Around 50km outside of Ondangwa we were cruising along on some lovely road when a woman in a blue uniform came running to stop us from a small shaded area on the side of the road. She was quite frantic but I thought nothing of it and continued driving, when a few minutes later a car pulled ahead of us blinking it’s siren and asked us to pull over.
A traffic policeman then got out and proceeded to tell me that I had been driving 70km in a 60km per hour zone and that we had to pay a fine for the penalty. We drove back to where his speed camera was stationed and I asked him to prove that it was my car and not the car ahead of me or behind me that caused the offence as we all were travelling at the same speed but he couldn’t and continued to talk at me rather than to me.
His female colleague was also talking at the same time and I told them to speak one at a time so I could follow what they were saying, they didn’t like that! After I had given them my driver’s license (a laminated copy) they also told me that I should give them my passport and then go and pay a fine at a police station before returning to collect my passport.
I told them that I was not going to hand over my passport but if they gave me the ticket I would then go and talk about this at their police station. They refused to give me a ticket without my passport and I asked them to show me where it stated that I should leave my passport with them but they couldn’t show me anything.
Even after I asked them to come with me to the station they said they could only do this after they finished their shift! We weren’t getting anywhere with them so we got the directions to the nearest police station a good 40 km back from where we had come from and went inside the station. The officers inside the station were very nice people and as it was the weekend it seemed very chilled (maybe that was every day in Ondangwa!) and they tried to see what they could do for us without the speeding ticket and proceeded to wait a few hours while one phone call led to another.
The two traffic police officers then arrived at the station and began to talk quite rudely in front of Reka and me about how we refused to give them our passports and that we should stand in the area where ‘suspects’ should remain, I then told him that I didn’t like his attitude and he was being unprofessional and that I wanted to speak to his boss. He didn’t like this and told us to pay and that he’d be back in a few hours to check we had sorted everything out.
As the police station couldn’t do anything we waited around for another 10 minutes and then left hoping that the officers had driven in another direction, luckily for us they had and all I lost out of all of this was time and my copy of my driver’s license!
