Despite teaching university students about the need for good governance, Prof. Peter Mwanga Zviwa, the economics professor at the Savannah University in Zambia, also runs a thriving consultancy business that sends him across the world every year. His professional life is intertwined with Zambia’s growing economic potential, and his personal life, at times, takes him to places of far greater significance than the country to which he was born.
Zviwa is the author of “Why Debt is the Great Peace: Former Kilimanjaro Tourist, Inside Commercial Contracts, in Commercial Settlements, and Integrated International Finance” (2012), which in turn is the basis for his recent book “The Kilimanjaro Café: Great Coffee, Locals, and Migrant Workers on Africa’s Cape Route” (2015).
His company, Lanka World, is credited as having played a role in setting up the small coffee farm that Robert Mugabe planted in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s.
His current books have been published since he was a student in the early 1980s when he began giving lectures on economic issues for locals in schools in the Katanga province of Zambia.
“A few things changed after that,” he told me over the phone from his home in Zambia. “One, we started looking for ways to manage student loans. But mostly, students need to find jobs, so they felt that if they went to the university, and studied, maybe they’d get a job, maybe they would not. So they gave me time to lecture on your taxes, your proceeds from your business, your business loans.”