It has now become the norm of the day that if you want a service or a product and you don’t know exactly where to get it from, someone quickly chips in and tell you that he/she can help you – for a fee of course. The fee can be high especially if the service or product you are looking for is scarce. One can earn a living in Zimbabwe by charging people just to show them where to get a service or a product fast without enduring long queues. I came across some of these people at Beitbridge border post recently when I wanted to clear some stuff.  I met these well dressed young men whom you can mistakenly think are the real Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) officers because of the way they entice you with the knowledge they have of clearing goods at the border post.

These people have so many names. The most popular ones are “clearing agent”, “runner” “go-between” or “middlemen”. So many names for this unofficialised profession hey! From my own under understanding the service, which was being sold, was to speed up the paper work involved in clearing goods. After telling me about their jobs, and in order to convince me, I was even taken to the help desk where to my surprise the officer commanding the desk actually recognised the guys. After rejecting the offer for the service I was told to be prepared for long waits, delays and high import duty charges, which made me wonder how possible was it for me to get low import duty charges from ordinary guys like these.  The fact that these people operate in the vicinity of the ZIMRA officials’ makes one wonder whether the services being offered by these unscrupulous people is now official.

This entry was posted on October 4th, 2011 at 11:11 am by Lenard Kamwendo and is filed under Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.