We must also learn from the University of Life

As usual I woke up early this morning after my 5 to 6 hours quota of sleep had been exhausted. I came across the above tweet and it got me thinking. With elections about three weeks away, Zimbo Twitter is mainly dominated by elections and it is very toxic. Its common knowledge that some of the most vocal accounts are for people out of the country who are not even registered to vote. People are relating to each other as if the world is ending on 30 July 2018. I am reminded about the following statement from my former chairman Mr Shingi Mutasa when I was still at Zimnat Lion Insurance company. He was quoted as following by Newsday just before the 2013 elections, “My feeling is that for the longest period as Zimbabweans we seem to have this wait-and-see attitude. We are now waiting to see what will happen during elections. In fact, this has been going on since 1980, we are waiting to see what will happen,” said Mutasa." I have gone through six elections. I don’t understand why we are waiting. The biggest challenge is about self confidence and self belief in our own totality. So as long as we are in that space, we will continue to have a challenge with liquidity.”



The best way to tell a story is from one’s experience. I used to be in the same boat as the marketing graduate mentioned in the tweet. In 2007 when I left Zimbabwe I had been a branch manager and the next position was to be an Assistant General Manager (AGM). The thinking that I had from school was that you work hard pass a course and be promoted. So when I joined the insurance industry at the end of 1997, I wrote my first and then only local insurance exams in March 1998 and passed them and then enrolled for courses leading to Associateship with the Insurance Institute of South Africa. By end of 2002, I landed my first management job that came with a company car. The following year I completed my Associateship and landed a bigger job with Zimnat Lion Insurance company as an underwriting manager with an even bigger car and other benefits such as a company paid contract phone.  In 2005, I completed my fellowship exams and it was a surreal moment in early 2006 when I attended the Society of Fellows meeting at the Harare Club with some of the Fellows of the Insurance Institute  who were mainly Managing Directors and General managers in the industry.

In 2006 I was transferred to Bulawayo as the branch manager and that job came with the use of a company house in the leafy suburb of Burnside. I had bargained and was allocated a Toyota double cab bakkie, it did not matter that according to company policy my grade did not qualify to get a vehicle with such as a big engine capacity. I had been offered a job by one of the competitors and as part of the counter offer the managing director had relented and given the vehicle I wanted. When I look back I had this feeling of entitlement. The company took care of all car maintenances, insurance, fuel etc. I would get 300 litres of fuel per month paid by the company. Now I only buy 60 litres per month. The company would buy newspapers for us and I would insist on getting both The Herald and The Chronicles even though they normally contain the same articles. My wife would remind me that we needed to start building our house in Harare and I did not agree as I could not see myself going to live in such a small house when I compared to the company house I was occupying.

On 23 August 2007, I collected my work permit from the South African embassy in Harare. The next evening we arrived in Sunnyside, Pretoria.  There is something that humbles you when you are a foreigner and maybe that explains why foreigners tend to make it in the same environment where locals struggle. Earlier that year when I was still in Bulawayo with no intentions of leaving the country, I had given a lift to a lady coming from Gweru to Bulawayo. The lady had left her job at a South African owned bank in Zimbabwe and was now working as a waiter in Pretoria and what she was being paid was four times what I was earning as a branch manager. So the next day after I arrived in South Africa I started enquiring on restaurant jobs as well as insurance jobs. Luckily on 31 August 2007, I got a job in the insurance industry. I was not worried that I would be starting as a clerk as I thought I would leave and then get a suitable job but that was not to be.

I started applying for management positions in the insurance industry and I learnt that most big insurance companies would not consider a foreigner due to employment equity policies. Also the insurance industry in South Africa does not prioritise qualifications, I have gone to a dozen interviews where they don’t even talk about your qualifications. I remember in 2008 and 2009 going for internal interviews and the feedback I would always get was, “you are not visible”. I just knew then that I would never get promoted as I would never change who I am just to get promoted.


