by MGCINI NYONI
As we were growing up, we used to hear a story about Nigerian immigration that best illustrated corruption in Africa: it was said when travelling into Nigeria, you had to pay a bribe to the immigration officials even if all your papers were in order. If you neglected to pay the mandatory bribe, the official would return your passport to you and say a page was missing from your passport.
We always thought this was just a crazy story. Our country, Zimbabwe, was still okay back then – or so we thought. We have all come to realize that Zimbabwe was never okay: even as we celebrated ‘independence’ in 1980, things were already going wrong. It was also said that if you threw a stone on the streets of Lagos, you were likely to hit a person with a university degree. But it seems all that education has not helped. The same goes for Zimbabwe. It was once said that Zimbabwe had the second-highest literacy rates in Africa, and we wonder why all that ‘education’ has not saved the country from near-collapse. But that’s not the point I am trying to make.
I remembered the Nigerian tale when I travelled to Botswana recently. The borders have become congested since Zimbabwe’s economy crumbled and everyone turned to the informal sector for survival. One such informal venture is the cross-border trade, mainly done by women. As I was patiently waiting for my turn at the border, I noticed that at regular intervals a woman would walk up to the immigration officer’s desk and, after conversing a bit, the woman would walk away frustrated and go to a different desk, where she would be totally ignored. This would leave her with no choice but to go back to the first official, who would get up and leave his post, and the woman would be forced to follow.
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