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This border bribe left me poorer but wiser
Jan Raath, The Times (UK)
September 09, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4709675.ece

A young man with a face like Jesus leant on the petrol pump and offered me salvation. There were many people at both sides of the border, he said, and I could be stuck for hours. For a modest fee, he would sort out my Customs duty while I waited in the car. The border at Beitbridge straddling the Limpopo river between South Africa and Zimbabwe is the busiest crossing point in Africa. It is like purgatory. When I passed through to South Africa a fortnight before, on a midweek night, it was seething with hundreds of poor Zimbabwean street-traders who sell food from South African supermarkets. They are coated with dust, sleeping on the ground, begging, scribbling out declarations, breastfeeding babies, litter everywhere, the toilets mephitic, the road choked with 40-tonne rigs that I have never seen move. Everyone bored, hot, dirty and wretched.

I usually take righteous pleasure in doing my turn in the queues, pay my duty and get cleared, queue jumpers notwithstanding. "You white people are funny," a young Zimbabwean hitchhiker said once. "You always do things straight. We just bribe." This night it was hotter than ever, I was exhausted after a 600km drive from Johannesburg, so I agreed to Bellington's offer to shepherd me back into Zimbabwe. I crossed the bridge and found the Zimbabwean side nowhere near as busy as I had been told. I could have cleared it in 15 minutes. But Bellington had my Customs declaration form and the gate pass. He appeared at my car in five minutes, tantalisingly waving the pass before me with all but one of the necessary stamps. "The Customs and road levy officers need more money," he said. Trapped. Like a lamb, I paid up and he went off to get the last stamp. It cost me the equivalent of £70. "You cheated me," I told him. "Good night, sir, have a good journey," he said, smiling.

I returned to Harare to find my telephone still dead after two months. I went to the local Tel One office where Trigger at the faults office told me that someone had gone down the manhole in my area and cut through the fibreoptic cable. "They just vandalised it," he said. "It is worthless. All it is good for is to tie up the wire in the chicken run." Zimbabwe's bankrupt state-run utilities are peopled by competent but appallingly paid technicians whose capacity to do anything is crippled by a management of politically appointed goons. Simple maintenance requires superhuman effort. So it helps to provide incentives. Some pay outright bribes, others provide a jerrycan of petrol or a frozen chicken. I gave Trigger a pile of recent copies of The Times. His face burst into rapture. "I will do my best," he said. Two days later I picked up the handset. The dialling tone purred. And just for giving someone the pleasure of a good read.

At the Lion and Elephant Hotel, near Beitbridge, they just do it themselves. When I stopped there after being fleeced at the border, the manager said that they had had no electricity for 23 days. Thieves bring down the powerlines and steal the copper cables. The hotel sends workers to dig holes and put up new poles while the technician attaches new cable, if there is any. The power had come back on the day before, but the quaint old hotel blacked out again after a couple of hours. Another 13km of cable had been stolen. The hotel sent out its posse who, in three days, caught 11 people stealing more kilometres of powerline and handed them over to surprised police.

It was Jehovah who came to the rescue last week. Our homes fell into blackness and the silence of dead refrigerators. We have power cuts every day, but this went on for three days before we learnt that someone had broken into the transformer down the road and stolen a heavy copper cable. Last year it took ten weeks for a similar cable to be replaced. It could have been worse - sometimes they drain the cooling oil so that the transformer heats up and explodes, and you can wait for Robert Mugabe to die before it will be replaced. Bob, a Jehovah's Witness from down the road, went to speak to the chief technician to see what could be done to help - whether it was to provide transport, fuel, labourers. Or frozen chickens. The technician was on the telephone to the stores department. While he waited, Bob noticed that on his desk were a couple of the luridly illustrated cheap paper pamphlets usually handed out by old biddies with shining eyes. The two men instantly recognized each other as brother Witnesses, among the persecuted of the Earth. The lights were back on in 24 hours.

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