An Ideas Whose Time has Come: Entrepreneurialism has Cool

VICTOR HUGO once remarked: “You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.” Today entrepreneurship is such an idea.The triumph of entrepreneurship is driven by profound technological change. A trio of inventions—the personal computer, the mobile phone and the internet—is democratising entrepreneurship at a cracking pace. Today even cash-strapped innovators can reach markets that were once the prerogative of giant organisations.

The internet provides a cheap platform for entrepreneurs to build interactive businesses. Meg Whitman grew rich by developing an online marketplace, eBay, where people could buy and sell without ever meeting. An army of pyjama-clad bloggers has repeatedly outsmarted long-established newspapers on breaking stories. Automated news-collecting services such as RealClearPolitics and Memeorandum, using tiny amounts of capital, have established themselves as indispensable tools for news junkies. The development of “cloud computing” is giving small outfits yet more opportunity to enjoy the advantages of big organisations with none of the sunk costs. People running small businesses, whether they are in their own offices or in a hotel half-way round the world, can use personal computers or laptops to gain access to sophisticated business services.

The mobile phone has been almost as revolutionary. About 3.3 billion people, or half the world’s population, already have access to one. The technology has allowed entrepreneurs to break into what used to be one of the world’s most regulated markets, telecoms. And many developing countries have been able to leapfrog rich ones by going straight to mobile phones, cutting out landlines.

This has resulted in a cascade of entrepreneurship. Iqbal Quadir, a Bangladeshi who emigrated to America to become an investment banker and then a business academic, had a dream of bringing mobile phones to his homeland. He struck up a relationship with Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, which provides microfinance, to turn the dream into reality. If the bank was willing to lend women money to buy cows, why not mobile phones? Bangladesh now has 270,000 phone ladies who borrow money to buy specially designed mobile-phone kits equipped with long-lasting batteries, and sell time on their phones to local villagers. Grameen has become Bangladesh’s largest telecoms provider, with annual revenues of around $1 billion; and the entrepreneurial phone ladies have plugged their villages into the wider economy.

Thanks to the combination of touch-screen technology and ever faster wireless networks, the mobile phone is becoming the platform of choice for techno-entrepreneurs. Since July last year Apple has allowed third parties to post some 20,000 programs or applications on its “app store”, allowing phones to do anything from identifying the singer of a song on the radio to imitating the sound of flatulence. So far around 500m “apps” have been downloaded for about a dollar a time.

These developments have been reinforced by broad cultural changes that have brought entrepreneurialism into the mainstream. An activity that was once regarded as peripheral, perhaps even reprehensible, has become cool, celebrated by politicians and embraced by the rising generation. Britain’s Oxford University used to nurture one of the longest traditions of anti-entrepreneurial prejudice in the world. The dons valued “gentlemanly” subjects such as classics or philosophy over anything that smacked of “utility”. (“He gets degrees in making jam/at Liverpool and Birmingham,” went one popular ditty.) The students dreamed of careers in the civil service or the law rather than business, still less entrepreneurship. “How I hate that man,” was the writer C.S. Lewis’s tart comment on Lord Nuffield, his city’s greatest entrepreneur and his university’s most generous benefactor. Today Oxford has a thriving business school, the Saïd School, with a centre for entrepreneurship and innovation and a growing business park that tries to mix the university’s scientists with entrepreneurs. Oxford Entrepreneurs is one of the university’s most popular societies, with 3,600 student members and a record of creating about six start-ups a year.

No longer niche

The story of Oxford’s conversion to entrepreneurship is being repeated the world over as a growing number of respectable economists discover the new creed. For most of the post-war period entrepreneurs were all but banished from economics. Practitioners concentrated on the traditional factors of production—land, labour and capital—and on the price mechanism. Schumpeter was almost alone in arguing that the most vital competitive weapon was not lower prices but new ideas. Today entrepreneurship is very much part of economics. Economists have realised that, in a knowledge-based economy, entrepreneurs play a central role in creating new companies, commercialising new ideas and, just as importantly, engaging in sustained experiments in what works and what does not.

