Dr BenSaimba Mutamba Muchechetere

The Ministry of Transport's proposed e-hailing rules must be rejected in their current form. Nobody is against regulation. Emergency buttons, real-time tracking and identity checks on drivers will make passengers safer, especially women travelling at night. Those measures should stay. But much of what is being proposed has nothing to do with safety. Drivers must have held a licence for five years, and must also get a defensive driving certificate, a medical certificate and a special permit. For thousands of young Zimbabweans who have found work through inDrive in an economy with no jobs, these are walls built to keep them out. Drivers must also be Zimbabwean citizens. A permanent resident with a clean driving record is no danger to anyone. Safety is about how you drive, not where you were born. Worse still, passengers will have to hand over their national identity card or passport details for every cash trip and every trip between 9pm and 5am. That creates a government record of where ordinary people go at night. In a country with our history of monitoring journalists, activists and critics, that is not passenger safety. It is surveillance. The people hit hardest will be the poor, who pay in cash because they have no bank cards. This process began with complaints about lost revenue and pressure from traditional taxi operators. It shows. Keep the safety measures. Drop the citizenship rule, the passenger identity demands and the barriers designed to push young people out of work. Is it not ironic that our Government wants to stop foreign nationals from driving e-hailing cars in Zimbabwe? Go to Cape Town, Johannesburg or Durban, and the person driving you is more likely than not a Zimbabwean, either a permanent resident or a holder of the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP). What does it say about us when our own people earn a living next door doing exactly this job, while we block other Africans who live in our country legally from doing the same? It exposes the dysfunction of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The rules should be the same from one member state to the next. Once every country starts deciding for itself who may and may not work, regional integration becomes a slogan and nothing more. Imagine South Africa announcing tomorrow that Uber, Bolt and every other e-hailing service may only be driven by South African citizens, not permanent residents, not permit holders. We would call it xenophobia, and we would be right. So tell me, what makes it any different when we do it? Stopping people who are in our country legally from earning an honest living is xenophobia, whichever side of the Limpopo it happens on.