If you have just moved into the cities of Cape Town, Maputo, Lusaka or Windhoek, you have become part of the problem. A big driver of climate change is urbanization and scientists say these four African cities are at the top of the list.
That was one reason why 2016 ranked as the hottest year on record, according to data analyzed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations’ authoritative voice on weather, climate and water.
One of the leading causes of this is carbon dioxide and methane concentrations from burning fossil fuels, which surged to new records, claims the WMO. This based on evidence from the likes of NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, UK-based Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
The world’s cities are responsible for 60% of all carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases while occupying just 2% of Earth’s surface, according to the United Nations Human Settlement Programme.
It means, unless humans find ways of reducing their carbon emissions, worse is yet to come.
Climate change, according to the South African Weather Service, is the natural cycle which the earth and its atmosphere experience from energy received from the sun. The climate goes through warm and cold periods, taking hundreds of years to complete one cycle. The changes also influence rainfall, but the biosphere is able to adapt to a changing climate if these changes take place over centuries.
As many as 100 million people could slide into extreme poverty because of rising temperatures, which are caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the World Bank reports.  It also says climate change has led to crop failures, natural disasters, higher food prices and the spread of waterborne diseases, creating poverty and pushing people at risk into destitution.
In 2015, the UN, in its report on climate change, noted that it is expected to cause shorter growing seasons and force large tracts of peripheral agriculture out of production. Without action, climate change would likely spark higher agricultural prices and could threaten food security in poorer regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Climate variability is also at play.
This year has been aggravated by El Nino, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern which decreases moisture in the sub-Saharan region and causes other extreme weather patterns.
Examples of climate variability could be seen in Cape Town in March; a disaster was declared by authorities as dam levels dropped to 31.5%. At the time of going to print, the city estimated that it had 105 days of useable water left. Meanwhile, in Mozambique and Madagascar, countries lying just north and east of South Africa, the category four tropical cyclone Enawo hit. The cyclone, which ravaged their coastlines with winds of 190 kilometers per hour, was dubbed the most destructive storm in years.
The next problem is how people deal with it.
A large group of people within the FRACTAL project, led by the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), is trying to tackle the problems associated with climate change in cities through novel approaches.
“We need to move away from the ‘sausage machine’ type of model whereby climate data is produced on one end by scientists, then follows a path to be spat out at the end to decision makers who are expected to use the data. Decision makers need to be engaged in the process of producing relevant climate knowledge from the beginning.”
So says Alice McClure, the coordinator of the Future Resilience for African CiTies and Lands (FRACTAL), a four-year project that aims to build relationships between scientists, practitioners, and the people whose elected representatives decide what’s best for the city.
“In this process, science should not be king. We argue that the knowledge that decision makers in the cities have is more relevant than the information the scientist is going to produce. For the purpose of decision making, scientists can produce as much rigorous climate data as they want, but the uptake of climate information and eventual impact that it might have, is undermined without considerations of context,” says McClure.
Started in 2015, FRACTAL is working in nine cities: Blantyre, Gaborone, Harare, Lusaka, Maputo and Windhoek. Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa have joined the program as self-funded cities.
FRACTAL is part of an initiative called Future Climate Change for Africa, which runs five projects to understand Africa better during climate change and integrates this into decision making.
FRACTAL’s approach enables particular issues, focused on water and energy, to be identified in each of the cities in which it is working, for which relevant and significant climate knowledge can be produced by scientists and decision makers.
What is becoming evident through the initial engagements is that each city has its own problems. For example, in Maputo issues associated with potable water, drainage and sanitation have surfaced, while in Lusaka groundwater recharge, drinking water, flooding and solid waste in peri-urban areas surfaced as pertinent issues.
“We need to understand the region within which the city is located, and how this might affect resources in the city, such as energy and water. For example, Lusaka is located within the Kafue river basin. So we need to understand how changes in the broader surface water system &#8211; as a result of climate or other non-climate drivers &#8211; might affect water supply in Lusaka. City-regions are very integrated, complex systems with multiple actors, stressors and scales. We need to have a deep understanding of the city-region context to understand what climate information might be relevant and significant.”
As part of the project, FRACTAL has embedded researchers into offices in the cities to gain a better understanding of how governments work. The idea is that the work undertaken by these researchers is mutually beneficial for the city officials and the researchers working on the project.
“The scientists are learning about the city-region and the decision makers are learning about climate variability and change. Together, we would like to build an understanding of what climate change might look like in the future in each city.”
It means cities need to come up with tangible solutions that can adapt to the next 40 years of increasing droughts and stronger typhoons in the face of growing cities.

