Getting your driving licence in Tanzania

Of course we need a 4x4 in Mtwara. The hospital is too far to walk, there is no public transportation to our place. The first fruit stall is half an hour walk; the first shops an hour and the market one hour and a half. Good reasons to buy ourselves a car.

To have a car registered in your name, you need to request a Tax Identification Number (TIN) from the Tanzanian Revenue Authority (TRA). With your TIN-number you can also request a Tanzanian Driving Licence at the TRA, so we thought being efficient to do that all at once. Here's the trick.

1. Present yourself at 8am at the TRA supplying your postal address, full name and copies of passport (they can't make copies there, so make sure you bring them yourself)
2. Line up at another desk where you have to show your paperwork for them to make passport pictures and where you have to give your digital signature which takes some efforts and where they digitalise all your fingerprints in fancy computers donated by the US of A so that Mr Obama can track you everywhere in Tanzania if you're planning to become a terrorist.
3. Wait for some time until someone calls you.
4. Collect your TIN-number and complete the Driving Licence Application Form.
5. Have yourself being told that you need to go to the police station for a Competence Test.
6. Find out at the police station that the officer in charge of driving licences already left his office for the day.
7. Come back on day 2 for the Competence Test. The officer will use your completed Driving Licence Application Form to complete some other forms before he brings you to another officer who looks pretty high in their hierarchy. After presenting yourself to him he will give you a small note on which he scribbles down his signature. Make sure you bring this note to the first officer who will complete his forms and brings you to another officer who writes your particulars in a book.
8. Go to the Regional Head Office further down the road. Climb up to the last floor to find a sleeping police officer at the Driving Licence Desk. Wake him nicely. Hand over your paperwork (don't forget the small note with scribbled signature!) for him to enter this into a computer (at the other place they didn't have computers).
9. Go back to the TRA to show you passed the Competence Test and get new instructions to pay your driving licence at the bank.
10. Go to the bank and pay 40.000 shilling each.
11. Go back to the TRA and show your receipt to collect your driving licence.
12. Wait for further instructions.
13. After an hour or two, find out that the driving licence printer is out of order.
14. Come back on another day to collect your driving licence.

Luckily the whole procedure is explained on the TRA's wall (see photo).

Buying a car in Tanzania

Down here in Mtwara there are not many options to buy a car, unless you are fortunate to meet another ‘mzungu' (white person) who is just leaving Tanzania and selling his car. 10km on Tanzanian roads trashes a car more than a regular road trip from Holland to Southern France. So, we started looking for a car that has been imported just now... from Japan, as it seems that all cars in Tanzania originally came from Japan.

We learned that cars in Tanzania are much more expensive than back home, not only for a mzungu, but also for Tanzanians. There are not many car factories in Africa and because most cars have to be imported, there is no such thing as a properly functioning competitive car market. Secondly, in every African chain everyone tries to get its bit. First of all the government by putting 65% import taxes on top of the car's value. All cars imported from Japan to Tanzania must undergo a 'Road Worthiness Inspection' (as if all these dumped buses here are ‘road worthy'). Since Fukushima, you need a certificate that proves the car is free from radiation and not a nuclear bomb. On top of that there's a port 'lane' tax because your car is driven off the boat onto that piece of concrete, there's a dumping tax as they feel in Tanzania that the Japanese are dumping their rubbish cars into Tanzania and this is such an inconvenience (keep in mind the cars are in amazing condition). Then if the car is older than 2001 then there's some extra tax it just goes on and on. So we had to reconsider our savings realising that we're losing some weeks of safari. Luckily they say cars don't depreciate that much thanks to the factors described above. Hopefully inflation and deteriorating exchange rates will not interfere with this...

As there are no companies importing cars in Mtwara, we took the opportunity of being in Dar in December to visit as much dealers as we could. We started asking around for second hand cars, but after having been directed to dodgy places with dodgy people and dodgy cars, we learned that a car that just has been imported from Japan is a ‘new' car for Tanzania (no matter how many km it has been driven already there). So we turned to dealers of ‘new cars' of about 10 ten years old and having mileages of around 30.000km (yeah right, but as the dealers they say: mileages always lie).

On our last day in Dar we found the 4x4 we were looking for in a showroom that was still under construction. Their office however was located at the other end of the city so we went there and closed a pretty good deal. In the first week of January (during our holidays) we came back to Dar to inspect the car; to have them doing the registration in our name and arrange for all other required formalities (insurance, road safety sticker, fire sticker and some more) and to pay (in cash). Obviously this process took also some more days than expected but after that we drove happily back to Mtwara (see photos), although the Japanese navigation screen kept on directing us to the Yellow Sea.