‘A day’s life inside Botswana’

A personal experience by Themba Nkosi

13 December 2005

It is 10 o’clock in the morning. I am in Francistown, Botswana’s second largest city, named after miner and explorer, Daniel Francis. I decide to visit the main post office to post money home. Inside the post office there is a branch of the Western Union Money transfer agency. The queue at the Western Union section is long and people are getting impatient because it is moving at a snail’s pace.

All the people in the queue are holders of Zimbabwean passports and they all speak local languages, Ndebele and Shona. The Zimbabweans are getting angry after they are told the money has run out. They have all the reasons to become angry because they had come all the way from Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare to collect their money, do their shopping and head back to Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans in the diaspora are now sending money to neighbouring Botswana so that their relatives can get it in foreign currency. But why are they collecting the money in another country? It’s not hard to find out why. Zimbabweans, by nature, are enterprising people. When they cannot get what they want in their own country, they will find it somewhere else.

They have suffered a lot under the Zanu (PF) government and have become masters in survival tactics. What is interesting is that all of them who are at the Western Union branch here are getting their payments in Pula, which has become the strongest currency in sub-Saharan Africa, if not Africa as a whole.

Early this year the government in Zimbabwe asked Western Union to stop making payments in United States dollars. Gideon Gono, the central bank governor said people who were receiving their money in foreign currency were fuelling the black market. But who ended up with an egg on his face? - Gono of course, because Zimbabweans are now collecting their money from another country because nobody wants the useless Zimbabwe dollar anymore.

‘What does the government expect us to do. Our children send us money in foreign currency and they want to pay us in Zimbabwe dollars, no way,’ said Mavis Masuku from Nkulumane in Bulawayo. She arrived here in Fancistown the previous day and slept in the bush.

She says if Gono had allowed Zimbabweans to receive their money in foreign currency, people would not be travelling to Botswana everyday to collect it. Tinashe from Harare tells the same story.

‘Does Gono think we are fools? We don’t want his useless dollar’ he says. ‘While I was in the post office, the Western Union ran out of cash three times. The branch is not used to handling so many customers in a day. Batswana are now complaining that the Zimbabweans overwork them.’

‘Nearly all the people I serve here everyday are Zimbabweans and they are too many,’ said the woman at the counter. When the cash runs out, Zimbabweans wait until the money comes. When they move in the streets of Francistown or Gaborone, Zimbabweans are easily identified by the way they dress, talk and behave.

Money that is supposed to be going to Zimbabwean banks is now going to Botswana, which has one of the world’s fastest growing economies. In the evening I meet Tadios who is working as an accountant for a construction company in Francistown. Tadios says he comes from Norton and got the job in August while visiting Botswana to sell his curios.

I have no work permit but I hope to get one next year, says Tadios. He later promises to take my fiance to another company to introduce her to one of the directors. He tells me Zimbabweans must help one another especially when they are in a foreign land. I agree with him because that is what we should do as humans and refuse to be used by politicians to divide us along tribal and racial lines.

Tadios takes me to Francistown’s area ‘W’ to interview Zimbabwean women who have become a disgrace to their fellow countrymen and women. These women, says Tadios, are now selling their bodies in Botswana just to get the Pula. Its degrading and distasteful, and very few of the women want to speak to me for obvious reasons. Some of them are married.

That’s life in Botswana for Zimbabweans.