Lelo Nxumalo

If you have been following Zimbabwean politics you might be aware of the debt overhang impeding Zimbabwe's infrastructure and human capital investments. Some US$8bn (mostly arrears) is owed to private creditors and IFIs including the World Bank, and the AfDB. The MinFin, Mr. Biti has set out a plan to address this crippling debt and set Zimbabwe on a path to sustainable growth. The plan includes the removal of the illegal sanctions; leveraging of our country's natural resources (mainly diamonds and platinum); and strict debt management. The plan, however, does not seem to tackle what I believe is an important issue, namely what happened to the money. IF only an elite group has been enriched by Zimbabwe's debt load, we must first get them to pay up. Not only will this set precedence that we are a country that respects the rule of law, but it will also let some of the country's platinum and diamond deposit revenues be put to better use instead of servicing debt. An in...

See pics on facebook. I saw the Mona Lisa today.

March 13 2012 will go down as the best day of my life for it is on that day that I received news of my acceptance into the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The subject line of the acceptance email read "Good news from MPA/ID Admissions". In the body of the email were the words: My colleagues and I very much hope you’ll join an exceptional group of people by answering the echo of President John F. Kennedy’s call to “ask what you can do.” One congratulatory note read: Regardless of where you choose to go to grad school, you now know what the rest of us have known all along. You most certainly have what it takes to be an Ivy leaguer. Congratulations again. Harvard certainly is the best of the best, and you deserve it! I look forward to meeting my peers in the fall, and I feel more enabled to answer the call, and pledge to do what I can to affect positive change not just in my native Zimbabwe, but where ever life will take me. Thank you to all those who believ...

I applied to 12 Economics programs, 8 PhDs, 2 MAs and Harvard's Master in International Development program. I have heard from 6 schools. I will be posting the outcome after all the decisions have come in. However as decisions have been coming in I have also been thinking about what I would really like to do. 5 or just 2 more years of schooling? Needless to say forfeiting paid work to get an education is a bold but commendable thing to do. If I were to matriculate into a PhD program it would have to be one that enables me to merge my interests in finance and economics - much like the financial economics program at Booth or International Economics and Finance at the International Business School at Brandeis. Those who know me well know that I spent my final year at Hampshire college researching financial deepening in Africa. My stint at the IMF has also piqued my interest in macro-financial linkages especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession. There exists so much informat...

A lot happened during the month of January. But one blog-worthy story is that I landed a job interview with Mckinsey. The 'experience interview' went well but I botched the case interview :(. On the positive side I learned a few things about management consulting and the importance of structured thinking and presentation. While I have spent a great deal of time these past few days trying to figure out what I could have done differently I have also decided that I would not let that failure dictate my pace in 2012. Take my new-found love for art for example. When I visited the MoMa earlier in January I met Degas, Rivera, Picasso, Van Gogh et.al. I saw the famous 'Starry Night' by Van Gogh, "The Indian Warrior" by Rivera, Picasso's "Still Life with Chair-Caning" and others. These works moved me in a way that art has never done before and I now realize why. Before going to the museum I did my due diligence and googled some of the works that were on...

So I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's 'Tipping Point'. One word - awesome! There are tons of interesting (and scientifically backed) factoids in this book, which Gladwell uses to illustrate how small things can lead to momentous changes. I highly recommend it. The book gets its title from an interesting sociological observation. Gladwell writes: Th[e] possibility of sudden change is at the center of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest to accept. The expression first came into popular use in the 1970s to describe the flight to the suburbs of whites living in the older cities of the American Northeast. When the number of incoming African Americans in a particular neighborhood reached a certain point-20 percent, say-sociologists observed that the community would "tip": most of the remaining whites would leave almost immediately. The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. I thought a bit about this, and my...

This is a comment to an op-ed piece that was published in the NY Times by Paul Krugman. Follow this link to the original article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1 I have been thinking about this article for some time now [because thats what I do :(], and I think there is merit to the argument that Hayek's work was written for a particular time, and that Keynes's theory is more general (hence the title of his seminal work). An economy ladden with too much government overreach is surely bound for 'serfdom' (Hayek's argument in a nutshell - read the "Road to Serfdom" for details). This is why classical liberal ideas appealed to me when I first came to this country. Having experienced hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, and the accompanying abuses by the state, Hayek, Ludvig von Mises, and the entire Austrian school really appealed to me. We must remember that Mises, Hayek's mentor, lived through the Nazi atrocities, and I be...