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Give Walmart Some More Credit Ted Gudmundsen My friend Biko is among Zambia’s elite. He boarded at a private high school, and went to a good college in one of Zambia’s urban centers. He’s reasonably bright, personable, and a teetotaler. He’s also unemployed. This is not an uncommon story in Zambia. The official unemployment rate is above 50%. Zambia is 166th out of 177 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. Biko and I went shopping the other day for some simple housewares for my flat: sheets, a towel, a blanket. We started in the Western-style shopping mall here in Zambia’s capital. We found the items in a store called Game, which carries products roughly equivalent to those sold in Walmart in the United States. Unlike Walmart, Game sells a pair of plain, single bedsheets for $70 (you can get fitted bed sheets of better quality at Walmart for $17). The customers walking through Game are Zambia’s super-elite—Westerners, Zambians working for Western NGOs, or Zambians at the top of government ministries. Refusing to pay $70 for sheets, Biko and I headed for Kamwala, the market at which middle class Zambians shop. (Lower class Zambians don’t buy things like sheets and towels, because they don’t have beds or running water.) Kamwala isn’t a market in the open-air African sense, but a series of small, non-descript shops—roughly resembling a strip-mall. The difference is that unlike an American strip mall, where each shop would specialize in something different and be a part of a large corporate chain, here all of the shops are run by the owners, and they all sell roughly the same assortment of basic items: stoves, ovens, irons, chairs, tables, bicycles, clothes, and—thankfully—sheets. Zambia is a disestablishmentarian’s dream. There are very, very few large corporations. Nearly all retail is done by small mom-and-pop shops. Nearly all transport is done by small-scale traders. Nearly all agriculture is done by small-scale farmers. Except for the copper miners in the country’s north, almost no one is subjugated by The Man. But most wish they were. A few weeks ago, another friend of mine named Banda who runs a theater group that disseminates HIV/AIDS messages and makes very good money at it, begged me to get him a job at the large, corporate-style NGO where I was working. “Why?” I asked, thinking of how nice it would be to set my own schedule, stop writing reports, and have control over my own projects. I asked him if he wasn’t making good money. “I guess,” he said, “but some months yes, some months there is no money at all. My wife, my kids, it is very hard for them. It would be much better to have a paycheck every two weeks.” While I sympathize with Banda, the real failing of Zambia’s informal market system is its inability to put people like Biko to work. In America, a guy who graduates from college, broadly-educated but without a trade, like Biko (or like me, for that matter), can join a bank, or an insurance company, or a marketing firm, and be taught how to work in banking, insurance, or marketing while on the job. Even someone without education can get a job at Walmart. The advantage of big, institutional businesses is that you don’t need to know anyone to get a job. If you are willing to work, you are “labor,” and it’s not difficult to find a business that will pick you up. In Zambia, if your dad doesn’t run a hardware shop, and your uncle isn’t a colonel in the Air Force—if you don’t have connections—you’re out of luck. While it may be impersonal to be a “valuable human resource,” it’s better than sitting at home and watching TV. Just ask Biko. Ted Gudmundsen, formerly Princeton ’07, now Princeton ’08, is working a one-year internship with a large non-governmental organization (NGO) in Zambia. |
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