Traffic Cops caught on camera taking a bribe

The baton comes down. It always starts like that. The traffic cop looms in the hard summer sunlight, in the semblance of a breakdown lane that runs in the middle of screaming traffic.


The hand -- and here we curse -- is pointing straight at some old green truck carrying traditional beer crates. "Now you'll see the real Zimbabwe," I mutter bitterly to my friend.

For Zimbabwe's army of crooked traffic cops, highways and the city centres are an excellent hunting ground.

Show me this document, the cop says. Show me that document. They root around in the glove compartment. A mirror is got a slight dent, the vehicle don't have rear red reflectors. Triumph for the traffic cop! Well, he smirks, of course, I can't let you drive this car. You'll have to leave it here.



We all know what comes next.

He and the driver huddle behind a tree, and negotiation ensues. The cops never like to be seen taking the cash. It's an inexplicable coyness, given that every passing motorist knows precisely what is transpiring.



"One hundred dollars," groans the driver.

This is what traffic police do here: They pull you over, and they collect bribes.

Well, so what, you say. The traffic cops are crooked. A trivial rite of daily existence; a hassle but not a tragedy; hardly worth discussing, really. And so, in a sense, their greedy presence is the face of the state itself.


Rush hour after rush hour, traffic cops stand as pervasive, petty reminders that cynicism is not an affectation, but a requirement; that one false step can lead to a mess that strips you of time, money and another degree of equanimity.

But they manage to entangle the drivers too. Everybody plays along, everybody pays; the drivers and the cops feeding one another in silence, a living illustration of how we get pulled into bad systems in which we simultaneously create and are victimized by the corruption, until we are repressing ourselves.

Vusumuzi Maseko runs a taxi business. He has little patience for the bribe-taking cops and even less patience for the drivers who pay.

"Before we start to look for trash in the eye of the traffic policeman, we should look into our own eyes," he says. "When I am asked, 'When will the corruption stop?' I always say that it will only stop when we stop paying bribes."

And, of course, he's right. But here's what I say, nevertheless: Pay the bribe! Because once I fumbled naively onto the path of the righteous and, my friends, it is a trail of sorrows.



If you pay the bribe, it may cost you $40, $60, maybe $100, plus 15 minutes and a few curses muttered under the breath.



If you don't pay the bribe, you have to go to traffic court. And it takes months to get a court date, and meanwhile you don't have a license, even if it's your American, South African or British license.


And if you need to, for example, get that license back because you are leaving for a vacation and you want to drive while you're there, then you may (let's pretend this is hypothetical) have to hunt down the man in the bowels of the traffic bureaucracy who is powerful enough to get that license back. And that bribe will be plenty steep; lots more than you'd have paid on the side of the road. Hypothetically. 



Done, paid the bribe, the truck is freeeeeeee to leave waaaaaal