Milk is soon becoming a cost at my house

(First Published in New Era Newspaper - 17 December 2014)

The past two weeks have been extremely hectic at the Shaanika-Louw household. First it was counting the elections results that kept me from home, now baby has decided we must get ready for our new addition. We arrived at the maternity ward quite prepared as we both have children from previous relationships. However, baby has had other ideas. Since morning Monday, till now just after lunch on Tuesday, baby has decided to take a break. It seems it will take longer to have our baby than counting the elections results.

As part of my baby preparedness, I took my wife to the new mall that recently opened in the south east of Windhoek. It was a pleasant surprise to see so many brand name stores and one look at the prices of these items made me appreciate the value of competition. In one of the toy stores I was able to buy a present for our elder son of 11 for less than N$ 200.00. The exact same toy is available from local toys stores and large retailers for more than twice the price.

Thus, I look forward to continuing dropping of prices as we see more competition in the market place.
This now leads me to a conundrum - a confusing and difficult problem or question. If competition is good for me as a consumer when prices drop, when can it be bad for me?

As a previous promoter of trade for Namibia based at the United Nations Industrial Organisations office in Paris, France, we often complained about competition against our local business that forced them to go out of business. Many times I heard the argument we need to defend our Namibian industries and business against “unfair” advantage and tactics used by especially South African businesses. The examples are numerous where the power of size was used by such companies, for example cooking oil, toilet paper, foam mattresses, etc.)
In recent months I have approached by both sides of the arguments on “protecting local industry”. (The two commodities referred to is the fresh milk and the chicken market.)

The suppliers argue that they need protection from the outside producers because they only have a small market, and the large produces can afford to flood the market and the non-protection would lead to job losses. Consumers on the other hand argue quite rightly that when there is competition, then prices will come down and prevent monopolies from increasing their profit margins without due regard to the “market price”.

Having been on both sides of the “game”, I must now take a stand. Do I believe in market forces keeping prices affordable or do I believe in protecting jobs? Wrong!

That is not the actual question. We need to look at the industries concerned on an individual basis and then come to some recommendation.

The dairy industry used to consist of many producers supplying to dairies that were locally based. For example, in Rehoboth the farmers supplied their milk to the locally owned dairy. At Independence there were two main large dairies and they kept the market in balance. However, these two consolidated and became almost a monopoly. This large size meant they could use business tricks to get rid of competitors or put them into a position of having to either sell or close down their business. Today, this is the largest dairy and if I am correct, only dairy in the country. They even have their own super-farm to provide products to themselves.

This large company now wants to continue the production of the dairy industry because otherwise there will be loss of jobs and it is important to grow the Namibian economy.

I disagree. This monopolistic attitude is causing harm to our consumers and should not be allowed to continue. The Ministry of Trade and Industry must bow down to demands from large companies crying “infant protection” when they are neither infants nor protectors of the small and medium business owners in this country.

Access to adequate clean water is a right

(First Published in New Era Newspaper - 19 November 2014)

The past two weeks I have been facing a personal crisis at home. The water connection was cut off on 6 November and still has not been reconnected. At first, I felt like a politician slumming it out and showing I can manage for a day without clean, running water but was very soon brought back to reality. Without water you cannot flush your toilets, drink from a tap, shower or wash your hands. Everything is returned to a basic water access through a bucket or a drum. This made me think of the quote by Marcus Samuelsson, “Clean water and access to food are some of the simplest things that we can take for granted each and every day. In places like Africa, these can be some of the hardest resources to attain if you live in a rural area.”

I was upset with my water being off and contacted the City of Windhoek to give them a piece of my mind. They in turn pointed out that I have a rental contract with the price of water included, but that my landlady had not paid them for a few months. I contacted my landlady who stated that it was a billing problem as she paid via online banking and thus the error was the municipality. Well, back to the debtors department at City of Windhoek (CoW). After checking again, they insisted the error was with the landlady and not their billing system.

In the meantime, I was willing to pay the outstanding amount of around N$ 2,000 to get my water connected and would then just subtract it from the rent.

The landlady once again assured me that it was not necessary for me to pay as there was a billing error. However, I realised that this was not the truth as someone had been sent to deposit money on this account, but the CoW did not deem it sufficient to reconnect my water.

As a consumer, I was now being severely impacted by the landlady who as my service supplier was (and still is) not keeping her side of the agreement. Not only was I being deprived of an inherent right of the contract, I was also getting a lot of flak from my pregnant wife!

Looking at this as a consumer, what is my rights in a case like this where my water is caused to be cut-off by my landlord? The first thing to consider is that the issue is a civil case and is not governed by criminal law – which means I have no recourse to a police person to assist, but rather through the courts. Secondly, as the wronged party what cause of action can I take now to get my water reconnected, and thirdly how do I get compensated for the loss of water, time and the indignity of getting water from neighbours and friends?

