Getting legal

I had the good fortune to buy a car from a departing diplomat. In Kinshasa second hand cars are a pretty safe bet: because there’s nowhere to go mileage is low. Our car, 4 years old, had done 15,000km.

It’s a Toyota Prado diesel, the work horse of the Congo, built like a tank, sounding like a tank and driving like a tank. But in spite of its old image it has plenty of hidden tricks like cunning storage places, a third row of seats and many other features which the proud owner explained to me and which were instantly forgotten.

Of course, the seller said, you can’t drive it with the embassy’s number plates: you’re not a diplomat so it would be illegal. That made sense: anyway, a couple of days waiting for the new plates wouldn’t be a problem because I could use office transport for most things.

A meeting was arranged with the Embassy’s protocol officer cum transport manager. He was very helpful and produced all the forms to be signed. Copies of passports, father and mother’s names, all known details about me were duly entered onto the forms. “I’ll phone you when the transfer’s approved”, he said.

“How long?”

“Two weeks, two months, who knows. It’s the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you see.”

I looked at the car and it looked at me. “Go on,” it said, so I did. I drove it with the CD plates, pretending and enjoying pretending to be a diplomat. Gates were automatically opened when we went to embassies and donor offices, security guards would show us to the best parking places, and one could stare down a policeman knowing that they were a bit scared of diplomats. Beggars would raise their rates – “come on Mr Diplomat, you can afford more than that . . .” If I had been stopped and asked for my papers it would have been disastrous. I had no insurance, no ownership papers, NOTHING. But somehow, it was worth it.

Every so often I would phone the embassy guy. Nothing doing, he would say, and I could picture him rolling his eyes at my naivete in expecting things to happen. Seven weeks later, I went to the embassy in person. “Hi,” he said, “I’ve being trying to get hold of you,” (lie, I think), “the papers came through last week”. And there they were, signed in quintuplicate by the Ambassador, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and dozens of functionaries underneath them.

“So?” I ask.

“So now you have to get the car registered with the city and get new number plates.”

“How do you do that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” (lie?) he said, “but your logistics man will.”

Well, he didn’t either, but eventually he found out what to do. But that, in Kinshasa is only half the battle. The other half is getting it done. It appears that number plates are one of those services which, if you don’t know someone on the inside, will never happen.

As luck would have it, a colleague knew someone on the inside. Five weeks later, at 9 p.m. I get an excited SMS. “Your number plate’s been approved. It is ……”.

Well that was good news. But it turned out to be a false dawn, because the man issuing the plates was sick or something, so was never there, and it was another month, after my driver had queued for five hours, that he got the new plates.

Now here’s the interesting bit: in addition to the plates we needed a whole lot of other documents. One was the certificate of third party insurance. That was quick – all done in half a hour. Then we had to pay our vehicle licence fee.

The City of Kinshasa issues these – like the licence disks that most countries require. The driver has a feeling that a bunch of men sitting in the middle of a roundabout near the office are the right ones – but it turns out they issue the insurance. Yes, all in uniforms, they just happen to use the roundabout as their open-air office. They direct us to a petrol station nearby – “that’s where the licence people are”.

Sure enough, finishing their breakfast were three people dressed in dayglo jackets advertising Kinshasa’s Revenue Collection Agency, sitting at plastic tables waiting for us to pay our licence fees.

We sit in the car, and one of them comes up and asks us what we want. The driver explains. That’s $147.20, (Yes, everything’s in dollars in the Congo) says the man, and then sits down to fill in a form for us which I sign. Then the driver takes the form and my money to the Bank, which is no more than a kiosk on the garage forecourt, and deposits the money.

When I get the receipt for the rather strange sum, I see it includes all sorts of strange items like “late fee” and some fine or other, but decide that since everyone had been so efficient, and the money had not gone into anyone’s pocket, it wasn’t worth arguing.

The final stage is reached when the clerk excitedly carries the disk to the car, peels off the backing, and sticks it very carefully, and very straight, onto the windscreen. I get outside to look. 2007/08, it says. “But this is the wrong year” I say, “or do the numbers mean something else?”

“Oh no,” says the driver, “it’s just that they’re running a bit late.”