Friend request

The high cost of doing business is a massive hindrance to the success of Zambia’s commerce and industry more especially for small and medium enterprises. Of course the lending rate in this country is inconceivably humongous. It is impossible for a Zambian entrepreneur to compete with a South Africa or American counterpart.

However there are more challenges that the Zambian businessman faces. Some of the high costs include marketing and communication costs. Without contest it is the responsibility of the government to create systems that enable business success.

Social media is a great opportunity to reduce communication and marketing costs. Hence Governments must begin to provide infrastructure to ensure that social media is not just a social time wasting experience, but it becomes a tool leveraged to reduce costs of doing business.

In Zambia there are 162,460 people using Facebook, which is 0.77% of the population of the country. Facebook usage in Zambia has grown by only 1.68% in the last one month. There are other social media platforms that are popular in Zambia but clearly Facebook is by far the most used service. It is important to note that the major problem in Zambia is accessibility to internet.

This has not been understood to be incapacitating economic growth in Zambia. Believably that is why we have not seen much political will in efforts intended to increase accessibility to internet. As long as government does not prioritize ICT, we will be a pre-hi-tech nation if not only a post stone age country for ages to come.

In the event that Government effectively facilitates the implementation of fiber optics connectivity to all universities, schools and homes, SMEs would be able to reach their customers in easier cost effective ways. The cost of placing an advert on conventional media is too high for a small business to afford especially during startup. Social Media provides a cost relief for marketing budgets.

Communicating within the company can only get cheaper with Skype, Gtalk, Whatsapp, or G+ messenger among others. With Skype you can make voice and video calls between mobile phones such as the Blackberry, Android phones, Nokia and desktop computers. Gtalk from Google also provides a voice service. On Whatsapp contacts can share video, photos, and audio and text for free as long there data service is active or the mobile device is connected to the internet via WIFI.

All you need to reduce the cost of some of your business processes these days is a data plan with Airtel, MTN, or ZAMTEL and a WAP enabled phone or Internet enable device. You can pay for a fixed internet service and link your WIFI device at your office or home. There are various companies offering fixed wireless internet service such as Coppernet, Microlink, iConnect, Zamnet, Realtime, among others.

The problem is that we are limited by the cost of installation of even availability of service in some areas. That is why government should take it as its responsibility to provide accessibility to internet, the same way it is their responsibility to provide roads and energy. This agenda should not be left to the private sector. In this age it is a core responsibility of the government to provide internet infrastructure.

When we have the internet infrastructure in place, all users will have to do is send a friend request in order to do business. This as simple as it may sound social media is potent with economic boom for Zambia and for many countries in the world.

Steve Jobs the Book

"Steve Jobs" (Simon & Schuster), by Walter Isaacson: "Steve Jobs" takes off the rose-colored glasses that often follow an icon's untimely death and instead offers something far more valuable: The chronicle of a complex, brash genius who was crazy enough to think he could change the world — and did.

Through unprecedented access to Jobs with more than 40 conversations, including long sessions sitting in the Apple co-founder's living room, walks around his childhood neighborhood and visits to his company's secretive headquarters, Isaacson takes the reader on a journey that few have had the opportunity to experience.

The book is the first, and with his Oct. 5 death at age 56, the only authorized biography of the famously private Jobs and by extension, the equally secretive Apple Inc. Through Apple, Jobs helped usher in the personal computer era when he put the Macintosh in the hands of regular people. He changed the course of the music, computer animation and mobile phone industries, and touched countless others with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, Pixar and iTunes.

His biography, therefore, serves as a chronicle of Silicon Valley, of late 20th- and early 21st-century technology, and of American innovation at its best. For the generation that's grown up in a world where computers are the norm, smartphones feel like fifth limbs and music comes from the Internet rather than record and CD stores, "Steve Jobs" is must-read history.

Isaacson, whose other books include biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, uses anecdotes from friends, family, colleagues and adversaries to illustrate sometimes deep contradictions in Jobs.

