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Published: March 25th 2009
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Malai Freight Forwarders
My clearing agent on Samora Avenue Time for another update on this - the port of Dar Es Salaam struggles keeping up with the amount of ships coming in, so there is a 2 week delay for them to unload, hence you can see lots of big vessels anchored in the bay. This applied to ‘Karijn’ with my car on it as well and Roselyn, my clearing agent told me, they cannot start the clearing process until the vessel has docked in the port. At least I was in Dar now and could take all the documents to her office and they wanted a fair amount of them and all the original ones: passport, visa, work permit, MOT certificate, sales contract, shipping papers. I didn’t feel too good about giving all this away, but then I didn’t have much choice. In addition this prevented me from opening a bank account as I needed all the original documents for that as well and now they were at the customs office.
After some almost daily visits to Roselyn’s office two weeks later, she finally got the valuation of the car from the customs office confirmed - slight downturn, they valued it at double what I had paid for it.
Considering the duties surmounting over 50%, not something to easily agree to. So I surly did not want to settle for that and asked Roselyn to contest it. This meant having to wait a few more days and therefore having to pay port fees for the additional days as well. But I thought, it was worth trying. Roselyn said, they weren’t satisfied with the contract as proof of value, I needed something else. Fortunately the eBay page was still live including pictures of the car with registration plates visible. So we printed some nice colour copies and also the winning bid email and I kept my fingers crossed that it will work. Roselyn suggested for me to come with her to the customs office to speak to the assigned officer in person. The customs office was quite a sight, this big hall filled with agents all shouting at the counters with glass barriers - reminiscing a mixture of an old stock exchange and an old bank in Southern Europe. Roselyn fought her way through to the front of one of the counters and was calling our guy, who completely ignored us and then walked away and through the back upstairs to some offices. After half an hour he came back, just to keep on ignoring us. As it was past 5pm by now, the end of their office hours, there was no hope of getting anywhere. So Roselyn made some sort of written contest on the documents, stapled the eBay print outs to it and stuffed it through the counter window.
Three days of nervous waiting passed - with daily walks to Roselyn’s office in my lunch break. I was hoping, if I keep on pushing Roselyn, she might push the customs office more as well… Then yes, finally, they agreed to it!!! I was so happy, but then it was waiting again! Now that I had accepted the value, they had to issue the papers for me to be allowed to pay customs duty. I had started withdrawing money already a few days ago, with the maximum amount of 400,000 Shillings (a bit less than $400/£200) at the ATM and the biggest note being 10,000 Shillings, this was a scarily big bundle of money to carry around each time. When it finally came to taking the money to the customs office, I had big bundles stuffed in various pockets and a second pair of underwear - over one million Shillings is a lot of bank notes to hide indeed!
The cashier’s section of the customs office was another interesting experience: There was this queue of people wanting to pay their duties, which wouldn’t be that extraordinary weren’t it for everyone for having to pay in cash and in Tanzanian Shillings… So there I was in line with people, each one having stacks of money some 20 - 30cm high! At least they had counting machines, so it didn’t take too long.
Naively I assumed, I would be getting my car now, but no it was supposed to be taking another day for the customs office to issue the papers to the port authorities, for them to be starting their procedure of calculating port fees, letting me pay them and maybe even getting the car…
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