eBusiness Weekly
The annual shutdown beloved of so many enterprises in Zimbabwe, outside the retail sector and much of the informal sector, has been built into a tradition in Zimbabwe, extending far beyond its roots and periodically needs to be examined to see if it is still valid.
The roots lie in large factories and the growth of planned preventative maintenance as a standard engineering practice. The plant engineering manager, chief engineer, maintenance foreman or whatever they were called wanted to be able to dismantle productive machinery to check the innards, cleaning or replacing bearings and other parts subject to wear, and be able to pull down steam pipes, flues and other ducts that could get corroded from the inside or blocked.
For this to happen, it was almost essential to stop production for a week or two. For other reasons, it seemed a good idea to use the same weeks to kill a large block of annual leave days, basically everyone except the maintenance crews or, these days, the IT crews as well. The people who have to stay, and even work overtime during the annual maintenance break, go on a normal leave roster, the sort of thing a shopkeeper has to plan.
It certainly made life easier for human resources managers, stuck between the financial manager demanding that leave provisions are chopped out of the books by year end, and the operations managers who flung their arms in the air and asked how they were supposed to run a business if chunks of staff were missing.
For some processes you cannot have a “skeleton staff”. Either a full production team is on duty or no one is. There is a no half-way point as might be possible to sales staff or the like.
The timing varied as to climate. In large chunks of Europe, for example, there are major shutdowns in August when everyone wants to go on holiday. In Zimbabwe, as in South Africa and Australia, the Christmas and New Year period was considered ideal since, in any case, lot of staff wanted leave at that time in any case.
In some countries this allowed a lot of others, outside the hospitality and tourism industries which were overworked, to close down, at least partially.
In southern Africa the ultimate must be the central urban belt in Namibia, where the capital Windhoek lies. The city almost closes down outside essential services and even banks and a fair number of shops will close some branches or just run basic services.
But as traditional manufacturing declines as a percentage of the economy, and as smaller and medium enterprises start grabbing an ever higher percentage of the capacity even in the productive sectors, the idea of a whole country grinding to a halt becomes less desirable and perhaps even impossible.
For a start, a swathe of smaller engineering companies finds Christmas and New Year their busiest period. These are the companies that provide the specialist services that every maintenance programme needs, especially with the growing trend to outsource what can be outsourced.
Supply chains and value addition chains can be severely disrupted unless there is almost perfect co-ordination along a long line of companies and critical stocks and raw materials have been stockpiled in adequate quantities.
And then you get the major movement of people.
Already some of these pressures were becoming intolerable in Zimbabwe by the early 1960s. At that time the school year was arranged with a couple of weeks break around Easter, a couple of weeks at the end of August, and eight or nine weeks in December and January, copying the English tradition of the long summer holidays.
Unfortunately this overwhelmed the transport and hospitality industries, and caused growing a severe disruption in much of the productive sectors, let alone the commercial and service sectors which did not have the partial safety valve of a maintenance shutdown.
So the Government changed the school year to sequence of roughly equal terms and school holidays to spread the economic load and disruption more evenly. That in turn was embraced by the post-Independence Government, which had the good fortune to have a situation where almost all public holidays, after the old national holidays were scrapped and new ones inserted, could fall within a school holiday if the planner was careful.
Other major social changes, the end of migrant labour and of people having rural and urban homes simultaneously, being the most obvious.
But the culture is still definitely there, and it would take a very brave employer, for example, to dump the year-end annual bonus and replace it with an 8,33 percent pay rise so spreading the bonus across the year. Inflation has, to a degree, encouraged the year-end bonuses, coupled with changes to the tax system being announced in November to set new limits for tax-free limits on bonuses.
Economically it would make more sense to increase the zero-tax band and spread the bonus out through the year. Or even split it into quarters or, perhaps better still, into thirds payable a fortnight before a new school term opens. But the cultural pressures are so severe, and Zimbabweans are such bad savers even when inflation is low, that we have this curiosity of cash-flow management that must create very severe headaches, as well as cause the monetary authorities minor headaches as they manage the slow growth in liquidity in business sectors followed by a sudden crash and a dump of liquidity into personal bank accounts.
Of course we do not live for work. We work to live. So cultural traditions are important, and in an agricultural society there is always a break between the land preparation and planting and the weeding and harvesting, which coincidentally falls into the Zimbabwe festive season.
But the growing complexity of the economy, the growth of industries and businesses that have slack times at other parts of the year, the growing percentage of the population whose rural ties are now second or third cousins, and even the need for a more even economic cycle, with fewer towering peaks and deep troughs, combine to make closing down a country for two or three weeks once a year every more impossible.
Change would not affect individuals much. They would still get their annual break, but not all together. And shutdowns for maintenance could be scheduled to more obvious times, such as seasons when equipment can be hauled outside and painted or dried off. Lockdown restrictions imposed in the wake of Covid-19 show that there were other solutions. For some concerns, having to schedule installing new machinery or new software systems might well suggest a break at more appropriate time would be more practical and less costly.
Perhaps everyone might agree that tinkering with the present system and culture is all that is required. But we still need every now and then to step back and consider if there are not better solutions than those embraced by our grandparents.
