We got this and we thought it well worth sharing because it so clearly illustrates the incompetence in Zinara:

This week Zimbabwe Post Offices finally started issuing the new required vehicle license discs.  The new system was instigated as according to the Zimbabwe National Roads Administration (Zinara) their ministry lost US$15 million last year alone to counterfeit discs.  They reckon there are at least 800 000 vehicles on the country’s roads.

Sadly the Post Office computerised system encountered some major glitches, so the majority only opened for service on the 21 May, giving them 11 days, including weekends and extended hours, to issue the 800 000 or so discs.  A large Post Office can issue about 100 discs per day, using at least 3 tellers.  So, I will be generous and use that as a national average for the 50 designated venues, plus the 10 mobile service providers.  Here is the maths:

No. gazetted post offices (including 10 mobiles): 60
No. licenses issued per day on average: 100
National Total per day: 6000
No. days from opening of service to deadline: 11
Total potential discs to be issued: 66000
No. vehicles in Zimbabwe: 800000
% possible of 800 000 vehicles in 11 days: 8.25

There is pandemonium at our Post Offices, tempers are frayed as members of the public are spending up to 8 hours in the queue and still not being served, returning the next day for another massive loss of potential productive work.  The Post Office workers are barely able to type as they have only ever worked on manual systems previously, now they have to capture screeds of information per disc.  The form is long and complicated and the amount of paperwork required cumbersome.

What is amazing is the ingenuity of Zimbabweans in latching on to the potential for lucrative business.  Some Post Offices resorted to issuing place numbers to help alleviate time spent in queues.  I know one elderly person who queued for 4 hours to get his number and who ONLY had to spend 2 hours in the queue the following day.  But, a few particularly enterprising individuals quickly saw the opportunity for profit, spent the day queuing, were issued several numbers for their hard work going from the front to the back of the queue and the next morning they sold places for US$10 a number!  Alas, the Post Office officials quickly caught on and stopped the number system!

Yet another friend hired a queue sitter.  This individual obviously received priority service as he is a member of the police, and for $25 my friend was the proud owner of 3 new discs for his small fleet of vehicles.

Now you have to remember there is one variable that has not been taken into account – the fact that the new system is entirely dependent, of course, on electricity, the scarce commodity that is needed to run the state of the art equipment.  Need I say more?

The new disc plan is a good plan, and nobody can deny it, but oh dear Zinara has really aimed far too high in announcing the programme would be complete within the deadline period of 1 June and no grace period will be awarded.  Perhaps the Zinara head of information, communication and technology Mr Gift Kanotangudza and his colleague, head of corporate communications, Mr Augustine Moyo, should sign up for a few basic maths lessons, for through their insistence that there will be no extension, they have created a mathematical impossibility.

This entry was posted on May 31st, 2012 at 12:29 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Activism, Economy, Governance, Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.