HABARI COMMENTARY
Tales from Another Planet

By PATRICK L. THIMANGU in St. Louis
Posted on July 18

By now most of us have seen the intergalactic dispatches seeping from Mbali, a small republic in the newly discovered planet of Kula Wazi, where a human tribe thought to have been long extinct is alive and struggling with an Earthly type of capitalism.

A tale from Mbali that's gaining lots of currency is the one about the tribulations of the Sisi clan, which owns Yetu Cooperative Factory, a plant that suffered horrendous losses for decades but has huge potential to become the No. 1 supplier of clean air to polluted Earth. The clan recently awarded Bunge Unlimited a five-year contract to manage the factory, with hopes of a turnaround.

Bunge, a Mbali company, won the Yetu Co-op contract hands down in a highly competitive bidding process, after promising the Sisi Clan it had the acumen to do the job and ability to eradicate mismanagement and rampant theft that had almost killed Yetu Co-op. The clan has a unique way of doing things, in which its members select the best bidder for a contract by secret ballot, but once a bidder is selected the clan allows the company to write its own rules about how to run the factory.

Of worthy note is the optimism and positive spirit of the Sisi clan, unlike us Earthly beings, who have become so jaded by the massacres, crimes and greed in our midst. Not that the clan has not seen its share of suffering, first from alien invaders from our very own planet and then by its own members. But still, Sisians wake up every day believing that things will be better than yesterday.

With that optimism, the Sisians met strange requirements that Bunge sought to run Yetu Co-op. Among the demands, the management company asked for rights to quadruple salaries of its own executives, extract funds to buy private rockets for the managers, and pay for healthcare costs of their families and concubines, from the diminished Yetu Co-op coffers. The Bunge executives, who also demanded exemption from paying taxes like their bosses, the Sisians, said they sought the perks so they wouldn't have to steal from Yetu Co-op.

While Yetu Co-op didn't really have the resources, Sisians agreed to Bunge’s demands without a whimper, because Yetu Co-op really is a viable enterprise. Bunge's bizarre promise that it could somehow borrow more money from Big Nane, the huge Earth-based conglomerate, to finance Yetu Co-op operations -- without affecting shareholders -- might have helped sway the clan.

The latest reports now coming from Mbali are that Yetu Co-op is still limping along at quarter-capacity and piling on more debt, which the children of future Sisians will have to repay. Meanwhile the Bunge managers, who rarely show up for work have become fat cats and have bought personal rockets that cannot really fly in Mbali because of inadequate air space in the alien nation. It appears stealing time from an employer or getting paid to do nothing is not considered corruption in Mbali, because Sisians are not really complaining.

Although all the news coming from Mbali sounds bad, we must all remain as hopeful as our brethren the Sisians and have faith in their reinvigorated system of hiring new managers every five years. The Bunge contract is up in a couple of years, and there's a big rumor that Sisians are likely to look for new partners to run Yetu Co-op.


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