William Baumol has put entrepreneurs at the centre of his theory of growth. Paul Romer, of Stanford University, argues that “economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable…[It] springs from better recipes, not just more cooking.” Edmund Phelps, a Nobel prize-winner, argues that attitudes to entrepreneurship have a big impact on economic growth. Another reason for entrepreneurship becoming mainstream is that the social contract between big companies and their employees has been broken. Under managed capitalism, big companies offered long-term security in return for unflinching loyalty. But from the 1980s onwards, first in America and then in other advanced economies, big companies began slimming their workforces. This made a huge difference to people’s experience at the workplace. In the 1960s workers had had an average of four different employers by the time they reached 65. Today they have had eight by the time they are 30. People’s attitudes to security and risk also changed. If a job in a big organisation can so easily disappear, it seems less attractive. Better to create your own. Yet another reason for the mainstreaming of entrepreneurship is that so many institutions have given it their support.

In 1998 HBS made entrepreneurship one of the foundation stones of business education, partly in response to demand from students. The school’s Arthur Rock Centre for Entrepreneurship now employs over 30 professors. Between 1999 and 2003 the number of endowed chairs in entrepreneurship in America grew from 237 to 406 and in the rest of the world from 271 to 536. The media have also played a part. “Dragons’ Den”, a television programme featuring entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to businesspeople in order to attract venture capital, is shown in 12 countries. “The Apprentice”, a programme that had Donald Trump looking for a protégé, has produced numerous spin-offs. Even China’s state-owned Central Television has a show about entrepreneurs pitching ideas to try to win $1.3m in seed money. A welcome mat for businessThe world’s governments are now competing to see who can create the most pro-business environment. In 2003 the World Bank began to publish an annual report called Doing Business, rating countries for their business-friendliness by measuring things like business regulations, property rights and access to credit. It demonstrated with a wealth of data that economic prosperity is closely correlated with a pro-business environment.

This might sound obvious.

But Doing Business did two things that were not quite so obvious: it put precise numbers on things that people had known about only vaguely, and it allowed citizens and investors to compare their country with 180 others. This “naming and shaming” caused countries to compete fiercely to improve their position in the World Bank’s rankings. Since 2004 various countries have brought in more than 1,000 reforms. Three of the top reformers in 2007-08 were African—Senegal, Burkina Faso and Botswana. Saudi Arabia too has made a lot of progress. Doing Business is also encouraging countries to learn from each other.Most rich countries are working all the time to make it easier to start new businesses. In Canada, for example, it is now possible to start a business with just one procedure. But the list of top reformers includes all sorts of unexpected places, and the range of reforms that have been undertaken is impressive. India has concentrated on technology, for example, introducing electronic registration for businesses; China has put a great deal of effort into improving access to credit. Robert Litan, of the Kauffman Foundation, suggests that the World Bank may have done more good by compiling Doing Business than by lending much of the money that it has.

Global Heroes: entreprising genie youths can learn.

Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge.

IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well. Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship.

The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel.

The company that arranged the oversubscribed conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.

A disproportionate number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard. This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree going right back to Schumpeter. Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.

Five myths

Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent.

The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos in their garrets. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters.

A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business. The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19. But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.

The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money. But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.

The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.

The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.

Big can be beautiful too

But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.

But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.

Misfortune and fortune

The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results? For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow.

As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways. Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years. There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important.

Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition. economist.com

Understanding the Barotseland Question..........What Youths Need to Learn.

By Sishuwa Sishuwa
ONE of the most interminable, touchy and persistent challenges that has troubled successive Zambian governments has been the Barotseland question. The Barotseland question has invoked deep nationalist sentiments in some Zambians who have viewed those talking of a Barotse (or Bulozi) nation as unpatriotic citizens who deserve to be locked up for treason. For others, especially those located in the state or close to the government of the day, demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement have been interpreted as the work of a few misguided people who want to bring about anarchy and disunity to our constitutional order based on a unitary state.

The political temperature in Barotseland reached scorching levels on January 14 2011 when demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement of 1964 led by the Barotse Freedom Movement (BFM), Linyungandambo, Movement for Restoration of the Barotseland Agreement (MOREMA) and the Barotse Patriotic Front (BPF) (all unregistered or illegal organizations) led to a peaceful rally in Mongu that was brutally suppressed by security forces of the Rupiah Banda administration, resulting in the death of two people and the imprisonment of several others. The violent manner in which the government cracked down on the protesters was unprecedented.

