A short tale of Brexit Britain vs Africa rising in one small package

Any brief glance of current British headlines will confirm that my sorry excuse for a nation is taking a headlong dive back to the 1970s, at least economically speaking, there remains the stubborn refusal of flares to come back into fashion. Politically speaking, the 1870s seem more of a guiding light for our government, bathed in its imperial arrogance and racist entitlement. Apologies of course to the Welsh and Scots who bear little responsibility for the almighty clusterfuck Brexit has wrought upon the nation, now graced with empty shelves, petrol queues and international humiliation. It is England and mostly its hallowed halls of elite, private education, that have furnished us with the most utterly venal, corrupt, incompetent and mendacious shitlords, who dare appropriate the word government to describe their diabolical mishandling of every issue placed in front of them.

Embracing this spirit of the age, alleged, international courier service DHL, or rather its English branch of operations, decided to apply a similar modus operandi to the delivery of my package to the Ivory Coast in West Africa.

In the same way that shortly before Covid hit, the world’s experts had pronounced the UK and the US the best pandemic prepared nations on earth, you might have been forgiven for imagining that the managerial tasks of international post would be better performed by a “developed” country than an African one. So, as Covid deaths in Britain are roughly on par with the entire African continent, your presumption on postal matters could be dumped in the same waste bin as the pandemic experts’ efforts.

Although fixed postal addresses with codes to pinpoint them geographically are common in the West, much of the world has got by without them so far, particularly as suburbs have evolved somewhat organically. Hence, Africans, along with many other people find it far more reliable to pick up deliveries from the offices of couriers, than leaving it to confused delivery drivers not having house numbers and road names to deal with. DHL England seemed oblivious to this fact and demanded a delivery address regardless but with the promise that it could be changed online afterwards. Given that my actual address is far too vague I used the more precise, “The house next to the Catholic church” address of a friend – see what I mean about picking it up from the main office, especially as it is only down the road from me.

My brother, who was dealing with the UK end of operations for me soon discovered that the promise of online simplicity proved as elusive as the average Abominable Snowman. Forty five minutes of listening to on hold tunes later, charged at 7p a minute, my brother had achieved precisely fuck all, beyond a demand to call back tomorrow. This led to a further forty five minutes of utterly pointless expense, only to learn that DHL had decided that his efforts demanded my package being put on hold at Heathrow airport for no discernible reason. The simple matter of changing the delivery to a collection from the office it was going to anyway and thus saving them effort, proved beyond the scope of this world spanning modern business.

Thankfully the African end of operations could grasp the concept of customer service and told me to call Friday morning to arrange the pick up, which duly went exactly as required. I was in and out of the office within ten minutes proudly bearing my package. DHL Africa I salute your noble staff. DHL England, you can go and die in a ditch.

Of course my story is only a microcosm of events but one I suspect will gradually become more representative.  No one is going to pretend that Africa is always a shining example of efficiency and, as I’ve written about before, its perception of time is open to a much looser interpretation than in the West. Although once you learn to live with it rather than battle against it, I often find it can be a lot less stressful than our time obsessed lives back home. However, Britons have firmly relinquished any right to lecture Africans on how to run things. If the Brexit debacle proves incapable of teaching us a bit of humility for our position in the world then nothing will, as we continue to descend into global irrelevance while Africa assumes its rightful position of influence.