availability of "exchangeable commodities"!

Do we use Nyerere's Ujamaa principles to get the irrigation canals dug; given digging trenches takes muscles and that may come pretty cheap around here? But, I believe we have no intention to use slave or any other forms of conscripted labor? Bakili saw to that and created MASAF. The only problem it has never been truly not available to the poor it was intended. However, choices are there—after all Capitalist is the harnessing of idle surplus capacity [i.e. slave surplus in different degrees of exploitable disposition]. If the Chinese are refusing to sign the WTO agreement is because they discovered ‘enslaving’ foreign [Western] patents for free is their route to growth and glory. We, poor Malawians, signed on the dotted line without understanding the ‘thieving principles’ involved and who is worse off then?!

Instead, to brain power a bit, we will employ one of my development principles. It is called "Cascading". You know the stuff your parents used to do? They would force you into your older brother or sister’s worn-out clothes just to make sure household funding goes a little bit further. Economic Cascading recognizes that out there lies so much idle "advanced"—by Malawian development standards—technology and most of our "kick-start" development solutions. Our State Presidents—instead of going on foreign tours looking for Sushi dinners—should seriously spend more time in "foreign scrap yards! Forget the rubbish the earlier leaders used to say: "Ku Malawi sikudzala". Did you ever utter "sindine padzala" when your mother brought the toeless shoes your older brother was abandoning? In fact if you know your history Stalin Russia built its car manufacturing industry by "carting away" a whole BMW factory out of defeated Germany! The economic cascading I am proposing would involve merely doing the reverse in a smarter way.

"Cascading" is a ‘science’ of consciously gathering useable technology lying idle in the advanced systems. Half the time those systems don't need the stuff. It is a bother to them because in those parts of the world "scrap" can be quite expensive to dispose. Besides in this day and age of Globalization we need such national business development and marketing strategies. So if Malawi should become "kudzala" so be it. Let's get the Americans to give us some of the back actors and trench digging machinery that Norman Swartzkorf and others used to dig trenches in Kuwait during George Bush Senior's unfinished war and in Iraq during George Bush Junior's "Round Two with Saddam". In this case we get the cascade for nearly nothing as an investment on our part.

So let's together draft a note:

"Please, Sirs in the USA [in fact with Obama in it ought to be much simpler] can you kindly let us have some of your war-surplus back actors and other things to accelerate our national irrigation program. Naturally this will enable us to raise our national productivity and if your cows ever need any surplus maize we will gladly supply it at a reasonable price..."

An efficient back actor—digging through the largely spongy soils of Malawi—should give us at least 1000 to 2000 meters of meter-deep trenches a day. So, hundred back actors will manage 20 kilometers of trench work per day. That is a lot of trenches by the end of 365 days! By the way back actors have front plough hoes that can also be used to restart Kamuzu’s gravel quality DRIMP roads throughout Malawi.

The Americans should also add a few good levelers to be used to scour and cover up a few bad patches in the field creating reasonably level planting fields. The rest of the job the idle Malawian smallholder—in the field for three months and drinking kachasu and uchema for the other nine months—will know how to create suitable irrigable land behind the trenches.

Finally, if you still have a few old high-lift pumps from Texas or other places—where your oil wells dried out—we would be more than grateful to take those too. Sometime later—possibly within eight to twenty months of serious agricultural activity—we will gladly approach you with a valid bank-check as a token of our appreciation..."

P/S Help us with the shipping costs and deduct the same from your already budgeted "Scrap Disposal Account"; given we are providing you with free dumping sites. Please do not send any nuclear waste alongside! Besides we will supply you with reasonably priced pork once our "Gander Program" gets underway!"

Signed

DziYAMBAKATA of Malawi

This is what I call "Cascading Networking". It gets results. Try it!

The author can also be contacted on zivaiclaude@gmail.com

GANDER IS THE WAY TO NATIONAL PROSPERITY

A persuasive argument:

An average American gobbles down 25 kilograms of pork and products per year. That's more than half a pig per year! But get ready for this— In 365 days an average Chinese—diminutive as he is—swallows 40 kilograms or a whole pig—sweat-and-sour, soy sauced etc! Now if you put the Americans, the Chinese [mainland and Taiwan], the Japanese, the Korean and other pork eaters of the world the number comes to no less than 1.5 billion users!

Interestingly though most of these people raise their own pigs. Yet, their home supply hardly scratches the demand surface. Hence they go around the world looking for reliable suppliers. Malawi—with all its abundant fresh water and arable land is well positioned to join the club of exclusive suppliers. On paper that is because in 2000 the defunct MDC [Malawi Development Corporation] reported that Malawi suffered "a shortfall of 95, 000 metric tons of pork per year"! Judging by the empty [or pork-less] fridges in most supermarkets of Malawi the situation has definitely not improved! This is in a country of physical poverty, disappearing forex and yet unresolved issues about fuel supply continuity. Piggery as an industry is an often mentioned subject without the concomitant action [as usual]. But it is a venture standing against a backdrop of abundant and unexploited opportunities in a country where people still bemoan imaginary "land shortages and poor rains". Again it raises concerns more about action-orientation than brainpower. It poses specter stories of Malawian pork reaching into the unsatisfied global demand. But we appear stuck as ever—so allow me to merely dream of the possibilities.