 My first work permit was expiring in 2012 and there was no guarantee it would be renewed. The the labour laws in South Africa do not protect workers like in Zimbabwe.  I was not very secure in the job I was and learnt not to feel very comfortable. I learnt of a Zimbabwean engineer who had been retrenched with a very small retrenchment package, he had a home loan, car loan etc and was struggling. I started thinking about building our house in Zimbabwe and this would keep me awake most nights. The first few years, I regretted the decision I had taken to come to South Africa in the first place. I would visit Zimbabwe almost every month during a weekend. At times I would literally arrive in Harare on Saturday evening and then catch another bus back to Pretoria the same night. I would see how bad the situation was back home and I would come back and endure. With every trip to Zimbabwe, I started seeing opportunities and I knew that I had to prepare to go back home for good. Some of my friends went back during the GNU era when the economy had stabilized and we decided to postpone until we had built our main house. I also knew that I would not go back home and look for employment in Zimbabwe as the salaries are very low as compared to South Africa.

We started sharing flats with strangers in order to save money. I was fortunate that my job paid a performance based salary so I started working very hard, would work long hours, during lunch and most Saturdays. My team leader would tell me that I was earning more than her. In 2009, I decided a career change and started studying for an Accounting degree in order to qualify as a chartered Accountant.  I do not know how I did it, I would come home exhausted but whenever I thought that I deserved better than my current state, I would study well into the night. In 2014, I completed my accounting degree and I failed to get a training contract and it did not matter because what I learnt in my accounting degree is very valuable in the journey that I am pursuing.


By end of 2009 we had saved enough and I took leave, went home and I started building our house and in 2010 my family went back to stay at the house and finish the construction. After my family went back Zimbabwe, I started sharing even a room and I would send about 80% of my salary home every month. Most property  managers charge foreigners double deposits when renting  out apartments and you struggle to get it back when you move out and that drove me to want to buy our own home. In 2010 we applied and all the banks except one were willing to give us a loan on condition that we raise a big deposit. When I got my annual bonus in 2010 I paid the deposit and lawyer fees and at the same time we were finishing our cottage in Zimbabwe. In January 2011, I was so broke and I do not know how we made it through to payday

As a foreigner in South Africa it is very hard to get the first car loan, some Zimbabweans do stokvels (rounds) to  buy  each other cars for cash. In 2007, our company was still part of a bank and eventually there was a staff scheme and I still needed to raise a deposit to get the car. I would wonder if I had done the right decision to leave Zimbabwe. In July 2007, I had been driving a big Toyota bakkie and now in December 2007 I was driving a Toyota Tazz. Locals can finance more expensive cars and I later learnt that most of the cars were being bought on residual finance. A lot of the guys would never own those vehicles. I would feel sorry handling insurance claims for some of these guys because even after 6 years of financing the cars, they would still owe banks more than a hundred thousand Rands and the vehicle would not be worth even half of the debt. At the end of 2010 when I bought my first Mercedes Benz, the bank initially insisted that I pay the instalments within 2 years to match the expiry of my permit. At that time it seemed harsh but now I am happy it turned out the way it did.

In 2011, I had a new manager and he insisted that I act as a team leader and I did so for two months and how I hated that job. I did get very good reviews and I was asked to continue acting and I declined. To me the train had already left the station. That year for the first time, I had made it into the top 2% of the department and won the Top Perfomers' incentive overseas holiday. At the end of 2011, I went for a company sponsored holiday to Thailand with my wife. I would win the incentive two more times and came very close a few more times. I would feel sorry when up to about a half a dozen of some of the guys who had been promoted to team leader positions because they were 'visible' were now being demoted because they could not keep up with the work. All of them ended up resigning. I frequently get asked why I am not applying for management positions and now I have a good answer, "I am working on my visibility". The truth is that I am so grateful for the rejections I got whenever I applied for those internal management positions and it turned out to be the best thing that happened to me. My focus is now on Zimbabwe and every paycheck I get is helping me closer to financing my projects in Zimbabwe.

 Now I spend more time daily communicating with people back home in Zimbabwe getting updates on when are we putting tobacco seedlings in the ground, when next are we selling the next batch of pigs. I find that I now know exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life. I have written in my blog how well my personal business was doing in early 2007, that I even managed to buy an Isuzu bakkie for cash around the Easter holidays. My branch manager salary was then averaging R1 000.00 due to the massive and frequent devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar then and the high inflation. My shops in rural Mutoko and Macheke, my minibus and my truck were giving me over R20 000.00 per week. So I resigned in May 2007 and started serving my three months notice. During that time the government ordered a price control blitz and I lost a lot of money. It is understandable that when I settled in South Africa to start over, I was bitter with the the Zimbabwe government. In 2008 I visited my relatives at their respective agricultural plots in Zimbabwe. I came back to South Africa and I said to my wife that although the economic situation in Zimbabwe was dire, I found my relatives to have better prospects than I had and how I envied them.



