Balls of steel

Today I was on ‘special leave’, granted by my employer for exams, which includes obligatory assignments such as the one I have been working on over the last couple of days. In fact, I had advanced so well over the weekend (yesterday evening I was too tired to do anything) that by noon I was able to send the essay, go for a swim and take a nap. Spent the rest of the day planning the next four weeks of study and reading ahead. Hardly exciting stuff, but quite enjoyable to me.

I am back into the routine, and drafting the assignment took me back into the creative flow and intellectual buzz of the writing process that I enjoyed so much when working on my PhD thesis on Ancient Philosophy between 1994 and 1998 (yes, I know, without ever finishing it, a thorn in my flesh for the rest of my days…). At work I draft a lot too of course, but it’s different with the constant stress and the constant little and big distractions interrupting any creative writing flow one may experience (apart from writing nasty letters and e-mails, which remains my favourite and for which I would claim, with all due modesty, to have beyond average capacities). I used to think that studying and writing a thesis was, while enjoyable, difficult and tiring, but right now I am doing it in my spare time and find it …. relaxing and refreshing! How things can change.

There was a bit of a nuisance yesterday when I received an e-mail from the UK Embassy in Brussels curtly informing me that they would stop renting our house as of September. And we let the house to them because we thought they would be such reliable lessees, only to see them b… off after less than two years. Great. In order to avoid a major financial millstone around our necks we’ll have to get it rented out to someone else quickly or otherwise sell it. In short, just the kind of things you want to do when you are thousands of kilometers away in some godforsaken place where even telephones don’t work properly. Anyway, enough very greedy real estate agencies in Brussels to take care of it, so perhaps it won’t be so difficult after all.

A. and the children are doing just fine in Lith. A. sounds rather happy to be in Lith. M. and T. love their school, which is an unspeakable relief especially in M.’s case. It’s still not clear whether he will be in Group 4 or 5 next year, which annoys us a little bit. I can tell the children are doing fine as they were way too busy playing yesterday and today to talk to me on the phone for longer than 20 seconds, their only concern being the wellbeing of Sammy the dog. T. is being a handful to A., and doesn’t listen to her these days. When I make an attempt at exercising some paternal authority over the phone she pretends not to hear me or starts talking about something else. She’s getting way too smart for a four-year old….

A. and I are running up phone bills of hallucinatory proportions, and the phone company here is dragging its feet over my ADSL connection, which would allow me at last to pass to near-free calling over the Internet. I called them again time this morning, even the field guy doing the installations, but it’s really like kicking a dead horse.

Bernard, my friend with the diamond cutting factory, just called me in distress. He had paid his fake penalty of 1500 euros yesterday, paid another 750 euros bribe to the officer ‘helping’ him out, only to find the same people of the Ministry of Mines this morning at his factory. They told him his diamonds had been seized definitively by the state and asked him to also hand over the keys to his factory, which had also been ‘seized by the state’. The poor guy is basically out of business now, with no realistic way of legal recourse. Judges are equally corrupted and extremely unlikely to rule in favour of a foreign investor, unless of course the latter substantially outbids the national side. This was the case recently when a Syrian sugar trader, a real fraud apparently, won a case against the state…. If Bernard ever wants to see his belongings back it will have to be by pulling more high level strings, paying more bribes, etc. There is a real risk of losing one of the few foreign investors that would actually be able to provide training and well-paid skilled jobs for local diamond cutters, bringing back some value added activity back into the country. He told me yesterday that one of the diamond purchasing bureaus literally fled the country leaving everything behind, cars, buildings, equipment, etcetera, just dropping their business like that, after similar, quasi-legal measures had been imposed in the form of impossibly high diamond exporting thresholds below which penalties apply that eat away the margins of the smaller bureaux, which is driving them out of business one by one (six out of nine and counting). As I said earlier, this measure may also have been instigated by the big monopolist from South Africa.

So, that’s rule of law for you here. And I thought that in this country we, in the development industry, needed a thick skin… It really takes balls of steel to set up anything commercial here, not only for foreigners but also for the locals, who are subjected to similar racketeering schemes by tax and customs services, police, etc. Anyway, it makes little sense for us to set up big reform projects if predators like those mining people are left to do their dirty business with impunity, thus strangling the life out of economic activity. So much for pointing out the obvious today.

Yesterday’s events in the North led the President to call an emergency meeting with the boss and a number of other high-ranking diplomats to give them his view on the situation. It seems that this view is no longer quite accurate and perhaps beginning to be somewhat out of touch. In spite of his being the Commander in Chief and his own Minister of Defense, he has no longer any trust whatsoever in the army, and rightly so. But this being the case, the chances of him achieving anything else in the field of law and order begin to look very slim indeed. Well, I did it again (pointing out the obvious), so I better stop now.