As this is a civil case, neither party has recourse to the police – meaning that a difference on this or keeping back part of the rent is cause for getting the police involved. As the wronged party, I can decide to go to the CoW and pay the outstanding amount and then deduct this amount from the rental and submit the invoice for the water paid. The third part is the hardest, what should I be compensated for this wrong? I have looked into the matter and believe that any tenant has the right to deduct pro rata the amount of rent for each day the material aim of the contract is not kept by the landlord. In plain English, if I rent a property of N$ 6,000 a month, I may deduct an amount of 200 per day for the water being cut off due to negligence from the side of the landlord. In my case, the rent will be less by an amount of one-third (or more) as the water is still cut-off and the landlord insists that she has paid the water.
I would have just have preferred to have running water!

A happy customer is the best advertising you can get

(First Published in New Era Newspaper - 12 November 2014)

In everyone’s life there comes a time when you need “someone in your corner”. Being married has reminded me of how important it is to have support structures in place through friends and family – especially when you and the better half have different views or opinions on an issue. For me, after only a few months of marriage, it has been difficult lately because my work is very demanding on my time, as well as being a job in which I get to travel very frequently. This means that I have to make that extra effort to convince my wife that she is still the most important person in my life.

Last week I was fortunate enough to be a panellist at the Namibia Customer Service Awards and Conference hosted at the Polytechnic of Namibia. The topic for which I was invited to do a short presentation was “Customer Advocacy”. This term is used to refer to companies that focus on what is best for a customer. This might sound like just another gimmick, but is in fact a marketing technique which is used to encourage the sales person to better understand the customers’ needs and according to this philosophy, give advice to the customer even if it means less profit for the company. It also means finding the time of the day that the customer is most comfortable being called about a company’s products and services. In extreme cases it might even mean suggesting a competitors products as they can best suit the customers’ needs. For me, this sounds like customer heaven.

While on the panel, I also had an opportunity to discuss how that companies can measure this advocacy and its integration into their strategic goals through customer satisfaction, retention and profitability. A popular tool to measure this is the NetPromoter Score. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that can be used to measure the loyalty of a customer to a business. It can be used as an alternative to the traditional customer satisfaction research and many businesses who use it claims that it can be correlated with revenue growth. In other words, companies who use NPS state they have improved their profits through this process.

NPS is based on a direct question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. Customers that answer with a high score (with a 9 or a 10) are considered loyal promoters. Detractors are considered to be customers that answer with a score between 0 and 6. The NPS is now calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of customers that are Promoters. The primary purpose of this score is to evaluate the loyalty of a customer to a specific brand or company rather than their satisfaction with a specific product or transaction.

What is interesting for a customer advocate (such as myself) is that through this scoring, companies can identify customers who are willing promoters and sales persons of the company – without getting paid? This is becoming very important in the modern world where most of our decisions on products and brands are being made more and more often based on the recommendation of a friend rather than the advertising prepared by the sales and marketing departments of a company. The value of advice given by a friend (or trusted source such as this column), is becoming more and more important when buying decisions are made.

For companies this means that making a customer happy, and encouraging them to make their voice heard is good for the profit of a company. Never before has the bad experience of a customer been so quick to be shared with others as it is being done today through social media. Customers have now got the power to share their experiences, both good and bad, within a few seconds of that experience.

Carpe Diem to City of Windhoek

(First Published in New Era Newspaper - 29 October 2014)

There is a Latin saying, Carpe Diem, that means Seize the Day. It can also be translated that you should enjoy the moment. Having been a bachelor for more than a decade, I had never really taken this advice to literally in terms of material possessions. Now that I am married and planning for a family (again), I have had to re-evaluate my future plans and need to start seizing the day. This is important especially in light of me wanting to have a house with a big yard in anticipation of my soon to be born child.

Having been married before, and owning at least three properties during those ten years, I eagerly started the process of looking for a suitable house that I would also be able to afford. And then reality struck. I live in the City of Windhoek which as the second highest increase in house prices in the world. Yes, that’s the second highest INCREASE in property prices in the World.

At first it did not strike me that hard when I heard the prices of erven sold by the Municipality went over a million dollars. After all, the area in which these erven were auctioned in a very luxurious area and has access to most of the important services such as schools, university, gold course, access to the western bypass, etc. Thus I heard about the prices and just shrugged my shoulders.

Last week, I happened to go past a property I had owned near the Polytechnic of Namibia and I saw a person standing in the driveway. Out of curiosity, I approached the person and found he was the “new owner” having just bought the house some three months before. I politely enquired about the price and that’s when the reality of our house price increases hit me. The owner proudly informed me that he had purchased the house at a bargain compared to other houses in the area – a bargain meaning he paid only N$ 1,240,000. He considered over 1,2 million a bargain?

