Brave Business

A few weeks ago we received in Zimbabwe a trade mission organized by the NABC (Netherlands-Africa Business Council). The NABC mission, led by its Managing Director, Bob van der Bijl, first visited Zambia for around 5 days, and afterwards a small group of brave Dutch businesses took a 10-hours bus ride from Lusaka to Harare.

With moral and financial assistance from the Dutch Embassy and with the help of the local Dutch community, the mission could do what missions want to do: network with local potential partners, visit companies and sniff around the realities of doing business with each other.

All visitors came with low expectations and all of them left with a much better understanding of the opportunities Zimbabwe offers. One delegation member (an expert in red meat processing) expressed it in simple words: ‘What I looked for in Zambia, I found in Zimbabwe!’ Two weeks later I met a retired Dutch sugar expert – ‘sugar, nothing else’ – who works with the EU on a project to revive the sugar industry in Zimbabwe. His assessment: ‘Zimbabweans have an enormous business drive’.

Last week I came across two Dutch business people, both of them Productive Africa Freaks. They had toured the country to see if they could add some lodges/hotels to their portfolio of lodges which are situated all over Africa. When I took them back to the airport one of them told me: ‘will be back soon’.

At the Christmas party of our local bank it was announced that a Dutch investment group had invested an initial credit line to be used to fund small-to-medium-businesses in Zimbabwe. It needs guts to do business in Africa, especially in Zimbabwe, since it is seen by many as member of the ‘Axes of Evil’.

Few politicians have the guts to promote trade relations in “difficult” countries. They rather hide behind populist rhetoric: ‘no tax money to corrupt regimes’ (whilst wearing Chinese made top quality suits), ‘no products made with child labor’ (forgetting that they themselves earned pocket money by working as teenagers in factories and family businesses).

I have more trust in the guts of for instance Bernard Wientjes, the most influential person in Holland, being the president of the biggest Dutch employers organization. In the latest issue of the magazine P+ he had the guts to give his views on development aid, stating that you can only strengthen economies of developing nations using the private sector. On diplomacy he had a magic one-liner: ‘its main use should be to strengthen trade’, and he was surprisingly positive towards NGO’s, provided ‘they open the doors for private enterprises’