Given up for adoption at birth, the young Jobs would go on to deny his daughter Lisa for years. The product of 1960s counterculture who shunned materialism, he'd go on to found what would become the world's most valuable company. Deeply influenced by the tenets of Zen Buddhism, Jobs rarely achieved the internal peace associated with it and was prone to wild mood swings and mean outbursts at people who weren't living up to his expectations.

But it's these contradictions that make the out-of-this-world Apple magician human to a fault. And it's his uncanny ability to meld art and technology, design and engineering, beauty and function that allowed him to put the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad into the hands of millions of people who didn't even know they wanted them. Jobs changed our relationship with technology because he understood humanity as well as he understood chips and interfaces.

"I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline," Jobs tells Isaacson in one of the extended passages in the book that are in his own words.

These longer interview excerpts pepper the book like rare gems. In them, Jobs offers eloquent, no-apologies explanations of why he did things the way he did and what was going on in his mind amid decisions at Apple and in his own life.

Apple fanboys, tech geeks and encyclopedic-minded journalists will likely comb the book for previously unknown details about Jobs and Apple. I went into it with only a little more knowledge than the average reader, and a tenuous, nostalgic connection to him through having attended high school with his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. I found myself combing the book not for secrets about Apple, but secrets about Steve Jobs the man, the father, the son.

With little patience for technical details, I found myself skimming through some of the book's passages detailing the creation of the Apple I computer, the Macintosh and the i-gadgets of Jobs' later years. It's in these passages, though, where the reader might find explanations for why the iPhone's battery is not replaceable, why Macs cost more than PCs and why the iPod's headphones are white.

The intimate chapters, where Jobs' personal side shines through, with all his faults and craziness, leave a deep impression. There's humor, too, especially early on when Isaacson chronicles Jobs' lack of personal hygiene, the barefoot hippie who runs a corporation. And deeply moving are passages about Jobs' resignation as Apple's chief executive, and an afternoon he spent with Isaacson listening to music and reminiscing.

"Steve Jobs" was originally scheduled to hit store shelves in 2012. Its publication date was moved up after Jobs died. As such, there are bits that might have benefited from another round of editing. There are anecdotes, for example, that Isaacson repeats as if introducing them to the reader for the first time.

In the end, it's a rich portrait of one of the greatest minds of our generation.

At 47 years old, the solution is corruption

A colleague this morning intimated that she would be “killed” by taxes. She is importing lingerie and for only a small consignment she is being charged an exorbitant total.

Continuing her lamentation, she swore to sale them at an extremely high price to recover her cost. I made a suggestion to her that the solution was going to have to be corruption. After all, that way, her clients will not repudiate tender her enterprise and she can still keep her business alive, and eventually keep her family fed.

This sounds rather absurd. How can corruption be a solution? Well we live in a world where we want to good things including a “corrupt-free” social and business environment. But we are seldom willing to make relevant sacrifices that change demands.

High taxes in this country have simply stopped adding value to our lives. To start with, government doesn’t account to us how they use the money we pay in taxes. Moreover, in a liberalized economy it is the government’s obligation to make the cost of doing business low enough to encourage industrial innovation, and growth. This not just for the large corporations but more for small enterprises.

Secondly, the higher taxes do not lead to the buyer enjoying access to high quality, low cost products. Instead it worsens the negative price constriction, an effect that causes economic coronary failure.

It is no rocket science that higher taxes are negative to the economy. Quality cannot be preserved or maintained in an economy where the taxes force people to either resort to second hand or low quality products or just as well to the solution of corruption.

Corruption can solve your problems, help you continue running your business on profits and putting more money in your pocket (hence arriving at the same objective the PF government espouses for the people of Zambia).

In Zambia second hand products are taxed as if they were luxurious first hand products. This puts both the client and the tax collecting agent on a podium of temptation. For instance recently a ZRA employee was jailed for asking to be bribed and for being bribed in order to give the client “due” advantage.

Let me take a turn to ICT and say, a government anywhere in the world, today, in the 21^st Century which does not have a clear road map to ensure that ICT is given unprecedented advantage because of its impact on all sectors, would be lacking not only vision, but wisdom as well. So far, I have not seen anything that suggested that the PF government will be pragmatic about the ICT sector and embrace it as top priority tool for achieving development and progressing our economy.