Africa Is Heating Up  And Not In A Good Way

There can’t be too many days when you start work climbing down a ladder, with a government spy, into a dingy underground shaft in search of a torture chamber. This was how the meandering road of journalism took me to tunnels and bunkers deep beneath Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, on a sunny day in September 1995.
A few hours earlier I had been sitting at the presidential palace with the diminutive former President Frederick Chiluba. He assured me, with his peculiar trademark expression of rolling his eyes so all you could see was their whites, that we would see shocking evidence of torture in the days of his predecessor Kenneth Kaunda.
At the time, Kaunda had been a thorn in the side of Chiluba and was staging a political comeback. To give Chiluba his due, the union leader had ousted Kaunda, fair and square, at elections on a wave of votes of people fed up with food shortages and autocratic tendencies from the old man. It ended Kaunda’s 27-year reign since the day Zambia won independence on October 24, 1964. KK or Super Ken, as they called him in the copper belt, was determined to fight back at the 1996 elections and was going to wring out every bit of popularity he had as well as making a nuisance of himself to the people in power.
<div id="attachment_3519" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3519" class="size-medium wp-image-3519" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Par1766006-1-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />Zambia&#8217;s former president Frederick Chiluba gives the thumbs up outside the Magistrates Courts on Febrauary 15, 2008 in Lusaka after the court ruled today that Chiluba should face a corruption trial in May. Chiluba would have to show cause why he should not be convicted on charges of theft of public funds and abuse of office, prosecutor Mutembo Nchito told AFP after the ruling by Lusaka Magistrate Jones Chinyama.</div>
In response, Chiluba threw mud at Kaunda from every angle. He tried to deport the old man to Malawi with a bizarre claim that the former head of state was not a Zambian – his father, a Church of Scotland vicar, was born in Malawi. In 1998, there was a misprision of treason trial where Kaunda was charged with failing to inform authorities of a treasonous act. Kaunda, who spent nine months in prison during the independence struggle, was to spend many more months behind bars on remand and grew a bushy Father Christmas white beard in protest. Appropriate, since he was arrested on Christmas Day.
“These are frightened little men trying to hurt me,” was one of Kaunda’s phrases of the time.
This was the scene on the surface on that day I walked into the dim tunnels built by engineers from the former Yugoslavia in the days when Lusaka was under attack for sheltering guerrillas from neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa.
It was a bit like walking down a mine as the shaft led downward, in a gentle incline. There were lights here and there perched in the rock; every now and then there was a room off the main tunnel. We had the camera ready to get shots of the torture chamber; we found… nothing. If there was a torture chamber it was well hidden.
We scoured the underground bunkers and all we found was a radio station with a five-kilowatt transmitter, lots of damp carpets and rotting wood, what looked like a council chamber and rooms filled with bunk beds; little else.
We emerged at the other end of the long tunnel, which came out at the presidential palace, puzzled. Why had Chiluba sent us on a wild-goose chase? There was anecdotal evidence from a Major Ronald Chansa who told of being held and tortured in the tunnels for 21 days in 1981.
Afterwards, we headed for Kaunda’s home in Lusaka to ask the question about torture.
“If I see a spider in the bath I will take it out before I put my water there,” says Kaunda in denying the charge.
“Maybe there were one or two over-zealous policeman, here and there, but I can say I know nothing of torture.”
Maybe.
Chiluba faced corruption charges after his term in office and died in June 2011. Chansa, if there was such a man, never spoke out again. Kaunda, who famously grabbed the microphone to make a tribute at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, is alive and well, living in Lusaka. He pulled out of the 1996 election at the last minute and never stood again and was acquitted of misprision of treason.
Maybe between the three, lies the truth about the bunkers deep below Lusaka.
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Deep Under The Earth  In Search Of A Dark Secret

