Cheap is Expensive

It's funny because Zambians know this, they say this and yet they don't heed their own warning. That's not actually true, often they justify buying something a little more expensive because they know it will last, like a plough from Zimbabwe instead of a locally made one. I on the other hand don't always remember how true that is. The rule is that if you want something cheap, find the cheapest model on the market and then buy at least one level up from that. I bought a small camera from Canada for here, it was $79.99 from Future Shop. When it does work, which isn't often it doesn't work well. It hasn't worked for about 1 month now and it's only a few months old.

Unfortunately, the Zambian government is no where near as smart as Zambians themselves. A good example is an intersection near my friends house. He lives in the richest area of Lusaka and I was driving there one day. I was supposed to turn left on Reedbuck Rd. but didn't see the intersection and flew through it at 50km/hr. When I turned around and made the turn I noticed that not only did I not see the intersection, but I didn't realize it was a 4-way stop. I didn't realize this because 2 of the stop signs had been stolen or fell over and hadn't been replaced. I said "That's going to cause an accident and the damage will be way more than the cost to replace those signs." Just after Christmas I heard a screech, the sound of glass breaking and then lots of yelling.



An SUV driven my a mzungu slammed into a minibus. Of course maybe only the mzungu was wearing a seatbelt, but fortunately there were only minor injuries. I looked at this and thought about how quickly a stop sign would have been replaced in Canada and how slowly, if ever it would be replaced here. The government saved a bit of money and its people lost a lot. Sometimes we don't realize how lucky we are in Canada.