A long expensive journey home
February 14th, 2008
I occasionally use a ‘runner’ to buy things I need that are no longer available to buy in Zimbabwe. A group of us place an order, and the runner nips across the border to South Africa or Botswana and buys it for us. Fees vary from runner to runner, but it’s usually about 20% of the value of the goods (although I have heard of some people paying cheaper rates). Given my recent first-time experience at paying a bribe, I asked him how runners fared with their regular cross-border ventures.
He told me when they left South Africa, they made sure they had plenty of Rands, in small denominations, easily accessible in their pockets. Bribe payments begin right from the start of their journey. Apparently the South African police routinely stop the buses and vehicles heading towards the Zimbabwean border. Lengthy ‘harassment’ (his word) over paperwork or the amount of goods in the vehicle ensues. The driver does a quick whip around, and all the passengers chip in a few Rand which is handed over and the problem goes away.
I had noticed, on a trip I made to South Africa last year, that the police did seem to be stopping all the vehicles with Zimbabwean number plates and lots of passengers. My fellow passenger and I assumed this was to do with the refugee crisis, but neither of us could understand why they would stop people LEAVING the country. Surely this is what they want to happen if it was a refugee issue? Now I wonder if we were witnessing bribing on a grand scale going on.
The runner told me that when the vehicle reached the border post bribing increased further. If the queues were very long, a bribe helped people to jump to the front. He pointed out that this is very important if cross border trading is your job: “Time is money”, he said.
He told me that those passengers travelling on dubious documents faced heavier bribes than he did to persuade the officials to turn a blind eye. What was interesting about this nugget of information was his comment that the border officials – on both sides – wanted Zimbabweans with suspicious paperwork to leave the country and go back to Zimbabwe. This meant the bribes paid while leaving the country tended to be ‘reasonable’. I was told that officials know that the crisis in the country will drive the people back to South Africa, most likely using the same suspicious paperwork. At this point the bribes become very steep because the desperate person trying to find a way back to the land of employment will pay almost anything to get in: “It is better to get a little money on the way out, so you can make a lot of money when they return”, he said. “You don’t want those people to be stuck in South Africa”.
The bribes don’t stop there. Once through the border, the intrepid Zimbabwean traveller faces endless harassment by the Zimbabwean police: the runner told me that the police tended to stop all the vehicles laden with passengers and goods. “What are they after?”, I asked. It turns out the Zimbabwean police will make passengers slowly unpack their entire possessions on the side of the road, demand customs clearance payments (even though they have no mandate to do customs work) and threaten to seize goods. Again, R10 from each passenger smoothes the way and makes harassment and hassle disappear. So, to answer ,my question, they are ‘after’ a bribe.
The runner I was talking to took pains to explain to me that this was one of the reasons why the goods he brought in cost so much more than if they had been bought in South Africa. He said he could pay as much as R500 in a trip, through bribes to border officials on both sides, and the police on both sides. This is a cost passed on to Zimbabwean customers like me.