For some food is seen as art, for others music is an art form.
Ignatius Anayawa has fused the two at the Misty Jazz Restaurant and Café in Lusaka. Earlier this year, Misty’s won the International Hotel &amp; Restaurant Quality Award from the Global Trade Leaders’ Club (GTLC) in Madrid. The question is how this two-year-old establishment on the periphery of downtown Lusaka received this honor so soon?
The answer lies in Anayawa’s innovation. The idea and concept of the establishment was born out of his love for jazz and his desire to combine music with food. It was also important to Anayawa that the music was performed live. There are very few venues where one can have a meal with good live music playing in the background. The interior décor and ambience of Misty’s is more likely to be found in Johannesburg than Lusaka.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3497" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_6279-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
The biggest challenge in establishing Misty’s was finding an environment where the music could compliment the cuisine. The venue had to be suitable for jazz to be the core of the ambience. The menu also had to complement the music.
When entering Misty’s, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a gallery of jazz artists’ photographs. You would also be forgiven if you thought the menu was a jazz photo album. It was designed by the Vice President of the South African Chef Association, to specifications of the concept of fusing jazz and food.
No detail was spared in establishing this top notch venue. The walls and floor were soundproofed, the fabric of the upholstery and furniture had to complement the venue’s acoustics and the ceiling had to be an ideal height for live music. The purple color scheme and the gold framing of black and white pictures initially jars the senses, but eventually grows on you. The pictures behind the stage, featuring New York and New Orleans skylines, add a cosmopolitan vibe. The venue boasts sound equipment from the United States and a piano from Britain. The sound engineer’s booth is suitable for live broadcasts and recording live performances. Every Sunday, a Lusaka radio station broadcasts live from the restaurant.
This minute detail makes Misty’s difficult to replicate and the unique brand is being established in Kampala and Accra. Another innovation in the Misty’s concept lies in the intention to adapt it to the different night lifestyles of African cities. The venue in Kampala will have live music being performed in the bar, which will have a much larger floor space than the restaurant. Lusaka’s venue will give more space to the restaurant.
Despite these differences, some consistency will be maintained and the venues in Kampala and Accra will be fitted by the same team that worked in Lusaka. More often than not, the materials for the fittings are imported.
In Lusaka, the venue will be in a newly opened shopping mall on the outskirts of the city center. The restaurant and stage takes up more than 60% of the floor space and the venue has the capacity to seat 115 patrons comfortably. Fifty percent of the venue was financed by Anayawa and his wife, the other half came from the bank. It is projected to take three years to break even, and so far the business is on course to hit this target. A definite sign of the success of the Misty’s brand is the fact that patrons of six different nationalities have expressed an interest to franchise the concept in their home countries.
The factor that sets Misty’s apart is its ability to deliver both food and music of the highest quality. The restaurant has hired an experienced executive chef from South Africa, and the menu includes signature hearty dishes such as braised oxtail in a rich red wine sauce, grilled French trimmed lamb cutlets, stewed beef, beef fillet with a white wine and mushroom jus, and tempura prawns. Excellent music is ensured by having band members on the restaurant’s payroll. They rehearse every morning, besides Mondays, and perform every night. On Fridays and Saturdays, the band performs with guest artists that are fit for the venue.
The challenges that Misty’s has encountered include being the victim of its own success. Patrons tend to enjoy themselves so much that they spend their entire evening at the venue, with little to no turnover at the tables. This limits the revenue that can be made in one night. This tendency also presents another problem. The venue is busiest on Fridays and Saturdays when patrons can be most relaxed. However, the introduction of the live radio broadcasting on Sundays has improved business on this night.
Misty’s is also introducing themed nights and using social media to effectively reach its target audience. In addition, as a member of the GTLC, Misty’s will be featured in marketing and publications that the club puts out.
Another challenge that Misty’s has encountered is the sourcing of food which, more often than not, has to be imported. This means that the food is more expensive than it should be, squeezing the food margins. However, this has spawned another business opportunity. Misty’s imports its food in bulk and supplies other restaurateurs.
Given the effort and expertise that has gone into establishing the Misty Jazz Restaurant and Café brand, there is no doubt that it is meant for those that enjoy the finer things i