As part of his campaign message, then opposition PF leader and now President Michael Sata promised to resolve the Barotseland question if elected. True to his word, President Sata has begun addressing the Barotse challenge. Recently, the government made available and publicised the Barotseland Agreement of 1964 as a starting point for discussions. It is the first time this has been done by any sitting government. Previous successive governments, most notably the Banda administration, not only criminalised debate over the Barotseland issue but also treated the Agreement as a top, classified document to be kept away from the public eye. President Sata latest stance demonstrates the current government's preparedness to depart from that incorrect historical path, confront the challenge head-on and find a lasting and amicable political solution to the Barotseland question as any delay may have far-reaching repercussions on the territorial integrity of the country we call Zambia.

Dialogue should be based on knowledge and such an approach enables both parties to come to the negotiating table with informed perspectives. But what really is the Barotseland Agreement? How was it abrogated? And how can the protracted standoff over the Barotseland Agreement question best be resolved? A reader of the column recently shared their take on this issue and I reproduce the writer's opinion, which I share, with very minor alterations, below.

What is the Barotseland Agreement?
The good citizen writes: "Barotseland is not a fiction or an imaginary political community, inconsistent with the modern state of Zambia. Barotseland has a legal and special status in Zambian political history. It enjoyed the status of a Protectorate during British colonial rule in its own right and as part of the Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia. In various colonial treaties and Orders in Council Barotseland was acknowledged as a separate nation-state. Specifically, the Moncton Commission of 1960 reaffirmed the special status of Barotseland within Northern Rhodesia. Section 57 and 80 of the Northern Rhodesia Order in Council of 1962 and section 59 and 112 of the Self-Governing Constitution of Northern Rhodesia of 1963 affirmed Barotseland as a separate state within Northern Rhodesia.

It was ‘a protectorate within a protectorate.' To be sure, the Zambia Independence Act and the Zambia Independence Order of 1964 gave recognition to the Barotseland Agreement of 1964.
Prior to Zambia's independence the position of Barotseland had to be considered. As a protectorate of the British Crown, Barotseland had an option to be part of an independent Zambia or to remain a British Protectorate and seek its own independence separately. Barotseland at the time had status similar to the British High Commission Territories of Bechuanaland, Basutholand and Swaziland (present-day Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland).

The people of Barotseland chose to be part of an independent unitary Zambia on condition that they retained some degree of autonomy and were in charge of local government affairs based on their traditional and customary law as they had done for generations. It was agreed at the London Conference held on 16 April 1964 that the Litunga of Barotseland will continue to have power to make laws for Barotseland in relation to local government, native treasury, local taxation, native authorities, traditional and customary matters, native courts, land and natural resources, game conservation and local festivals, among others.

Thus the Barotseland Agreement of 1964 signed by first President Kenneth Kaunda on behalf of the Northern Rhodesia Government, the Litunga of Barotseland Sir Mwanawina Lewanika III on behalf of the people of Barotseland and Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth and Colonial Relations and representing Her Majesty's Government as a witness to the settlement, did not create a separate state of Barotseland but rather reaffirmed its semi-autonomous status in a unitary state of Zambia.

The abrogation of the Barotseland Agreement
In 1965 the independent government of Zambia unilaterally abrogated terms of the Barotseland Agreement by introducing the Local Government Act 1965 which effectively abolished the Barotse Government, Barotse Native Authorities, the Barotse Native Courts and the Barotse Native Treasury and Barotseland was to be administered through a uniform local government system applied throughout the country. The Chiefs Act was introduced the same year and it permitted the President of Zambia to recognise or withdraw recognition from any Chief in the country at will, in the interest of national unity and order, leading to widespread suspicions in Barotseland that the Act was targeted at the Litunga.

In 1969, the Government organised a national referendum to determine if the Barotseland Agreement should be removed from the constitution or terminated. The people of Western Province overwhelmingly voted ‘No' in the Referendum but the rest of the other Provinces voted Yes. Barotseans argued that it was wrong for the Government to extend the referendum to the whole country on a matter that concerned them, adding that the referendum should have just been restricted to the affected Province. In the aftermath of the referendum, the Government took to Parliament the Constitutional Amendment Act of 1969, which effectively terminated the Barotseland Agreement of 1964. The same year, the Government renamed Barotseland as Western Province and declared that all provinces were to be treated the same.

