It’s interesting how Harare never runs out of people getting passports, yet in other towns you can practically walk into the passport office and be the only one there. So now it is my turn to go through this dreaded experience seeing as though my passport has expired. I have however decided to make this a pleasurable experience. I got there at 6.15am only to find over 200 people there already! Hallo??? What time do these people get up? So as I am walking towards the queue, 3 men approach me and offer me a place in the top 10 for $5.00. I politely turned them down and they persisted. And each of them had different positions and each was trying to convince me that one place is better than the other. It was just hilarious. However, as funny as it was it just reminded me of the hustler mentality that Zimbabweans have. These guys got up very early to hold places in the queue and then sell these places! Ingenious! As if that was not enough, there was a guy at the side of the road selling cups of hot coffee or tea with bread! So appropriate, and for sure it was selling fast. And now the icing on the cake, there were also guys who were selling black pens that would normally cost $1 for 5 or 6, here they were $1 for 2 and they stressed how you could not fill in the forms if you had no black pen (I later asked when I got inside and they said either a black or blue pen would do the trick, so clearly these guys were really misinformed, as they were about a whole bunch of other things). Oh and these same guys do photos and photocopying...by the roadside!
So apart from wanting to be a good citizen, I suppose I went through this whole process to see if I could come up with any interesting observations about the system of getting documents which are rightfully ours, and why we resort to paying someone to sort them out for us and now I fully understand why! So we were split into 2 groups, those that needed the passports within 3 days (US$253.00) or in 1 day (US$318.00) on the one hand, and then those that needed the ones that are supposed to take 1 week (US$150.00) but actually take a month, on the other hand. Then we were told to go and make our payments and then get the forms. I tell you the staff all of a sudden started being extra nice it was astonishing. I remember one of the guys asking me which passport I wanted and I could not even answer him because of the amazing treatment he was giving me. Ok, so I pay, fill in the forms and get myself ready to go and hand in. First the lady tells me that my I.D is still a paper one and looks “untidy” so I should go and get a proper one! Can you believe it, so I go and behold... another queue! So I waited a good hour before I could get served and eventually I get the I.D. sorted, and then I eventually handed it in, eish I am really making it seem easier than it really was, let me save you the drama!
I am bothered about this process though, because something that will simply be an in-and-out job, will take forever in Zim. And it is not even that we do not have the technology! Oh no. Its there, and there money is definitely there; I think I can safely count at least 60 people (which is way less than the actual people who were there), who needed 3 day passports so on average they are raking in more than US$15 000.00 a day, and please note I have not even included the 24 hrs and 1 week passports, which were over 200 people, so that’s an additional US$30 000.00!!! So where is this money being used? Because clearly it hasn’t helped the infrastructure or the system at the passport office which by the looks of things really needs improvement. Should we go through so much trouble just to get a simple travel document, an I.D. or even a birth certificate and especially because we are paying so much for them? Are we not creating unnecessary corruption by allowing simple processes to be so tedious? Can the average Zimbabwean afford to have a passport? Are these avenues for corruption simply “created circumstances” by a select few so that only these selected few can exploit and benefit from? Given a choice, I would rather have paid more money and have the passport delivered to my doorstep, than spend all that time waiting to be told “ magetsi aenda vabereki, huyai mangwana”! Food for thought!