Music  To Your Mouth

When Maybin Madiba Mudenda was 15 years old, he sold CDs and blank cassette tapes across the back of threadbare seats on the train on his way to school from Livingstone to Lusaka.  It is a heck of a long train ride to where Mudenda sits and sells now, in a leather backed chair with a polished table in his offices at African Grey Insurance, in the heart of Lusaka. In his pocket he has over $9.5 million, enough to buy a pile of CDs that could derail a train or match his mountain of ambition.
“Give me five years and I’ll be on the cover of FORBES AFRICA magazine, there with Adrian Gore and Patrice Motsepe,” he says with a smile.
It may take longer. On the FORBES AFRICA 50 Richest List, Motsepe is ranked 11th with $2.7 billion and Gore 45th with $460 million.
It’s not a worry for Mudenda, who makes his money carrying risk. He is of a new generation of confident, cool and savvy Zambians. He started out in logistics for Oxfam and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in the drought ridden bush around Nangweshi, in the Western Province of Zambia. The contracts dried up, so did Mudenda’s job. Out of the blue stepped the appropriately named Saviour Konie, known as the father of Zambian insurance. Konie gave him a chance as a salesperson for ZIGI Insurance in 2000.
Money proved the spur. Mudenda’s first commission was $2,000.
“Now that’s when life started to get interesting,” says Mudenda.
A year later, he was confident enough to make a bold move to sell in Zambia’s Copperbelt, the lifeblood of the Zambian economy. The mines needed insurance badly, but few took the trouble to sell it. Mudenda didn’t need an invitation and made $50,000 in his first year.
No sooner had the dust settled on the copper mines, along came another piece of luck. Sandra Valenzo, an Italian working in Zambia and owner of VS Cargos, wanted to move large amounts of copper. Again Mudenda stepped in and oversaw the movement of 10,000 tons of copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Africa in a deal worth $250,000 that earned him 20% commission.
Twelve years later, Mudenda is a multimillionaire. He’s never looked back. He holds 50% of African Grey Insurance which is valued at $6 million and 20% of Genesis Finance Limited which is valued at $3 million. He also owns the $1-million Insizwe Consult , a $2-million 2,000-hectare farm, Muccabella Farms, in Chisamba as well as the Kabanana House and Halen Kaunda House, in Lusaka, valued at $650,000 each.
Through a string of canny deals, Mudenda has also garnered shares with H&amp;F Hydraulics, a company based in South Africa worth $125,000, and 25% stakes in Burton Karya Resources and Kurema Resources.
“The new generation now wants to come out. The older generation still lives in the fear that if you talk about your wealth, the politicians will still come and haunt you. You will find guys that will call you and say ‘no you mustn’t tell people about your wealth. People will put some sort of juju on you. You are attracting commissions to you’. I have got nothing to hide,” says Mudenda.
Among his assets are cars that are the envy of most people he passes in the street. A Mercedes Benz SL500, ML500, E300, the new S Class and a Land Cruiser are parked in his garage. It is a long drive from the tiny apartment he shared 15 years ago.
“We used to have nothing. We used to live in a little two bedroom flat in Northmead, Buchi Road. My mom gave us a Toyota Camry 1998/99 model. We were comfortable, but we didn’t have all these luxuries,” he says.
Mudenda says Zambians must not be afraid to start their own businesses.
“The next generation must go for what you think is right for you. Most young Zambians believe in being workers. They are so scared of being entrepreneurs. But you need to go out and fight to get the business. I’ve got files of people who I’ve been to school with that could do it. You know what I’ve started doing now? I’ve started employing them as agents. That’s what Konie did for me,” says Mudenda.
Mudenda might not be on the cover of FORBES AFRICA anytime soon, but with more deals on the way he could put himself in the fast lane. At the very least he plans on shaking hands with the men he looked up to when he had nothing.