The rights reserved for the Litunga and his Council and the people of Barotseland were tampered with as they no longer had the institutions to exercise local self-government. This was interpreted in Barotseland as another attempt to further undermine the semi-autonomous status of Barotseland and vest all land in the President of the Republic of Zambia. Agitation and resentment over government actions regarding the abrogation of the Barotseland Agreement are not new. They were voiced in 1968, 1969 and 1970 with some Lozi traditionalists led by Litunga Mbikusita Lewanika demanding restoration of the provisions of the Agreement or they would seek secession. In 1993, under the Frederick Chiluba Government demands were again made for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement.

But the authorities at the time dismissed the demands and even threatened to arrest and detain all those involved, including Litunga Ilute Yeta for high treason. President Chiluba declared then that Zambia was a unitary state and as such indivisible, therefore no part of it would be allowed to break away. The recent demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement of 1964 led by BFM, Linyungandambo, MOREMA and the BPF should thus be understood in their right context.
They are just a continuation of the work of other similar organisations that suffered government reprisals and harassment. For example, the Barotse Patriotic Front (BPF) was banned and its leader placed in detention for advocating secession in the late 1990s. What is different about the new formations is that they are much more radical and demand immediate resolution of the impasse.

The motive force that led to the current demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement was the apparent refusal by the National Constitutional Conference (NCC) to incorporate submissions by the Barotse Royal Establishment to recognize the status of Barotseland in the new Constitution and implement the provisions the Barotseland Agreement 1964. The submissions by the Barotse Royal Establishment to the NCC in 2010 were dismissed outright as lacking merit in a unitary state. It was this which provoked anger by sections of the Barotse ‘nation' that there is need to engage in dialogue on the Barotseland Agreement as it was an important part of the first independence constitution.

Since this agitation began there have been a lot of commentaries from different sections of our community on the merits and demerits of restoring the Barotseland Agreement. One group of people dismiss the demand as tribal, parochial and going against the tenets of a unitary state and the national motto of ‘One Zambia, One Nation.' Another group accuses those who advocate the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement as secessionists, anarchists who should be arrested, charged with treason and possibly hanged. While others, have simply trivialized the demands as unworkable, as Barotseland cannot survive without Zambia, ‘since it is just a sandy place.'

There are those who feel that advocates of the Barotseland Agreement want a separate state which will incorporate all the areas which originally fell under Litunga's dominion in pre-colonial times."
So, good citizen, ‘what should be the way forward?', I put it to my intelligent friend.

Resolving the Barotseland Question

WE continue with last week's interrogation of the Barotseland question. What then should be the way forward? First, demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement cannot be said to be tantamount to secession. To the best of my knowledge the Barotseland Agreement 1964 was never repealed nor revoked. The point is that the central authorities in Lusaka unilaterally abrogated the terms of a legal document that was part of the Zambian constitution. The Government of the Republic of Zambia has an obligation to explain what happened to the Barotseland Agreement 1964.

Why were those terms abrogated? Who was consulted when those changes were being made and to what extent was there consensus on the matter? There is no doubt that if there was consultation and consensus regarding changes to the Barotseland Agreement 1964 and the status of Barotseland post-independence, there would not be demands for its restoration today.

Second, it is most irresponsible for national level politicians to dismiss the demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement 1964 as the work of young, misguided individuals who want to bring about disunity and anarchy in the country. While the methods being used by the advocates of the Barotseland Agreement 1964 may not be acceptable to everyone, it is important to recognize that they are raising legitimate demands that need to be addressed by the Government of the Republic of Zambia. The hardening of positions in Lusaka, the criminalization of debate and the demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement will only drive the resistance underground and escalate into a fully-fledged armed conflict.

Indeed, what successive Governments have found unacceptable is the demand for secession by the advocates of the Barotseland Agreement on account that the Government has not only unilaterally abrogated its provisions, but has consistently refused to listen to any voices on this matter and lately ensured that there is no mention of Barotseland in the new Constitution of Zambia. The events of January 14, 2011 where security forces brutally suppressed the holding of a peaceful public rally on the Barotseland Agreement question resulting in the death of two people and injuries of several others were not only unfortunate but were avoidable.

Third, it is important to interrogate how widespread the demands for secession are in Barotseland. It would be politically naïve to assume that simply because there are few people who are making the demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement, there is no consensus on the issue in the province. It would also be politically costly for the Government to use brute force in suppressing the demands as that will only radicalize the conflict. The starting point should be to recognize that the people of Barotseland have a legitimate right to make the demands for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement, including the right to secede from Zambia. However, this should be done through democratic channels.

