@Tokoloshe Safaris while you may now be an African, your maintenance sensibilities are very American. You're sort of a black swan in Africa.
The local PHs always give me a hard time about my guns and maintenance in general thinking I'm some sort of OCD psychopath.
I had a friendly argument with a very good PH about shooting sticks. I didn't pull any punches, I was clear as I could be without being a jerk. Please load my shooting sticks, yours are going to damage the rifles. Yeah yeah. One of the days, they unloaded my sticks and he had his. I mentioned: "by the way, your sticks did $1500 in damage to my rifle, the cost of steaming out the dents, recutting the checkering, and putting a london oil finish back on the gun. He was in disbelief that giant gouges destroy the value of guns. Indeed, the gun was sold for a $1500 reduction in price when I upgraded to a better gun with the proceeds. That's pretty typically African.
In fact, I've had no less than a dozen guns in my presence in Africa that they wanted my help to repair that were so far gone, they would have had ZERO value in the USA. They couldn't fathom that the guns were destroyed as they thought they were just fine. They were in what NRA grading would call 30% condition.
Another PH was adamant that cleaning rifles is harmful. His claim was that lubricants attract sand and grit to the gun so he had only cleaned his gun 2x in 35 years. Of course it was unreliable as well, having had the stock cracked at the magazine well, and his ammo having insufficient crimp coupled with "topping off" on the round count dozens of times, the internal magazine had powder in it along with a lose bullet and a jammed up magazine spring. The 458WM cartridges were reloaded so many times that they had swelled cases. These are fairly typical PH scenarios.
Another scenario that is a very common one is the PH's arguing that you should always shoot the back trigger first on double rifles. The reason they give is to avoid doubling the gun. The actual problem is the guns are in such disrepair that the front trigger is way too sensitive and the right barrel is so shot out that the left barrel is the more accurate one due to decades of neglect.
Once I brought a gunstock to Africa for a PH that jumped out of a tree and landed on his rifle, breaking the gun. (you'd think one's source of livelihood and safety would be something treated with more care?) When I arrived at camp ready to install the stock on a PH's rifle in which he had his license for a decade, he was unaware of how to use a fine chisel, or sandpaper, had no proper tools, and figured he'd use a coin to tighten the bottom bolts if he could find a coin. His ability to guide my hunt was predicated on me getting his gun functional of course, so he was betting my hunt on my ingenuity. I completed the inletting of the stock by candlelight using tools I made in a pinch and the turnscrews I brought with me in my emergency stash, but it was par for the course.
Once I was in croc and hippo infested waters on the Zambezi, not far from where the PH had his fishing boat sunk by a hippo a few years earlier. The power tilt on his outboard went out and he had no tools on the boat with us stuck on a sandbar halfway to Zambia. Realizing the tilt went up but not down, it was likely the solenoid (i'm not a mechanical person, but this is a pretty basic diagnosis). I proceeded to show him how to remove the cowling from the outboard, find the solenoid, and use a rusty screwdriver to bridge the points on it to lower the outboard motor. So there you have it, city-slicker client that never had shop class is showing a 30+ year PH basic outboard motor troubleshooting out of survival necessity. (generally, a boater would check these things at a dock before taking on a client, no?)
I don't think any of things apply to you, but they are common scenarios amongst Zim PHs whether we're talking about guns, tools, automobiles, generators, boat motors, or even their homes. It's not an issue of affluence at all that I'm referencing either, its a mindset that something isn't in need of service until its completely broken. The exception to this generally are the "old guard" that grew up on farms and had reasonable mechanical skills back in Rhodesia, but the younger group grew up on small properties with lots of servants leaving them somewhat helpless in the bush when things happen other than DG charges occur.
