Road Trip

Today, Marco, Jason and I, in the company of Mr Dumisani Makubalo of ECRFC, headed to a rural area of the Eastern Cape to conduct branch office interviews. Unfortunately, our team-mate Anna felt too ill to join us.

I rode with Mr Makubalo and we had some terrific conversation ranging from business to sports, to politics, to what it has been like living in the country both before and after apartheid. He is unusual too in that he and his father bought 46 hectares of land shortly after the apartheid era, where he now has 170 head of cattle and 150 sheep on a farm he runs on weekends and evenings in addition to his job as the Credit and Risk Manager at ECRFC.Mr Makubalo holds a degree in Agriculture from the University of Fort Hare.

We arrive at Queen's Town

Our first stop was in Queen's Town, a beautiful place nestled in the green hills that we saw most of the day. We interviewed both the branch manager and the branch administrator/credit controller and explored many issues with them such as why some people have the mindset that they should not have to repay their loan ... for reasons such as a culture of dependency after years of deprivation, that free money from government grants is commonplace, that as freedom fighters they have a sense of entitlement. These are but a sampling of the very significant issues we will need to address in developing a strategy to reduce the rate of loan default.

Queen's Town Branch Manager

On the desk of managers back home one might expect to see a box of tissues or maybe business cards ... so the box of condoms on the branch manager's desk in Queen's Town seems wildly out of place until you realize what a massive problem HIV is in South Africa. The country has the fourth highest incidence of HIV in the world, which drives the life expectancy under 50 years - 178th in global rankings. Reminders of the life-and-death need to practice safe sex are everywhere.
 
Not surprisingly, the further we get from the client's office the more the perspective seems to change on business issues. For example, the customer service consultant in  Engcobo, a satellite office of Queen's Town, told us how important it is to include the "headman" (local authority such as councilor or tribal chief) in the group loans they make ... because he can exert influence if that loan starts to go into arrears.

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I find it interesting that people in the branch offices they have not heard of IBM ... which speaks volumes of how much ground needs to be made up by the IBM brand in South Africa. The people often want to know what IBM does - something I have never had to explain in my career. How do you tell someone in simple terms what a company does to drive $100 billion per year in revenue and employ hundreds of thousands of people?

Transkei Robots

The rural countryside on our long drive through the Transkei region was spectacular - lush green fields dotted with colourful houses and with picturesque hills or mountains as a backdrop. Every now and then the road would be blocked but cattle or sheep - what the locals call "Transkei robots", robots being the term for traffic lights and the livestock requiring vehicles to slow down or stop. The round houses are often made of mud and are cheaper to construct than square homes using concrete blocks.

The road-trip continues on Friday with more interviews in Mthatha before heading to a really exciting weekend visit to a remote African village on the Wild Coast ... stay tuned for what that is like!