Fourth, the government of the Republic of Zambia should not misrepresent history and misinform the Zambian people about the true status of Barotseland. Reading the many commentaries that have appeared in our media in recent months, an impression created is that those making demands for an independent Barotse nation are mad, misguided and bent on creating disunity in this peaceful country of Zambia. Senior government politicians have been quoted as saying that what the advocates of the Barotseland Agreement are demanding is no tenable and in any case there is no way Barotseland can be treated differently from other parts of the country. This is a distortion of historical facts.

Barotseland and Northern Rhodesia proceeded to independence based on a legal agreement. That legal agreement termed the Barotseland Agreement was the product of negotiated settlement between the people of Barotseland, Northern Rhodesia and the British Government. The terms of that Agreement are therefore important for the sustainability of the union between Barotseland and Zambia. It was envisaged in the Barotseland Agreement 1964 that in case of disputes the Courts of Zambia would adjudicate between the parties.

Fifth, the demands by the people of Barotseland for the restoration of the Barotseland Agreement or to secede from Zambia are not an isolated case in international law.
Although no country in the world provides for a state's right to secede in its national constitution except Ethiopia, there are many similar cases where nations came together and when the purpose for which they came together were no longer in force they sought to break away. Yugoslavia was brought together as an amalgamation of several small states dominated by Serbia. The Soviet Union was also a federation of several states. When the purpose for which the coming together was no longer justified they broke up, sometimes after prolonged military conflict.

Kosovo which has been dominated by Serbia as its autonomous province is perhaps the best example that can be compared to Barotseland in Zambia. No amount of resistance from Serbia was enough to prevent the unilateral independence by Kosovo in 2009. Other examples include South Sudan and Quebec, Canada's second most populous and economically influential province, after Ontario. South Sudan recently declared its independence from mainland Sudan after a democratic referendum was held. After several years of demands for secession from mainland Canada, which included two unsuccessful referendums for independence in 1980 and 1995, the Canadian House of Commons finally passed a historic motion in 2006 that recognises Quebec as a nation within a united Canada. However, there are alternative options that the Government of Zambia can pursue that do not border on secession. These include recognising the fact that Zambia, like the United Republic of Tanzania, is a unitary state and that national heritage should be reflected in the constitution.

Valuable lessons can be drawn, for example, on how Tanzania and Zanzibar, whose union was also promulgated in 1964, have managed to hold on, promote national unity and avoid the path that our own union has taken. However, there has to be willingness on the part of the Government of Zambia to take responsibility and face this question head-on, inspired by two obvious questions: ‘what is the problem?', and ‘how can that problem best be resolved in a manner that enhances national unity and puts this matter to rest?' Furthermore and in order to avoid any potential mix-up, misinterpretation and strife, the reported plans by the Government of Zambia to relocate certain districts from Western to other Provinces should be shelved until the Barotseland question is amicably resolved.

National politicians and party leaders should exercise their minds over the Barotseland question. The question requires a political solution and it is imperative to engage in dialogue with all the protagonists over the issue. Surely, 47 years after independence perceptions about Lozi nationalism have slightly changed. Even perceptions about the Lozi monarchy has fundamentally changed and notions of modern democratic norms are now prevalent in the minds of most inhabitants of Barotseland. However, it is up to the people of that area to democratically choose what form of government they desire, including to continue being part of Zambia or to secede. Nationalist sentiments can be very strong and pose potent mobilizing forces against perceived dominant and exploitative forces.

To be sure there are three positions on the Barotseland question: to remain as part of a unitary state of Zambia, to restore Barotseland Agreement so as to ensure more regional autonomy, albeit in a traditional authority sense, or to completely secede. These positions are not mutually exclusive. They are intertwined and have wider implications on the relationship between modern and traditional jurisprudence. To allow more autonomy to Barotseland undermines the political authority of the Zambian state and may encourage other regions to make similar demands. For example, the Barotseland Agreement provides for institutions such as a Barotse National Government, Barotse National Council (parliament), Barotse Native Courts and Barotse Native Treasury all sovereign institutions that will have implications on the sovereignty of Zambia and its unitary constitution. The question is why did the central government at the time not deal with these issues in a more transparent and democratic way, than hope that somehow they will die away with the passage of time?