For argument's sake Malawi could aim to satisfy a mere 5% of the global demand and my ‘National Minister of marketing’ [see an earlier blog] could go around the world selling this pork to a whopping 75 million ready-made mouths taking down—at an average of 30 kilograms each—2.25 billion kilograms of pork per year. Put it differently this is amounts to 56.25 million pigs per year or every Malawian raising three pigs each in their backyards for sale or better yet 156,109 pigs per day or to put it in forex language 16 fully processed 40-footer freezer containers per day exiting the Malawian borders into the foreign markets! Multiply all those processed kilograms by an average wholesale price of MK400 [this is a 2004 price by the way!] and the country will be raking in MK900 billion per year or MK2.47 billion per day! Who needs tobacco—that one-crop-per-season love affair currently fetching under MK240 billion per season? The Malawian pigsties could churn out millions of pigs per day.

With those Chilembwe signs all over forget—for a moment—all those biblical stories about "THE Pig Sins" in the bible. The old story that one. Born Again Preachers and sundry you need to dream in Technicolor. Think lines of stretch limos carrying the formally Malawian gone rich on the harram. Rich guys rush into your churches so that they can be seen to be donating away their newly found wealth!

Gander is the way forward. Malawi is drowning in all the water found in the NSR [New Shire River] I have always believed the Shire River actually starts at the source of the Songwe and stretches down to South Marka. Anything—the bulging Lake Malawi was a geographical accident that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is all freshwater and we are doing very little to harvest it before it disappears into Mozambique. Therefore, instead of fancy road projects—to carry foreign tourists coming here for sex tourism and spread more HIV/ Aids—let’s do something different with our taxes.

The problem is with our national priorities. What ought to come first: producing food or getting the food to the market? Roads first or Productivity First? It is chicken-and-egg but the measure of a man I knowing when to cut into the vicious idiocy. Food first—even Kamuzu got that one right. Yet check the outcomes of his "Gwelo" Dreams? He built "white" things: "tourist attracting" motorways across Malawi and Capital Cities! ADMARC got the disease too. In 1975 they took a good part of the US$300 million peasant surplus and built Kanjedza Village—not one kilometer of irrigation canal in rural Malawi! [Check my blog on white elephants and black elephants for who is actually responsible for some of this madness]

It costs about US$2 million to build a decent—not the margarine-spread things cropping up in Africa—half a kilometer of bitumen road. Meanwhile—with smallholder labor digging lateral trenches off the main canal, a working water pump and ignoring self-liquidating recurrent costs—the same amount will give you [at 2004 prices] five kilometers of irrigation canal or 100 hectares of fully reticulated fields! Since Kamuzu's "roads-first" approach Malawi boasts over 1000 kilometers of bitumen roads have been built but check the merry-go-round that is foreign advice: "Not that many foreign tourists have been coming anyway!" You can never get it right if you listen to these foreigners—forever shifting the goal posts. It is time we serious considered saving our rain-reliant citizenry from this kind of policy hesitation or is it direction-less.

The way forward is to lump in the Nyika "avalanches'"—South and North Rukuru—add in "snaky" Bua and "boa constrictor" Linthipes, "goldy" Lisungwi, "flaky" Nkulumadzi, "baby" Mwanza and "caterpillar" Ruo into making the one vast NSR. It becomes Fresh Water Galore! Next let’s get the "brainpower drought" affecting the Green belt Initiative [GBI] solved once and for all. One does not need to cogitate for too long over where to ask villagers to dig bypass trenches. Just set up the NIA/ NIC—National Irrigation Authority [or corporation if you are into Kamuzu’s fanciful failures]. Let it become the power over the Bangula Dam Development Process too! Through NIC we must purposeful harness of these water bodies and install pig farms all over the places. Forget the excuse from the advisers that Malawi does not need MDC. It’s a lie. They have ZDC right across in Zambia and yet the student IMF/ World Bank consultant who wrote the Malawian ‘restructuring report’ forgot to cross check how the ZDC remains functional where MDC was mothballed! We need a revamped MDC—with proper development experts not accountants and organizational undertakers at the helm—to manage the process of expanding the gander initiative and thus solve the current pork shortage and home-made national poverty!

Here is how the arithmetic works: an irrigated hectare—any extension officer will vouch—gives 15 tons of Sasakawa-style maize output in under four months or 45 tons per year. Multiply that by one rained fed and two-irrigated harvests and determine the amount of pig feed. A pig—raised to 40 kilograms in 6-7 months—consumers a ton of food matter. That is 45 pigs per hectare per year. Multiply all those potential hectares—using a "Food-First" approach with smallholder irrigation actually generating the road building income anyway!—and shock yourself over the development opportunity costs of the "Roads-First" strategy! Malawi has a potential 600,000 irrigable land or 1.8 million hectare that could be irrigated annually at 15 tons giving 27 million tons of green matter or—if we reasonably migrated up the food chain—27 million pigs at 40 kilograms each! At an average of price of MK400 [2004 prices] we could rake in not less than MK432 billion per annum.

So get NIC going urgently—funded by yours truly VAT or fuel/ road levy—just like the NRA [National Roads Authority]. Rome was not built in a day so we should start with an experimental one along the NSR and considering the NSR—unlike the Ganges in India flowing off the Himalayas tops—is in a ditch we need to enroll ESCOM and or her cousins from other countries into this one. They must provide sufficient power to pump the water into uphill reservoirs where the water can gravity towards the NSR.

Who said ‘home made’ solutions to our Malawian economic dire straits are far and away? We just need to jack up our act a bit—know where our ‘white elephant’ priorities lie!

The author can also be contacted on zivaiclaude@gmail.com