This is the eighth of a series of blog postings from Clare Bottle, who will be telling us about her travels in Zambia - supported by transport charity Transaid - to see what the transport industry is like out there:
There’s a transport flavoured headline on the front page of today’s paper. According to the Times of Zambia, four former employees of the roads department are facing arrest. It is claimed that these four resigned from the roads department 11 months ago, moving to the Road Development Agency, but continued to draw their old salaries and allowances, defrauding Northern Province government administration of more than 74 million Kwacha (ten thousand pounds sterling).
Another item that caught my eye was a public notice from Honda, explaining to clients that their Parts Department in Lusaka is closed throughout this week for stock-checking.
This morning I met with Raymond, CILT’s President. Raymond says Ian Heggie was the Godfather of Road Safety reforms in Zambia. He explained that as African countries gained their independence during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s (Zambia’s independence came in 1964) there was huge investment in the road infrastructure funded by borrowing from the World Bank. Lack of maintenance led to more borrowing in the 1970s and 1980s until a fuel levy was introduced in the 1990s, to fund safety programmes and especially road maintenance. This approach was Ian’s brain-child and he also secured hypothecation (ring-fencing the funds) despite opposition.
Raymond took me around to the Zambia Insurance Business College Trust where we met the Director, Mr Simule and the Head of Business Studies, Mrs Momba. They recently accepted their first intake of ten students for the CILT Certificate in Lusaka. There are plans to expand from Lusaka into the Copperbelt with more students and to offer additional qualifications, such as the Diploma.
After that we talked to Mr Kasongo at Catholic Relief Services. CRS is one of the largest NGOs in the world, engaged in a wide range of development work. Before arriving we didn’t know that Mr Kasongo was a member of CILT, but he told us he was and went on to explain how important CILT membership is to him in managing CRS’s national fleet of 84 vehicles.
When we visited the railway station yesterday it was almost deserted: the bus station today was a contrast, full of excitement and activity. As soon as we drove in, our car was surrounded by porters demanding to know our destination and competing for business on behalf of the different operators. What with the drivers, porters, passengers and stalls selling all kind of goods, it was bedlam. Some of the buses and coaches were old, but on the whole they were in good condition. Following a tragic coach crash last year where a tyre burst and over 35 people were killed, road speed limiters have been introduced. The Operations Manager of CR Coaches told us that he welcomed them, but felt the industry had no representation to handle the public aftermath of the crash and its image had suffered as a result, despite safety improvements.
During the afternoon we called into the government agency TEVETA which is responsible for vocational training development and standards. They commented that international qualifications, including CILT’s, tend to use EU law and Euro-centric case-studies which are not relevant in Zambia. CILT Zambia could play a role in localising the syllabus to make it more valuable.
Finally, I couldn’t resist popping into Honda to find out about their stock-check. The After-Sales Manager, Nick, had just finished counting 65,900 bolts but was nevertheless very welcoming and invited us into their storage area which has a mezzanine floor and is fully shelved. Honda Zambia uses an IT system called Pastel and Nick has recently populated it with bin-numbers to aid stock-checks, but it still takes a full week to count every item. You learn something new every day and today I learnt that the rubber foot-pegs on motorbikes hardly ever wear out, so there’s no need to keep a huge stock of them. The quad bikes in the showroom looked tempting but I couldn’t think of a way to prove that test-driving quad-bikes is a critical part of the project, so we said our goodbyes and headed back to the internet café, as another day’s work drew to a close.
If you’d like to know more and would consider sponsoring me, please visit my charity giving page: http://www.justgiving.com/clarebottle.
Clare Bottle is a freelance logistics specialist, with experience and market knowledge in storage, packaging and transport; she is also a Board Director and Trustee of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport UK.