A suggestion worth taking a second look at it is this that taxes on computers, computer accessories, and internet enabled products including phones and palmtops should be reduced practically to ZERO. This will stimulate the ICT industry and conjure its growth. This would in turn make it possible for ICT companies that are able to develop systems that can help curb corruption do so in order to lead to a corrupt free nation.

Let me explain. If all systems are computerized and security in place, ZRA can demand to be partner to most of the suppliers in the world whose products find route into Zambia. As such whenever a purchase is made, a buyer can notify ZRA and a copy of receipt is sent to them without a chance of manipulation.

This can only be possible if Government to start with doesn’t privatize its responsibility of ensuring that communication (just like roads) is provided for every citizen. Government must lead in ensuring that every urban home is fitted with high speed internet, and also ensure that computers are accessible for every home.

If this were the picture, there would be no need to travel to the border to negotiate the rate of tax. Tax would be calculated at the point of purchasing and probably even paid for, at that point, to the revenue authority. This seeming incoherent superstition of my analysis is believable and practical.

A computerized and normalized system (where you pay tax based on the real cost of product), as well as a bearable tax regime, would in fact wipe out counterfeit, secondhand, polluting, poor quality products from our market. Most importantly Zambians will not turn to corruption and hence the President’s dream will become reality.

The president in his address on the eve of Independence Day reiterated a Zero tolerance agenda against corruption. Truth is, that intolerance towards corruption it will only make people find other ways of making sure that they are not caught. Not that we should tolerate it, if ever corruption will be a thing of the past, people must not be squeezed to the point where the only way they can afford is by corrupting someone in the system.

Finally, unless we employ the full power of ICTs in Zambia we will be talking about corruption and underdevelopment a 100 years from now.

As you may agree, this is going to be a profound premise to argue taxes on technology. Then again it's a profound view on why Zambia is extremely corrupt. The question is, will Zambia still be dealing with these causes of corruption in the next 10 years. Happy 47th Independence Day.

What Is Zambia’s Technology Agenda?

We are a landlocked country that should be leveraging the high number of neighbors for some sort of economic benefit and nothing could be better than being a center of technological advancement.

We are living in a hi-tech world, and truth is we are never going to go back to the Stone Age. Things are going to get more advanced and more competitive. This is why as a nation we must develop a clear practical and pragmatic agenda for our technological advancement especially in science and information and communication technology.

Talking of information and communication technology, I want to kick off this blog by saying that this is one sector that has the potential to bring large and ever increasing amounts of investment. Government needs to put policy in place that will set this sector into fast track motion. We need to think big and to be visionary.

Anyway, that said. It is pleasing to see ZICTA make a stand on fake phones. We cannot continue to be a dumping site for low quality products in Zambia. However, we need to ensure in this country that we pay the right price for these gadgets. We are really ripped off. The starting point is the tax system. The import tax that you pay on these gadgets is ridiculously high. As such the cost is shifted on the buying user.

The cost of a Galaxy Tab P1000 which is GSM capabilities is K2.6m in the United Kingdom. In Zambia that same device is sold at K4.3m in the Samsung Shop at Manda Hill. Zambians are buying this gadget at 100% higher than their counterparts in Europe. This is the case with most gadgets that are brought in from the west or indeed from the east.

This trend has a negative domino effect on the ICT sector and the economy at large. These prohibitive prices means only a few people will afford and hence saturation is low and the prices still up to. What the further means is that we become locked down into the past whilst our friend advance technological.

We need to bear in mind that ICT greatly reduces the cost of doing business and we have to be tactful about our economy if we have any hope of developing as a nation.

Imagine if people have original multimedia phones, they could do their banking on the mobile phone reducing the cost of paper and congestion in banks. If people could have access to Internet enable smart phones they could send their emails and communicate more cheaply and hence more money in their pockets in the end.

If students have access to tablets for instance they can do their research without struggling for internet access in their universities and colleges, or looking for money daily to do their research in internet cafes. You see, the cost of ICT gadgets has impact on the nation in various ways. We need to understand this as fundamental in the 21^st century for education, development, and financial success. As a matter of fact we need to understand it as the epicenter of growth.