Meet Our  Cover Story  For 2019

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If you haven’t been to Lusaka for a while, prepare for a shock. The last time I was there in 1999, the Cairo Road was grubby and rundown; there were cars on the road that should have been pensioned off in the 1970s and everywhere there were the signs and scent of pungent decay.
The Lusaka of 2012 couldn’t be more different. Shining new shopping malls are springing up on once barren land; gleaming new office parks are everywhere. Investment and trade are brisk and the roads packed with brand new cars. Indian and Chinese investors have helped breathe life back into the once moribund copper industry and it is tipped to achieve record production this year. Resurgent agriculture means Zambia is enjoying surpluses and exporting everything from maize to yoghurt.
Zambia, free from exchange controls, is reaping the rewards of more than 20 years of working towards becoming one of the most liberal economies on the continent. The country has set up the Zambia Development Agency to find ways to ease business. This year, it looked at 517 of the plethora of licences business needs to operate in Zambia and abolished 170 of them. Many of these licences can take months to acquire and have seen off many a frustrated investor.
All appears lovely in the garden, but there are clouds overhead. Uncertainty is a word used often these days by bankers and business types in Lusaka these days. The new government, formed by the ruling Patriotic Front (PF), led by President Michael Sata, is under pressure to ease the suffering of the poor. More than half the country lives below the poverty line. One of the bitter lessons of the Arab Spring was that governments cannot risk allowing the young to be restless and unemployed for too long. Zambia, with a population of 13.6 million, has 10.2 million people under the age of 35, with a mere five million jobs to go round.
Economists, government officials and bankers alike accept that Zambia’s growing economy, which has sustained a healthy 6 to 7% GDP growth for 10 years, has hardly made a dent in the country’s poverty. This cold fact is forcing the government to budget and regulate in the cause of the poor, which is creating disquiet among those in business.
One of the most recent and talked about regulations is the increase of the minimum wage, from around $75-a-month to around $110. This has caused consternation among cost conscious employers, who warn there could be job losses and a reluctance to hire.
This was one of the many issues at the “Growing Zambia” debate, held in a Lusaka hotel, as part of business channel CNBC Africa’s launch of its live TV crossings from the country.
“Let me ask you how many of you in this room can live on a $100-a-month?&#8230; You have to give an individual a reasonable wage to live on,” says Zambia’s pugnacious minister of commerce, trade and industry, Robert Sichinga, to the well-heeled audience at the televised debate.
The panel also debated the other new regulation causing waves, the so called SI 33. This statutory instrument bans the quotation of prices of goods and services in foreign currency.
Sichinga says the measure was to revive the kwacha, follow a plunge in its value. At the time of the world financial crisis in 2008, the kwacha was 3,300 to the US dollar, according to Sichinga, and has not recovered, standing at around 5,500 to the dollar.
“If you deal in foreign currency you are increasing demand for the dollar, which is decreasing the value of your currency,” he says.
David Kombe, the CEO of D&amp;C Saatchi &amp; Saatchi, said otherwise it was like building a house with kwacha and being allowed to rent it out in dollars.
“Today sales are made and tomorrow the revenue is sent out of the country,” he says.
Economist Trevor Simumba disagreed with the policy to defend the currency saying that it was akin to some of the protectionist policies of the 1970s and could hurt investment.
“My prayer is for the government not to regulate the private sector too much. If you squeeze it, you squeeze the life out of it,” says Simumba.
Despite these concerns, Sichinga believes Zambia can beat last year’s foreign investment of $5.4 billion. He says he travelled to Australia, Dubai, Doha, Turkey, India and the United States this year in search of more, but warned these trips could take a year to five years to bear fruit.
“We will use policy to entice business,” says Sichinga. Simumba countered that government policy should concentrate on growth as well as redistribution of wealth.