From my experience unfavourable situations we find ourselves in can either make us or break us. I believe as humans we are born to overcome obstacles in our path. What is normally needed is to change the way we see the world and at times people around us sees what are not seeing and tell us and all we need is to listen. The very first week, I started working in South Africa, African colleagues would come to me and tell me how much they admired Robert Mugabe about how he had empowered Africans by giving the best education and also giving them their land. During my accounting studies, many South Africans would remark to me that they struggled to complete their bachelor of commerce studies because they would not pass the accounting module in first year. In the group chats with fellow South African students, they would struggle with mathematics found in taxation, management accounting, partnerships, group statements. It is no coincidence that most of the private tutors are Zimbabweans. I would remark that all that mathematics they were struggling with was only basic O’Level Mathematics and not even A’Level Mathematics.
 
My experience of living in South Africa taught me many valuable lessons especially the importance of my Zimbabwean heritage. I had initially felt ashamed of coming to start from the bottom but I realised that I was blessed as a Zimbabwean, firstly I had better school education than most people around me and secondly back home, I had access to land back home as land gives a person dignity. Also because of my experience during the Zimbabwe crisis, I was  better prepared than the locals when the South African Rand began to devalue during the presidency of Jacob Zuma. We had lied to each other  that South Africa would never follow Zimbabwe. In 2015, 2016 and 2017 I found myself investing a lot of money in Zimbabwe just to hedge against the uncertainty in South Africa.

The problem I see with many young people leaving school in Zimbabwe is the lack of opportunities and inadequate career guidance. Even during my schooling days there was no proper career guidance. As I wrote my O'Levels in 1993, the career I only knew as better paying was being a medical doctor. I had to concentrate on Mathematics and Sciences and not subjects such as History and Geography that I was good at. It was only later in A'Level mathematics when we wrote the Old Mutual sponsored Mathematics Olympiads that I realised that there were careers such as Actuary. Later on I learnt of Chartered Accountants. In 1996 when my A'Level results came out and I had not made it into the University of Zimbabwe and really got depressed. At home in Marondera, we used to raise broiler chicken and I was sent by my mother to go and buy feed at Mashco and I saw this young man coming driving a brand new Nissan sunny box car. I asked him what he did for a living and he told me he was a salesman, some of my seniors at school had joined the tobacco industry and they were doing very well. When I started working as a temporary teacher in 1996, I saw guys with agricultural, BA, engineering degrees teaching etc also teaching and here I was thinking that people with degrees had made it in life.



I would then join the private sector the in mid 1997 and started to rise in my career. I have written about that in my previous blog    http://kanyokad.blogspot.com/2017/09/what-i-have-learnt-in-my-21-years-of.html The advice I would give young people in Zimbabwe leaving school at the moment. If you do get a place at university or college, please take up the offer and pursue the course in whatever discipline it is. It is important to learn something that assists you to challenge as well as open your mind. Learn to relate to people of different backgrounds.  Look at people like Tendai Biti, Simba Makoni and Nkosana Moyo, these people did not study finance or economics initially at university, however even in our current polarized environment we can all agree that they make better finance ministers than the ones currently occupying the position.


I have read  how some now successful people in America after school with no clue on what to do next would first join the army for a few years. What I have learnt in life all experiences are valuable. Young people are very prone to peer pressure and the early years after school are very key, you rather occupy your time and do something progressive. Hopefully you meet mentors in your life, by having positive role models in life such as your church leaders, lecturers, bosses if you go for attachment, genuine business people in the community. Nowadays with technology you can be mentored by someone that you will never meet for example you can follow on Facebook or LinkedIn people such as Strive Masiyiwa, Bill Gates, Richard Branson etc. Mentors are very valuable in one's life as they influence your life towards a positive direction. If you get a chance to get any job, take it. I remember in 1993 after writing my O'Levels, I would sell bread in the township from a bicycle. Some of my peers looked down on me and I am glad I did that job for about 3 months before I went for A'Level.



