Laissez Passer

For the last couple of weeks two members of staff have spent numerous hours taking the three company owned vehicles and the two vehicles that are privately owned by international staff through an annual inspection. They would leave the office first thing in the morning and head off to the designated police station where these checks take place and inevitably they would not return until the end of the day.

The process involves presenting all of the vehicle’s paperwork for seven different checks including customs (all vehicles here are imported), ownership, taxes and insurance. The vehicle’s chassis number is verified and some rudimentary inspection is done on the vehicle, such as checking the lights and the indicators. A document is stamped and signed as each of these checks is ‘passed’ and once all seven checks are done you are issued with a ‘Laissez passer’ (‘pass’) sticker to be affixed to the windscreen of the vehicle.

It is not uncommon here to be stopped by the police, who ask to see your vehicle’s paperwork and will inevitably find that one or more of your documents is somehow not in order. If you pay the policeman an on-the-spot ‘fine’ you are allowed to go on your way. A vehicle with a ‘Laissez passer’ sticker should, as the name suggests, be allowed to pass without any further checks being required so the theory behind this is a good one. Unfortunately as with many things in Africa the practical implications have not really been thought through and what should be a fairly straightforward process becomes, in reality, something that takes days to accomplish.

• All vehicles are required to be inspected at the same police station in July – so there are a huge number of vehicles to be processed
• Each check is done by a different official so you battle to get to the front of one ‘queue’ (I use the term loosely because in reality it will be more like a scrum), and then you have to start all over again for the next check
• There is no published information about what this process should cost but there do seem to be a number of ‘fees’ that need to be paid. This is not unreasonable; after all we pay to have an MOT test each year in the UK, but the fees seem to vary and there are no receipts…

People inevitably get frustrated at the length of time the process is taking – it is hot and tempers are short – so it is a pretty volatile place to be. I felt bad that I was asking two of my team to go through the daily ordeal of battling their way through this process. I know they hated it – one of them said he would rather do anything else – but the appearance of a white woman at the police station would only have complicated the process even more and made the fees higher!