The other curious irony is that Barotseland throughout colonial history was administered as part of Northern Rhodesia. The 1911 Order in Council that amalgamated North-Eastern Rhodesia with North-Western Rhodesia to create the colonial state of Northern Rhodesia conferred protectorate status to both Northern Rhodesia and to Barotseland, and yet Barotseland was administered as part of Northern Rhodesia. A poor resolution of the crisis in Barotseland has serious political implications for the Zambian state, Zambian politics and the viability of national unity. What is needed is a democratic resolution of the Barotseland Question that should involve the following: convening of a conference on the Barotseland Question in Barotseland to assess the state of the debate and to narrow the areas of contention; organizing a national referendum within Barotseland to ascertain whether the people would want to secede or remain part of a unitary Zambia; recognition of all political forces and civil society organisations that are engaged in the Barotseland issue and promotion of a mature debate about the Barotseland issue to avoid it escalating into regionalism, xenophobia and victimization of individuals and groups from that region.

Engaging Zambia's school drop-outs

Changing the way people engage with education has become the life's work for Zambian teacher and entrepreneur Rozious Siatwambo. He is the founder of the Great North Road Academy, an independent school in Zambia's capital Lusaka. The school encourages "drop-outs" of any age to return to education. Projectors are installed in classrooms to encourage interactive learning and students unable to attend classes can enrol in distance learning at home through DVDs and CDs recorded at the school.

Mr Siatwambo had a fairly conventional start in education - he gained a degree in education from the University of Zambia but after graduating he decided that he was not going to follow his peers.
"I didn't want to join the government. I didn't want to join anywhere. So what I had to do is, I had to now search my heart, search what I'd learnt at the university and then I started using those skills to come up with something," he told the BBC's series African Dream. With his passion for education and determination to be his own boss, he identified a gap in the independent school market.

"If you look at most of these private schools, most of them are not run by teachers, most of them are just business persons, so I wanted to come up with something different which would have an education attached."

'Growing of ideas'

Mr Siatwambo reached out to the public to sell his idea.
"I started printing some flyers and also calling some people and I remember during the initial stages, sometimes I'd leave the office, I'd go on the streets," he told the BBC's Mutuna Chanda.
For Mr Siatwambo it is these early stages and the "growing of ideas" which enabled him to visualise how the school would work and how it would stand out from other independent schools.
"We started looking at where we can come out different from these other schools and we started bringing in new ideas such as modernising our system, ensuring that even those who didn't come here got the best services they could ever get. And this is what has seen rise us to this level," he said.

However, not many people seemed to have much faith in his plans. He says he wrote to about 50 banks and organisations and received only rejections. But he describes this as an important lesson. "I learned that you don't need to depend on others or even other organisations. You can still do it on your own. I find it sometimes cumbersome where I have to do all this paperwork so I would rather stand on my own." He turned to friends who backed him to the tune of $15,000 (£9,700). This plus his own personal funds enabled him to put some money behind his idea.
Within the first month the school had enrolled more than 30 pupils. Today it has around 700 pupils and more than 30 employees.

Hijacked books

So given the large injection of capital he had, what is his response to those who might say they do not have the same financial advantages? Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version"You don't start a business with money, you start with an idea. And that idea it has to be grown," he says. "So the idea is the one that is going to lead you to where money is. I had to grow that idea. Upon growing that idea, that's when my brain would tell me to say now can you source some money to fill the gaps. "Running a business doesn't actually take money, it is the brain."

Mr Siatwambo has now turned his attentions to producing exam guides. In 2006 he had the idea for Exams Made Easy and went about getting it published. To keep his costs low, he had the book published in China. "After printing quite a number of copies [50,000] let me just say it was quite challenging because locally it was quite expensive to have a book printed," he says. "There was one major challenge I faced when the books were being shipped to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," he remembers.

"The ship that was carrying the books had been hijacked in Somalia and you can imagine there were only two weeks before the launch and I'd invited all the people, ministers and other people, so now what was I going to do? Abandon the launch? I just went ahead with the launch through just a few copies that I'd printed locally." He now has plans to build on the book and to expand his Great North Road Academy. "I have now converted the book into a DVD. My intention is to expand the school into a university in the next three or four years. "I've already acquired some land. We wanted to construct a complex which will house a primary school, a secondary school and also a university. Now we are just looking at financiers to finance the work. Hopefully by 2015 all of the structures will be in place." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16635975