Normal Yet Bizarre Licenses: Television

I am inspired by what my friend Beth, still in Harare, recently called a "normal yet bizarre experience" in Zim. Bizarre is true.  But I think I'd replace the word "normal" with "typical."

The experience is an example of a number of things:

-how one is kept busy in Zimbabwe running around to fulfill sudden, often changing, requirements,
-how the country tries to seem highly organized by charging taxes but then has no way to carry-out the system fairly or appropriately,
-how individuals doing official business often take the position as a blessing to make up their own rules and have their own little piece of power,
-and how people assume that if one owns something then that person must have a great deal of money at their fingertips.

What am I talking about? It's that time of year again... Beth recently had a run-in with the television license company and it gave me flashbacks of my own experiences dealing with this headache each January.

In Zimbabwe, one must own a radio license if owning a car, and a television license if living in a home.  It does not matter if you actually own a radio or a television (which we didn't during our last year). You must have a license anyway. The problem is that when the tax-man or woman comes a-callin' the tax must be paid on the spot.  One must pay immediately or the fine is sometimes up to four times greater than the actual tax, which makes for a hefty fee and a huge run-around to get one's name and address off the list of non-payers! But it's sort of a good luck, bad luck thing, as some years your street may be entirely forgotten by the tax collectors.

Last January when the gate rang and I picked up the speaker to see who it was, I was less than enthusiastic to find out it was a television tax collector for the ZBC (Zimbabwean Broadcasting Corporation). Okay; I'll admit it, I may have just tried to pretend I was the housekeeper and said that "Madam" was not home.

"The household will automatically receive the fine and a ticket then," I was told.

No dice.  I went out to the driveway to have a conversation over the fence.

As I stood on our gate box and looked over, I knew immediately from the fluorescent vest, receipt book, and clipboard, that the man was legitimate and ready to collect, immediately. After some back and forth about the fact that I did not have fifty dollars lying inside my house at the time, the man made it clear that the alternative was the fifty dollar license fee, a fifty dollar ticket to be paid at the police station, and a twenty dollar fee to be paid to him for having to write the ticket.  Hmm.  That was a new rule...

Zimbabwean citizens often assume that if one owns something or lives in a house then that person must have a great deal of money at their fingertips.  Because a large percent of the population does not use a traditional bank but instead carries their valuables on their body, it is expected that a person well off enough to own something requiring a license will always have money on hand.  I found this little assumption to be quite inconvenient a number of times, and always when talking about tickets and licenses.

When told I had no money lying around the house, the man suggested I drive him to my ATM. (Oh why was my husband never home at the right moment to deal with these things?!) I had to get the gardener, Shoman, from the back (on his day off, no less) and ask him to go in the car with me to feel a little safer as I took the tax collector to the bank.  (A beer is always promised for these kinds of things.)  The collector was very nice -albeit extremely inconvenient- until we returned home and I went to pay him. That's when he realized the machine had only given me hundreds.

"You expect me to have fifty dollars of change on me?!" he had guffawed in disbelief.

This from the man who expected me to have fifty on myself for a television I did not own when he was the one collecting money. I clenched every piece of my insides and thought for a moment.

This time Showman saved me; offering to walk the collector to the nearest set of shops to get him change.  I knew this would be incredibly difficult, as finding a person with two fifties would not be an easy thing.  Shoman came back an hour later, receipt in hand and a fifty in change. I owed him more than a beer, that was for sure!  The tax collector was no where to be seen,which made me wonder if he'd ever made it back to my neighbors'.  Probably not.

Oh, do you see why I never like answering the gate?!