Word: spares
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hundreds of government vehicles sit abandoned in a parking lot. Some are wrecks, but many others are almost new, missing only a clutch plate or a windshield. Desperately short of foreign exchange, the government of President Kaunda prefers to import new vehicles through aid programs rather than buy the spare parts necessary to repair the old ones. In Zambia and Tanzania, locomotives badly needed to haul copper and agricultural produce sit on railroad sidings because no one can fix their hydraulic-brake systems...
...life. They now take the form of a carton of razor blades, a case of Scotch or the latest in digital watches. Smugglers make a killing in African marketplaces. Recently police raided a privately owned store along Pugu Road in Dar es Salaam and found a cache of spare vehicle parts large enough to fill the cargo hold of a ship. Says former Tanzanian Police Chief Ken Flood: "Africa has always attracted con men and carpetbaggers. But they were almost always whites from Europe. Now the blacks themselves have learned the game...
...Tanzania's key export crops (coffee, cotton, tea, pyrethrum and sisal) is 40% lower than it was in 1970. The manufacturing sector, which was also taken over by the state, has fared no better. Mainly because of a lack of foreign exchange to buy raw materials and spare parts, many factories are now operating at less than 20% of capacity. That has sparked a vicious circle of economic decline. Without consumer goods to buy, farmers produce only enough food for themselves, which in turn means even less foreign exchange to keep Tanzanian factories running. Says Venance Chaka, a Himo...
...have convinced ourselves that children don't die anymore, not in the latter half of the 20th century, not in the United States of America, and certainly not in the suburbs." But of course they do, as Journalist and Novelist Frank Deford piercingly recounts in this spare and vivid eulogy to his daughter Alexandra, "Alex," who died in 1980 of cystic fibrosis...
...HISTORY-AT-HOME-IN YOUR SPARE TIME VIDEO...