Anyone who thinks that Zimbabwe is the run-down, hopeless, dictator-led backyard of South Africa can think again.
Anyone who thinks that Zimbabwe is the run-down, hopeless, dictator-led backyard of South Africa can think again.
Except about the dictator part – old Bob Mugabe is 88 and still clinging to the reins of his former Rhodesian hobby horse. (Would you trust a probably senile octogenarian to run a household let alone a country?)
But as for the country itself, it’s doing okay. I spent a couple weeks there recently and even though the Zim dollar is no longer in use (remember seeing pictures of guys rocking up at grocery stores with a wheelbarrow of notes to pay for a loaf of bread?).
They now use American dollars and people don’t have to spend hours in queues for petrol and food. In fact one shopping centre I visited in Harare was more jacked up and festive than any I’ve seen in South Africa (since moving to Grahamstown).
A giant blow-up Santa waved down at me from its height of about six metres and you could buy pretty much anything there that you can get in SA – just with an import tax mark-up that would make any Scrooge clutch his chest and need to sit down for a while.
Cigarettes were super cheap though, so working class addictions are well looked after north of our border. Believe it or not, the capital also has a swinging nightlife.
Don’t think you can get away with sneaking out of the club for a little puff-puff-pass though, I spoke to someone who very nearly got whisked off to the cells after members of the secret police busted him.
And rather don’t air any anti-Mugabe political opinions too openly, anyone from your gardener to your therapist could be part of the Central Intelligence Organisation.
I don’t know exactly what would happen to you if you did get on the wrong side of the CIO, but I noticed that bribery (like striking in SA) is the national pastime of Zimbabweans, so you might end up spending a lot of time and money paying officials to leave you alone.
Alas, no amount of change in my pocket would have helped me bribe my way out of a 16-hour wait at the Zim-SA border, where no food or water were on sale for the thousands of people waiting for their passports to be processed.
One could cross over to the SA side and wait, but then you wouldn’t be allowed back to wait in an air-conditioned bus.
Tough call – especially since nobody had a cooking clue how long the delay would take. And funnily enough the stamping and paperwork took less than an hour on the Zim side – it was good old South African Immigration that was holding up the works and causing a 20km traffic jam before Beitbridge.
I understand that SA is careful to monitor every person coming into the country – we can’t just have every foreign national and his clan come into SA to steal our women and jobs – but there is obviously room for improvement when women give birth in border queues and one man allegedly dropped dead.
Heck, I felt like having a baby or dropping dead after being there since before the sun was even up!
Anyway, I was obviously relieved to get the hell outta there after hitting the traffic jam at 3am and only leaving the SA side of the border at 7pm.
The bus trip from Harare to Joburg took a total of about 33 hours. So travellers be warned: think twice about driving to Zim (by car or bus) over any kind of holiday period.
You will waste days of your life in queues and be directly responsible for paying civil servants’ Christmas bonuses if you want to get anything done efficiently.
It may not be ideal, but hey, (here’s looking at you SA Immigration) at least they know how to get things done.