When I look back to my working life so far, my mentoring started with my late mother and the values she instilled in me, I would later work for many companies and meet many bosses and they would mould me during coaching and  meetings. In late 2002 when I landed a job as an Account Executive at Zimbabwe Insurance Brokers, I was in charge of servicing VIP clients, I would go to companies such as OK Zimbabwe and meet the Managing Director and the Marketing Director, Air Zimbabwe General Manager, IDC general manager, Vice Chancellor at the University of Zimbabwe as well as some of the Deans, Professors and lecturers, Members of Parliament, Business owners, many executives within the SMM holdings at that time our company was part of the SMM group. I would just listen and learn for example most of these people though they had very good jobs but you would see them running successful private businesses on the side as well as commercial farms. As an underwriting manager, I would daily meet executives from insurance broking as well as Reinsurance Managers and at times would go for surveys and meetings at big companies such as Zimasco, Hwange colliery, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe etc.



Hopefully as youth gets enlightened they realise the truth that you must first change your thinking and how you see the world. Any positive change starts by you believing it first. One might have a marketing degree and they are looking for a job in their field, however the truth is that the economy is not performing as we all know. Why not try something else just for a while. In my example above when I was in Zimbabwe I would never consider working as a waiter but just by crossing the border to South Africa in 2007 I was already looking for a job as a waiter. The bottom line is to change one way of thinking.


I was born a son of a policeman in the then Rhodesia and my father would be moved around from Belingwe, Kwekwe starting firstly in Amaveni township in 1982 and then Mbizo township in 1989 and then Marondera in 1990. I also worked in Harare and Bulawayo before I left Zimbabwe and settled in Pretoria. I have been fortunate to have dealt with many people from diverse backgrounds and that helped to shape my perspective on life. Here is something I realised during my stay in Zimbabwe, if you go and look for a room to rent in the following townships: Amaveni, Mbizo, Rugare, Tafara, St Mary, Dombotombo, Nyazema (Macheke) etc. Chances are that your landlord originally came from Malawi. I had a discussion with my uncle many years ago and he told me that when he came back from Zambia in the 70s, he bought a house in Glen Norah and he then sold it as the wisdom was that a true African would rather have a house back in the village. In 1991 after my father's death both sides of the family were not happy with my mother's decision to buy a house in town as they expected her to come back to the village with the kids. Now when my cousins had to go to Harare to look for work, they had to rent rooms. This just reinforces that people coming from foreign countries will seek and utilize every opportunity that come their way more than the average local guy would do.



My wish for young Zimbabweans is that they get to think like foreigners do in host countries. I have this saying, "Zvirinani kuwomerwa nehupenyu kwegore rimwe uchigadzirisa zvinhu zvohupenyu hwese". Do what you think is uncomfortable and sort your life once and for all. Never feel defeated, use your brain. Remember the future of the country is literally in the youth's hands. Right now the roads in the resettlements are not being maintained because the rural councils do not have money. Previously those rural councils would get rates from white farmers, now the new farmers can't afford to pay rates because they are struggling themselves. Whenever I go home and meet farmers, I remind them that they are actually business people in their rights and they must not take their new plots as burial places. Right now the government of Zimbabwe can't pay decent salaries to its workers because the government does not get enough revenue as there is very little production from farming and other industries. People in Zimbabwe complain about unemployment but in the shop they don't buy local goods but they buy foreign goods.



In September 2017, I had been 10 years in my job. The previous month, I had worked extremely hard and got a very decent salary. Even though due to my qualification, performance and experience I should have been in an executive role if the career progression was done on merit, however I was living comfortably as long I kept on working extremely hard from month to month as I did not earn a guaranteed salary. At that time, I had invested over $20 000.00 in my piggery project in Zimbabwe and the project was not going very well not because of the economic conditions in Zimbabwe but due to poor management as I could only go to Zimbabwe every forty night on weekends. I decided to resign from my job and I finished serving my notice on 2 October 2017 and on that evening I took a bus to Harare and I would spend most of October in Zimbabwe. I had always told myself that I would go back to Zimbabwe for good once Mugabe had resigned and I knew my failures had nothing to do with Mugabe. I went back to Zimbabwe in October 2017 and spend weeks in Mutoko buying cheap pig feeds for about 30% of what I used to pay when I was sending money from South Africa.


One of the things I learnt is to always be objective and find out the truth on your own. For example a person who has not been to Zimbabwe in years and rely on the media, would be mistaken for thinking that Harare now resembles Mogadishu. However by going home to Zimbabwe frequently it helps me to find out the truth on my own. I also wrote in my previous blog how vital the right information is. 

I wish the best to all young people struggling to find their purpose in Zimbabwe.