Ramokgwebana border post, Botswana – An immigration officer takes a long look at the faded passport, tracing its worn edges with one finger. Then he looks up at the woman before him, searching her face. She shuffles uneasily, heavy luggage strapped to her back. The official’s gaze returns to the document one last time before he stamps it and nods, granting the weary traveller the right to cross into Botswana. As she walks away her step is noticeably faster, and lighter, than when she first approached the checkpoint. Grace (not her real name) is one of many Zimbabweans who buy Botswana passports in an attempt to escape what she calls harassment by immigration officials and other law enforcers. ‘What drove me to buy the Botswana passport is the amount of suspicion, and problems, associated with the Zimbabwean document. The moment someone sees you have a Zimbabwean passport they assume, or suspect, you are in Botswana for all the wrong reasons,’ explains Grace. ‘To escape torture’, she had no alternative but to buy a Botswana passport for half a million Zimbabwe dollars, or P500 (two-and-a-half times the average monthly income in Zimbabwe). She says the price – while excessive, by Zimbabwe standards – is worth every cent because it guarantees her peace of mind.

She’s been living in the country, illegally, for three years and has become conversant in the local language, SeTswana. That, in turn, makes it difficult for officials to detect she is a foreigner. Yet there’s no denying that her being the bearer of the correct (albeit false) documentation helps. ‘At the border post you do not have to bother about long queues,’ smiles Grace, adding ‘Botswana citizens to not have to queue.’ Some locals say Botswana’s economic prosperity and political stability has an unforeseen cost: it is attracting thousands of Zimbabwean – and other – refugees, who are fleeing either political or economic hardship in their homelands. Grace says locals are equally to blame. She maintains Batswana sell their own passports to a syndicate, which reportedly operates from outside the Gaborone offices of the Department of Immigration. Citizens sell their passports for as little as P100 (Z$150,000) to a network of underground buyers, most of whom are either locals or South Africans. Previous owners then report to officials, claiming their passports have been ‘lost’. The travel documents are then smuggled into South Africa, where changes – including the addition of a photograph, portraying the new bearer – are made. Botswana citizen Michael Mogomotsi (not his real name) acknowledges he is aware of the syndicate, adding there is a ‘thriving market’, as he puts it, for the Botswana passport. He told ZimOnline South Africa has the sophisticated technology needed to swap snapshots and replace the plastic seal which incorporates security features like the Botswana coat of arms. ‘When the passports are brought back to Botswana it’s difficult to spot the changes.’ Members of the syndicate prefer older passports. ‘This’, says Mogomotsi, ‘is because it is easier for immigration officials to detect changes on new documents’.

Grace admits to assisting fellow countrymen and -women in obtaining Botswana passports. But it is not only Zimbabweans who want the document. Grace says she knows Zambians, for example, who are also loyal customers of the syndicate. One of the reasons for the Botswana passport’s popularity is the fact that its bearers do not require a visa when travelling to most countries abroad. ‘Soon the passports will be smuggled to Zimbabwe too, to be sold to those intending to visit either Britain or America,’ says Farai Chiroza, a Zimbabwean citizen. He predicts the situation will remain unchanged, if not worsen, unless the economic and political conditions in his birthplace improve. In short, Chiroza says, people are ‘desperate to escape their woes’. But the future, at least for prospective passport purchasers, is not rosy. A Senior Immigration Officer, who requested anonymity, says Botswana authorities are investigating the syndicate. He adds his department is busy creating a passport that will be increasingly more difficult for criminals to forge or alter.

Source: ZWNEWS.COM