Heavy construction in Africa is not for sissies. A myriad of risks have to be dealt with, but it all boils down to three objectives: on time; on budget and on specification.
The route to success is dependent on three more critical aspects for the contractor: good people, good equipment and positive cash flow.
Getting the ‘Three by Three’’ right in Africa’s remotest locations means getting to grips with the risks that can include gun toting taxmen; more of that later.
Take the people: it takes a special breed to leave family behind and spend one to two years away from home, living in basic conditions, working on hot, wet and humid sites where communication is scarce and disease lies in wait.
Many sites are manned by a multicultural workforce. Providing traditional foods, ethnic, cultural and religious harmony is essential, and it happens all over Africa every day.
It’s the mosquitoes that get our people though – much of Africa is stricken by malaria and the good people we send to sites sometimes come home sick. It never really leaves your body and repeat infections are common. No amount of spraying work sites, medication, nets, creams, counseling and behavioral discipline guarantees immunity. In addition, if you are HIV positive, malaria is a death sentence – we voluntarily screened our workforce for HIV. The counseling was the tough part. Medical evacuation in severe malaria cases, and for other life threatening ailments, is a critical service that gives peace of mind to families back home. It’s the people that make for successful projects – mind the mozzies!
That said, construction leaders in Africa are a special breed and relish the exotic destinations they call home for a year or two. They love the freedom to operate, the responsibility they have and the life-changing challenges they experience daily.
Border posts are also a problem. Getting equipment across Africa is tough. No amount of planning and preparation is enough; you have to have the right paperwork and physically shepherd heavy plant equipment through Africa.
In my years in African infrastructure, getting plants to site and getting it home again without losing time, or being asked to pay exorbitant unofficial border duties, was rare. Ports can also simply let goods lie for weeks or even months, which piles stress onto projects.
Transport routes become toll roads as communities set up roadblocks and press for toll fees to allow heavy equipment to pass. Building a power line in Nigeria – a nightmare as the line passed through many communities, each of whom was promised work by the elders – meaning we had to divvy it all up and employ a military guard for each pylon to prevent sabotage.
We even hired nearby mobile police or ‘Mopol’ to ensure people and equipment got to the sites.
It’s a tricky situation which forces you to manage this risk; avoid compromising good governance, yet keeping the project moving.
Avoid all of the above and the taxman can still get you on cash flow and margin. Onerous tax regimes are fueled by hungry economies, fiefdoms masquerading as tax collection centers, corruption and western aid. Efficient tax collection systems are developed to lessen their future aid burden – a costly recipe for great creativity and duress.
No amount of technical competence, good governance, good people and good equipment on site can prevent the unexpected!
In the early years, in one large country struggling to emerge from its war-torn past, where we constructed many successful projects, the tax base was the primary source of regional government income. The published national tax code was the easy part – it’s the governor or taxman who you had to be wary of! The tax assessors would arrive in military trucks, with AK47s, to encourage payment of some creative assessments of the PAYE and company tax. Needless to say, we learned how to deal with this, never paid under duress, but tax clearance can run for years after the jobs were built and that’s an unexpected cost to the company.
Building in Africa? Sounds easy? If you are looking for rewarding challenges, seeing the world, excitement, personal growth and building something permanent –
try it!