Growth is the name of the game on the streets of the new Lusaka. Where once was wasteland, now loom giant shopping malls, doing brisk business, with packed car parks. The familiar South African franchise names are all there, but inside there are Zambian produced goods from jewelry to food. Even the state has jumped on to the bandwagon. A spanking new shopping mall, in the heart of the city, opened in November. It cost $200 million and was named the Levy Shopping Centre, after the late Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa. The government’s pension scheme partnered with Liberty Properties in putting up the money.
In many ways, Mark O’Donnell is the father of the shopping mall in Zambia. He is a born-and-bred Zambian, the son of an entrepreneur, who emigrated from Britain in 1948, in search of a new life. More than half a century later, O’Donnell is chairman of Union Gold, a family company that owns three brands in Zambia: Protea Hotels; Spar and MICA Tools.
O’Donnell has also had a hand in marshaling millions of dollars in investment in the building of three shopping malls. The new SI 33 regulation, calling for all domestic transactions to be carried out in kwacha, concerns him.
“The resources are not available in the country. If I want to build a new hotel it is going to cost $10 to $20 million and that kind of investment is not available in kwacha… I think there is a lot of emotion around wanting to support the currency,” he says.
“I think there is a bit of inconsistency and different views from different ministers. What we in business are saying is: could there be no capital controls and no exchange controls in an economy where foreign investors can repatriate their profits?… I think the economy faces, many, many challenges.”
The next morning it was the wide blue sky of a winter’s morning in the capital as warm as a welcoming kitchen. Why can’t all winters be like this? I breezed into the Finance Ministry past friendly waves. One of Zambia’s most valuable national assets is its relaxed informality—I swear, I have felt less welcome in the reception of a tin pot South African company, than in making my way to the office of the top decision maker in Zambian economic policy, Alexander Chikwanda, the finance minister of Zambia.
Chikwanda was born in Kasama, in northern Zambia, the son of an ex-soldier, turned district magistrate. He was a young turk in the United National Independence Party around independence in 1964 and left the country for Sweden, where he qualified as an economist in 1968. To say he is a veteran politician is almost an understatement. Chikwanda has climbed the political ladder from the job of district governor to junior minister and into high office in the cabinet. In the 27-year rule of Kenneth Kaunda, Chikwanda was minister for everything from agriculture and health to local government, finance and planning.
Nine months ago, Chikwanda took over the job of finance minister, when Michael Sata’s PF party won the elections, steering economic policy and batting away criticism from uneasy business types.
Chikwanda’s first budget was hailed by the masses for being pro-poor, putting a bit of money back into the lean pockets of struggling Zambians. At the same time economists, like Simumba, worried that the budget didn’t address growth. The next budget will be in October.
“The PF policy of pro-poor budgets will continue,” he says.
Chikwanda believes business and government should join hands to grow the Zambian economy. He dismisses concern over the new SI 33 regulations, which he drew up.
“Every country has its legal tender. How can you spend anything but rand in South Africa? How can you pay other than in dollars in the United States? This is not a new policy, it is something that is carried on all over the world… Funds are available in kwacha for investment, in fact a lot of money is on offer… Those guys who talk about this are not right at all, they are protecting narrow interests,” he says.
Chikwanda accepted one of the criticisms by business of Zambia’s plodding bureaucracy.
“The bureaucracy has a history and leaves much to be desired. It moves at a snail’s pace and not as fast as we would like,” he says.
Another criticism is that Zambians are not seeing enough value for their tax dollar.
Chikwanda hopes to address this, in his fiscal legacy, by restructuring the country’s budget in favor of spending more on education, Zambia’s pounded roads and parlous rails. He says that 70% of the country’s 27.5 trillion kwacha budget (around $5.6 billion) is allocated to recurrent expenditure, while a mere 30% is earmarked for capital expenditure; Chikwanda hopes to change this to a 50-50 split by the end of his time at the helm of the country’s economy.
“It will not be done overnight,” he says.
Few could argue with the need
for change and the time it is likely to take.

Tag: Lusaka

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Africa Is Heating Up And Not In A Good Way

Deep Under The Earth In Search Of A Dark Secret

Music To Your Mouth

Meet Our Cover Story For 2019

A Fight For The Business Soul Of Zambia