Onions, Tears and Business Blindness

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. In the Zambian context it is also true that in the land of the blind, onions will make you cry. It is evidently clear that foreign nationals come into our country and see opportunities where we do not. And we bestow upon them the coveted title of investor. Even when they only came to make sharwamas, grow chickens and import second hand underwear, with all due respect. Our failure to acknowledge and monetize business opportunities is what qualifies us as the land of the blind, and we create one-eyed kings out of the people who see and seize the opportunities in block-making, local trucking, and abattoirs to mention a few.

Anyway, let’s talk about onions and tears. As far as I can remember from 2017, onions have been making us cry. According to Knoema, an online data platform, Zambia produced approximately 40,000 tonnes of onion in 2020, we have a peak period between July and the onset of the rains, then after that we have an annual crying ceremony. This ceremony happens, apparently, because foreign owned entities seize the opportunity to import onion into the country during our lean months. Then we go off crying to the government to impose an onion import ban. Unfortunately, this goes on year in year out. To give some context to this, Zambia imported over 8500 tonnes of onion in 2020, compared to 5400 tonnes in 2019. If we are really self-sufficient in this, what explains the upward trend in importation. It was however reported in some media houses that in 2019 government had approved importation of 100,000 metric tonnes of onion despite the official figure being announced as 1,350 metric tonnes.  The disparity between production and importation figures raises a lot of questions. The justification for this was importation in the midst of a ban was that we needed to cushion the export of onions into the DRC to fulfil our allocated quota. On the surface of it, the entire fiasco sounds more like politics than economics. If fulfilling your export allocation leaves you without enough for local consumption, doesn’t that say something about under capacity?

Admittedly, yes, we do produce enough onion for consumption, even in our backyard gardens. A lot of onion is “rumored” to come out of the Eastern province. A number of commercial farmers grow onions for export into the DRC. The issue, it seems, is actually around curing, drying or preserving the onion to an acceptable retail shelf life standard.  I remember sitting in a meeting with representatives of some of the major retail stores before the importation ban. There was a denial that retail stores do not collude to import onions and disadvantage the local farmers as alluded to in some sections of the farming community. One of the representatives elaborated that it did not make business sense to prefer imported onions over local ones with all the logistical nightmares and the cost implications of doing so. He pointed out that it was more about the quality than the quantity of onions that were available in the country, and we would be the same people complaining if he went ahead and stocked some of the poor quality onions.  For a moment I thought he was just pushing the agenda of the one-eyed kings, until the ban happened. Then the local onions made it to the retail store shelves.  What I saw was the kind of onion that will make you cry before you even pick it up, pitiful sight! The onion was more than ready to germinate just so it could get out of its miserable rotting existence.

So, from what I can remember and what the media have reported, even in 2017, there was a complaint about onion importation. Now this is about 5 years later, and from what I know, this better quality onion which comes in to undermine our local onion is not produced and processed on another planet, not even another continent. What then is so difficult about sourcing the relevant technology and expertise to make sure that our own onion is processed to get to an acceptable retail shelf standard. The five years we have gone in and out of the crying ceremony is more than enough to come up with a permanent and viable solution.

Surely the effort, time and energy expended on lobbying government, and setting up forums to demonize the chain stores can be used to set up a steering committee to coordinate the implementation of a plan that will get us out of this impasse. If we put Zambia National Farmers Union, Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission, NAPSA, Ministry of Agriculture officials in one room, we can find the solutions. I believe these entities have brilliant minds managing them.  If we have the time and resources to bicker and rant, surely, we can use the same to get tangible results and procure those dryers, get the expertise to give our homegrown onions a longer shelf life. Consequently, we will empower our farmers to give us better quality onions. It is called focusing on the solution.

Maybe it is because we are coming from a place of prayer and fasting our way out of problems, perhaps we are getting out of it now. But we should not mourn for too long, because while we are at the prayer complaining, the one-eyed kings will be taking advantage of our blindness and rolling in the dryers. The current government seems to have a plan and seem intentional about some of these issues. They have introduced a waiver on duty on some of this equipment. What we need to understand though, is that government can only do so much, provide an enabling policy environment. The rest is up to us. If we are not serious, the same foreigners will import the very equipment that has been made easy for us to purchase, then bring it in to rent to us or process onions on our behalf. We know this story with the abattoirs and many other ventures.

To be fair though, maybe we are not blind, we are just short sighted, hyper myopic (I heard that from my optician). We want the short-term solution every year, ban the onion imports, then lift the ban, then impose the ban again, like some economic circus at national level. The private sector actually arm-twists the government into this. It has to stop. Can we at least talk about a long-term solution when we sit in these meetings to lobby government for bans, can we talk about buying dryers and putting them in strategic locations so that after another 5 years we are focusing on something else and not onions?

Above everything else, I think what is more crucial in all this is having the right mindset and attitudes as a nation. I recently read some write-up where the author claimed that the chain stores were deliberately buying rotten onions from suppliers to undermine efforts to support local farmers. How absurd! This narrative is very similar to the neighborhood stories of how did he buy a Fuso truck, he must be practicing witchcraft. If we are going to collectively subscribe to such mediocre thinking as a nation then we have a long way to go, and we need to take a seat, and introspect, ask ourselves if we know what we are doing. Let us recognize the problem here, our onions are of poor quality, they are bad because we do not have the capacity to properly process them. Then let us go on to fix this, get better quality onions and ban importation, actually there will be no need for a ban, the free hand of the market will quite likely make it unprofitable to import onions.

Author Bio:

Chanda Mutale – expert in Agribusiness financing and SME lending. He is very passionate about the SME sector and regularly writes about it. He is a guest content writer for Zambia Agribusiness Society.