ALMOST without fail, every school holiday I would find time to break away from the
drab serenity of the rural milieu where I was teaching and sample the pulsating life of
the ghetto. I would visit my cousin in Majubheki (The Jo’burg lines along 22nd Street in Mbare).
I had become so close to my cousin, Abisha, we would do many things together.
(May his dear soul rest in eternal peace)?
During my stay in the ghetto, one of our favourite destinations would be Rambanayi
Beer Garden and the adjacent lounge bar, The Vito (aka Red Room).
This other day, my cousin and I had gone chilling out at The Vito: Sipping glasses of
cold, clear Castle.
A twosome suddenly appeared at the entrance: A youthful fellow and in tow, a short,
elderly man in a faded grey suit, tie and chapeau.
I had seen these two earlier on in the beer garden, quaffing from a mug of draught
Super: A jolly pair indeed. It was the routine that one always started in the beer
garden and ended up in The Vito for a wash-down. It later turned out that the twosome was mzukulu and malume. They walked in and settled at a table next to ours.
The young man would shuttle back and forth to buy more beer. The elderly
gentleman was drinking Castle milk stout- an imbiber of an exquisite taste.
Gradually, I developed more interest in the pair and was soon eavesdropping on
them. It looked the young fellow was out to impress his malume who had come
visiting from makhaya.
At some point, the mzukulu had just come out of the toilet and hurriedly walked
towards his malume with something tightly clenched in his fist.
He sat down and was excitedly showing whatever under the table to his malume. It
looked like a crumbled ten dollar note.
That was a lot of money those days.
That time, two of our Zim dollars were equivalent to one British pound.
Most likely, some drunken fellow had been auditing their wallet and had unknowingly
dropped the money at the urinary.
A windfall for the jolly pair. From that point, the booze was literally flowing. Soon it
was time to go home.
As per habit, the young fellow, after looking around and satisfying himself that no
one was watching, was surreptitiously checking the contents of his wallet.
He counted the money over and over again and turned his pockets inside out. Soon
he was wearing a gloomy and worried look on his face.
Something seemed to have dawned on him and he was raving hysterically: “Sekuru
ndadya mari yangu, kani” (Malume ngidle imali yami phela). Malume, who had since
taken to the floor, barely paid attention and would respond: “Ndozvakanaka
muzukuru. Idya mari yako uri mupenyu.” (Yikho okulungileyo ukudla imali yakho
usaphila mzukulu).
He was obviously oblivious to the anguish scribbled all over the young man’s face.
Finally the penny had dropped.
That crumbled ten dollar note the young man had picked was actually his own
money which he had unwittingly dropped at the urinary.
He had gone on a frenzy squandering that money in the mistaken belief that it was
loot. A very tragic case of book-keeping gone awry.
Business, in its most refined form, has not existed in our indigenous communities for
a long time.
Admittedly, it is a fairly foreign idea. I shall single out two aspects of business: What
gives rise to it and what sustains it.
The first dimension is the business concept or idea and this has always been with
us. However, the second dimension has never been that simple with our
entrepreneurs – to the extent they often resort to juju.
Indeed this has been their Achilles ‘heel. Sustaining a business has oftentimes been
a nightmare: Most likely because this involves the crunching of numbers, which is
not always a pleasurable exercise.
During my days as a Maths teacher, I always took the opportunity to bemoan the
tragedy of Mathematics to my students: Maths was meant not to make our lives
unbearable and miserable like it does oftentimes.
Whoever invented addition and subtraction meant well for humanity. We just have to
crunch the data in order to figure out the right price – a price good enough to be
afforded by the customer and good enough to give us a good return.
Crunching the figures enables us to draw the line between what belongs to us as
business owners and the business itself: Between the profit – the reward for our
sweat and the working capital – the lifeblood which nourishes the business.
I have known businesspersons who willy-nilly dole out goodies from the shelves to
friends and relatives, oftentimes as a way of flaunting their riches.
We often wrongly measure our business success in terms of how many cars and
side chicks we have, and not the size of the business.
Many a businessperson has been taken to the cleaners because they could not meet
their dues.
There is a special breed of entrepreneurs, which has a knack for telling apart
between profit and working capital.
These are the street vendors who ply their trade on the pavements. A savvy lot these
ladies are.
Mai Prince, a vegetable vendor who operates just outside Coolland Supermarket, is
one such celebrated entrepreneur.
These women would meticulously take away from total sales, money for re-ordering
and money for the Municipality’s daily dues, to make sure the business stayed afloat.
They are a frugal lot, they know very well that if they look after the pennies, the
pounds will look after themselves.
Little wonder this ilk of entrepreneur, when they graduate into big businesses, they
invariably make sober and well-disciplined business directors.
There is the story of George Tavengwa, the founder of Mushandira Pamwe Bus
Company and hotel, who had his humble beginnings as a vegetable vendor. It all
traces back to their beginnings.
For a small business, bigger than a street vendor, besides working capital (re-order
money) and rentals, other critical monies to be put aside would include wages, water
and electricity bills and transport costs.
Should these expenses prove to be too much, then there would be need to trim
down say on the number of workers and if need be, you become one of them. (They
say if you want to live like a king you would have to work like a slave.)
Whatever remains after all these expenses have been accounted for, is your
PROFIT- the price of your sweat.
You really do not need to be a qualified accountant to succeed in business. You just
need to know what belongs to you and what belongs to the business (and at some
point later, what belongs to the State by way of taxes!).
We may need to take a leaf from the vegetable vendor’s manual: Keep the books
properly or you will be singing the blues alongside the young man of The Vito.
