In this blog, I am going to take you on a trip from China to Africa. The reason for this is as follows. My family and I were in the Netherlands for a week in early May. It was the week before Mother’s Day; we had beautiful spring weather, and it was good to be back. It has been a while now, since Mother’s Day, but I wanted to share this anyway. Mother’s Day is all about flowers. What’s better than giving flowers to mothers, to make them feel special?
When we were driving to the spring flower garden, Keukenhof, with the early summer sun shining in our faces, we heard a commercial on the radio urging you to buy flowers for your mother. For me, that was the icing on the cake. In the early summer sun, on my way to Keukenhof, together with my whole family, listening to a commercial about buying flowers for your mom. Imagine my astonishment when I realised that the commercial was actually not an advertisement for flowers, but merely a cheap attempt to hit the African entrepreneurs while they were down.
The scope of the commercial was to discourage people from buying African-grown flowers. They would have been harvested, processed, and transported under appalling conditions for the local population. Young mothers would have been working as slave labour; they would even have to work more than eight hours a day. Excuse me, but I’m wondering where the person who cobbled together this kind of nonsense has been living for the past few years?
That has nothing to do with the fact that we, as Van den Berg Roses, own a nursery in Kenya; that’s completely unrelated. But because we do, I know a thing or two how things are done in Africa, and that it is a far cry from the slave labour as outlined in the commercial.
Excuse me for taking you on this trip from China to Africa, but I couldn’t resist not mentioning this. I can’t believe how much nonsense people are able to spit out, apparently not hindered by any factual knowledge. Our people in Kenya profit from many benefits, which they couldn’t even dream of if we weren’t there: education, medical care, and social services that measure up to the ones in the Netherlands. All in proportion, of course, but that’s obvious; they don’t live in the Netherlands. By African standards, however, it is way better than the alternative.
You shouldn’t compare Africa and the Netherlands one-to-one. That’s like comparing apples and oranges. Sure, in Africa we don’t have all the extra days off as they have in the Netherlands. The country where most people take a week to finish work that could be done in three days. No-one would tolerate this outside the Netherlands.
The same applies to China. The people want to work; they want to put in long hours because hours are money. It’s all about money. Okay, in China, you sometimes have to slow them down, or they would work seven days a week for twelve hours a day. That’s not good either, so you make sure it doesn’t happen. But it’s nothing like the picture that emerges of African employees who are forced to work more than seven hours a day.
If it wasn’t for the foreign entrepreneurs in Africa, the bulk of the people would still be living at the same level as 1000 years ago. Look at Zimbabwe, for example; it was the most prosperous country in Africa for a long time, until the Westerners were thrown out and the locals went on with what they did for thousands of years: knocking each other’s brains out and making headlines with their swollen bellies every dry summer.
This might be a blunt remark, but while there are still people around at this very moment who think that team leaders in Africa are walking around with whips, then I really must dig my heels in.
Cok Harteveld, General Manager, Van den Berg Roses, China