Having been a previous owner of the house, I sat down that night and contemplated what this price increase means for me compared to what it meant for me in 1997 when I had originally purchased the property. In 1997, I was a Managing Director of a multinational company and bought the house for a purchase price of N$ 260,000. At that time my salary was around N4 18,000 a month and I could comfortably afford the monthly payments. Comparing the price increase in the property I tried to calculate what my monthly salary would have to be for me to comfortably afford the house now.

Can you guess how much I would have to earn now in 2014 to afford the property? I figured I would need to earn a salary of just over N$ 83,000 to be able to live in a similar fashion to what I did in 1997. I am sure that you must realise by now my salary has in no way increased by the same amount that the house price did.

I will have to now look for a property more within my budget – and I am not sure I will even find such a property now. But of course, I must cease the day otherwise the house will just become more elusive in the future.

I now took another look at the erven that were auctioned by the City of Windhoek. The prices were originally listed as “upset” prices – meaning that was the minimum that the CoW wanted to get as a return of their investing in the sewerage, roads, and other services. In other words, the CoW wanted to make at least the same amount of money that they had spent on putting the services in with at least a little bit of profit.

Surprise, surprise. The CoW made more than triple the expected price (in other words for every N$ 400,00 they spent, they made a profit over and above the costs of around N$ 800,00). The CoW has responded to the citizens inquiries by saying it is not their fault as the auction caused the prices to reach these levels. No. The prices were driven up by a basic economic principle of supply versus demand. There are very few erven available compared to the number of people that want to purchase the erven, meaning that the supplier of erven can cause the the prices to be pushed up by NOT supplying enough erven to meet demand.

Thus, the CoW as the supplier of erven (or non-supplier if you ask me) has caused the prices to steeply increase because they control the supply side of the equation. In any country, this would be a case of anti-competitive behaviour and the authorities would react to prevent this situation and its negative impact on the consumer. I hope that this will be looked into by the relevant authorities and they do something about the situation before none of us can afford a house in this city.

My compliments to the CoW though, they have seen an opportunity to increase their revenue and they have certainly Seized the Day.

Saving money through recycling

(First Published in New Era Newspaper - 22 October 2014)

As a married man, I had my first difference with my wife last week. The argument was over a rather petty issue (taking out the rubbish – is it a man’s job?). This however started me thinking about rubbish and the ways in which we dispose of it. I look around Windhoek and I am always glad to state that I live in the cleanest city in Africa if not the world. However, there are small signs that as humans we are such a consumer throwaway society that we will find ourselves with so much waste we will not be able to dispose of it in the traditional way which is to bury it. I think the efforts being made by the City of Windhoek, together with various service providers, to get residents to separate the various types of rubbish so they can be recycled should be lauded.

As consumers, I believe we must throw our weight behind such efforts and encourage all our fellow housemates, neighbours and work colleagues to become involved in the “recycle culture”.

As I finished taking out the rubbish (Yes, it is the Man’s JOB), I noticed the high number of 2 litre plastic cold drink bottles that were in the garbage. When I was little, these were always a huge source of amusement as we made various objects from them. These included pot plant holders, candle stands and of course my favourite, holders for fireflies. This led me to thinking not only about recycling, but also “reusing”.

Homemade Mosquito Trap

Many of us in Namibia are plagued by mosquitos and flies around our houses. Often we as consumer will go and buy a product such as a zapper, a wall plug that kills them or even spend hours looking to kill that one mosquito in our ears. While search on the Internet, I came across this really easy way to make a Mosquito Trap. All you will need is an old 2 litre cold drink bottle, 1 cup of water, ¼ cup of brown sugar and a little yeast (around 1 gram).

To make you trap start by cutting the bottle in half. Boil the water and mix in the brown sugar while it is still hot. Let it cool for a while until it is about room temperature. Now that’s it cold, pour the sugar water mixture in the bottom half of the bottle. Add the yeast (less than a teaspoonful works). You do not need to mix the yeast in the sugar. Place the top half of the bottle (the funnel) upside down into the bottom half. You can use cellotape to tape them together if you want. Now wrap the bottle with something black and leave the top uncovered. You are ready to place your mosquito trap in an area away from your normal gathering place (for example outside in the garden, behind the kitchen door, etc.)

The yeast will create carbon dioxide that will attract the mosquitos. In addition, mosquitos are also drawn to the colour black – something to think about when going out at night.)

Remember to change the solution every two weeks for continuous control.

This same type of trap can be made for bees and wasps by putting in a more sugary mixture and no yeast. Something that can come in very handy when having childrens’ parties with lots of cold drinks around.