Beware Of Taxmen Carrying AK47s

From the heart of the Lower Zambezi National Park hundreds of miles from a town or on the streets of Lusaka, the name Mark O’Donnell is as common in Zambia as the Victoria Falls or Mosi Beer. On the streets they call him the Mall Man; the Zambian who made his fortune building places to stay and shop. In business, he is known as a ruthless strategist who wants to make money and cannot make it fast enough.
“Zambia is a small market but it’s a growing one, at six to seven percent a year, for the past 14 years. The economy of the country has grown much bigger. We’ve been fortunate to make investments when the time was appropriate… we just wanted to build a shopping mall,” says O’Donnell.
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O’Donnell is a born and bred Zambian and has walked a meandering path to riches.  At 18, O’Donnell was selling auto parts for someone else. But he dreamed of being an entrepreneur. Times were tough in the 1980s, when private money struggled in a socialist state run under tight regulations. Strangely, at a time when there was little to buy, he thought that malls could be just what Zambia needed.
“It was very difficult to do anything in Zambia. Ninety percent of the country was controlled by the state. You would drive around in Lusaka and all you would see were queues of people lining up to buy whatever commodities were in the stores. There were a lot of hardships,” he says.
This hardship led to riots and ushered out the 27 years of power for Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda and its policy of control. Frederick Chiluba led his Movement for Multiparty Democracy in the elections in 1991 on a ticket of free enterprise. Despite the freeing of the economy for private business, things got worse for O’Donnell. Private business was shrinking by the day.
“In the 1990s, business was pretty bleak. We were just plain contractors at that point, and we were just trying to find work. It was almost impossible to get regular types of work, so we had to be innovative. We had to figure out how we were going to make projects. So we went and designed our own projects,” he says.
O’Donnell decided to build a mall to keep his business running. Despite his fears, the Arcades Shopping Centre was built in 2003 and brought in a number of South African franchises, putting Zambia on the map for investment.
“Many people wondered why we were building a shopping mall when the market seemed like it was struggling,” he says.
It brought fame to the farthest reaches of the country, even to the far flung bush of the Lower Zambezi National Park. Hundreds of kilometers away, Joshua Chizuwa, who has been a game ranger for more than 40 years, has heard of him.
“I used to work as a construction worker for him during breaks from the bush a long time ago. O’Donnell was as a hard businessman, ruthless in his deals. I have seen his buildings rise and Lusaka has grown from his ventures. He’s changed the face of Lusaka,” says Chizuwa.
According to Trevor Simumba, a Zambian-born managing director of the Sub-Saharan Consulting Group, within Lusaka O’Donnell is regarded as a progressive businessman who saw the liberalization policies of the MMD in the nineties as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
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“He was very helpful to me when I was starting my career in the consulting field. At one point during a very difficult career transition, Mark said to me ‘Trevor it is always darkest before dawn’. This simple but profound statement helped me through and I always tell myself that whenever I face a challenge. Zambia is privileged to have Mark doing his business in Zambia. We need more role models like this in business in Zambia,” says Simumba.
O’Donnell also went into the hotel industry. It was a failed game lodge that saw O’Donnell go big. He negotiated a deal with Africa’s largest hotel group, Protea Hotels, a chain that has been targeted by Marriott International.
The first hotel O’Donnell built was in Chingola, in northern Zambia’s rich Copperbelt Province. He says it was a disaster.
“We opened it in the same week that Anglo American pulled out of Zambia. It wasn’t the best start to a hotel chain. There was zero occupancy for a couple of years,” he says.
It has taken 13 years of fighting back to expand seven more hotels. He is currently building his eighth in Lusaka, next door to his mall.
As the largest owner of hotels in Zambia it makes sense that O’Donnell wants tourism to boom. Until recently, he has been critical of the government’s efforts to encourage visitors. Tourism currently accounts for a mere 2% of Zambia’s gross domestic product. In August, the government announced a turnaround strategy to increase this to 7% in line with neighboring Zimbabwe. It has won over O’Donnell.
“You are talking about an industry that needs to double in size over the next five to 10 years. Our current arrivals are about 900,000 a year. If we take out non-tourist visits, we are probably looking at 300,000 tourists. I think what we would like to see that number grow to about 600,000 high spending visitors. We need to increase the visit to arrivals in Zambia. That’s our first priority. To raise Zambia’s profile in the key source markets and increase interest to come into Zambia either through leisure tourism or for business travel. Certainly both components have interest,” says O’Donnell.
Tourism in Zambia is difficult. O’Donnell says a ban on Zambian aircraft by the European Union (EU) has discouraged North Americans and Europeans.
“The agents won’t book internal flights due to insurance reasons. It’s purely to do with some technicalities that the EU won’t deal with, with our civil aviation authorities,” he says.
But his greatest challenge lies with Zambia’s marketing. According to O’Donnell, 60% of wealthy foreigners in North America, Asia and Europe have never heard of Zambia.
“Our customers demand a high quality sort of product. Just because this is Africa it doesn’t mean you can’t offer top class products to the market. Zambia is generally unspoilt, an environment untouched by commercialization. In some places in Africa you would find 20 minibuses around a lion, this doesn’t happen in Zambia. You can’t compare what we have with London and New York, but you have something different,” he says.
In a city that was little more than dirt roads, O’Donnell had a dream that many struggled to envision. Where people queued for hours to get their hands on commodities he saw malls with refrigerators. Today, O’Donnell’s buildings run alongside tarred roads and Zambians are eager to see what his next dream will be.

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Beware Of Taxmen Carrying AK47s

The Mall King And His New Toys