legal ownership

Let me tell you about how I became the legal owner of my car last week.

First, you may wonder why this was an issue last week. It actually has been an issue for, oh... ten months or so. When I bought the car, I didn't have a residence permit for Botswana yet, or at least didn't have it in hand. (I did actually have one, but it was sitting on someone's desk at UB, entirely unbeknownst to me.) In Botswana, one can't register the car without a residence permit or proof of registration. Also, in Botswana, the car's plates don't change; they're just registered to different people, and it's the registration (or 'blue') book that changes hands.

The man who sold it to me filled out the change of ownership section on the vehicle registration and gave me a copy of his passport. Everything should have been in order for me to march down to the Transport Office and sort this out...

... except that I didn't.

(Family members are hereby barred from commenting on this state of affairs.)

This didn't actually have much impact on my life. No one at any of the police roadblocks dotted across southern Botswana noticed the expired registration disk on my windshield. None of the border officials at either the Lobatse or the Tlokweng crossing ever asked to see the blue book. Crossing to and from ZA, one has only to write one's plate number in a book. That's it.

But I aspire to be a good girl -- or at least I suffer occasional sudden pangs of guilt that make me attempt to put my life in order every so often. So I took the blue book out of the car a few months ago, meaning to look over it carefully and figure out what I needed to do in order to register the car. Just as I did this, however, there was a flurry of people moving in and out of the house, and somewhere in all this, the blue book disappeared. Vanished.

Then, just a few weeks ago, I got word from a friend who stays in Zimbabwe that he was getting married. Upon hearing my plans to drive to the wedding, another Zim friend informed me that the police at the border post separating Botswana and Zimbabwe would under no circumstances let me drive the car over the border without all the paperwork in order.

What to do? I tore apart the house; then I tore apart the car; then I tore out some of my hair. (Don't worry; no one will ever be able to tell the difference.) Then I went to Transport, where they handed me an affidavit form so that I could request a duplicate blue book. But because I wasn't the legal owner of the car -- it sounds so bad when I put it like that! -- I couldn't make the request, and anyway, the form had to be notarized (or, as it goes here, 'witnessed by a commissioner of oaths').

The next hurdle was tracking down E., the guy who had sold me the car. I SMSed him, and we agreed to meet at the central police station. I waited for an hour, and E. never came. This was the lowest point in the entire saga; no registration, no wedding (the travel plans for which were becoming increasingly convoluted, but that's another story). E. did eventually check in, and we arranged to meet the next morning. After waiting an hour at the central police, they told us we needed to go to the Criminal Investigations Department. The CID stamped the affadavit without much ado, and then it was off to Transport.

At Transport, things got a bit hairy. After waiting all the way through the queue -- and Batswana are very particular about queues -- E. and I submitted the paperwork and the P130 for the duplicate blue book. Upon receiving it, we took it to the other side of the room, where E. proceeded to fill it out with his information, as if he were selling it to himself. So we had to go back to the counter and pay another P130 for a second duplicate. I filled this out, we submitted it, and -- presto! -- the car was legally mine.

I actually walked out of the door at this point before realizing that, although the car was mine, I hadn't paid the registration fee. I went back to the counter again, and asked to buy a registration disk. The woman behind the counter took my money, gave me the disk, and said, "Don't come back again."

This was all over by lunchtime. I was shocked. I had expected at least a little yelling and some public humiliation over the fact that I had failed the register the car, that I had been driving around with an expired registration disk, etc. I was anticipating some commentary to be made in front of me (of which I would understand only a tiny bit) on the sheer stupidity and nerve of makhoa. None of this transpired -- at least, not in my presence. Sure, I think I paid a P50 late-free for the registration disk, but P50 seems peanuts compared to the bureaucratic wrath I was expecting.