Gasosa

Let’s say you bought a second hand car, and want to have the paper work recognized by public office. First, you manage to get to the office. Well done. Then, and in spite of carrying all the necessary documents, one document is found to be missing: the fiscal id. It could be any other, really, but this is how the story goes. You confirm with the lady behind the counter that there’s no way you can have the document recognized without your fiscal id, so you submissively lead yourself downstairs while switching to bargaining mode. At the entrance, you expectedly find a big commotion of kids who had already insisted to help you as you went in. So you pick one and engage in the conversation. He says “car papers, fiscal id, no problem...”, so you start discussing the gasosa. If you have some skills, you might even cut it by half, and then you agree to hand him your documents, passport included. He goes to other kids, he buys official stamps from them, takes some photocopies and comes back a bit later to pick up the gasosa, plus, of course, the normal office price. Then you stay there and wait. You take your time to look at other people engaging with other kids, you wonder a bit about the ways of the world, and in conversation with your Angolan mate (without whom you’d have probably not felt comfortable enough to lose sight of your passport), you find out about the probable gasosa process. Part of it is for the kid who is selling you the service, part of it is for the guard who sells the kid the service of letting him through the back door. In the absence of more intermediaries, the rest is certainly for the lady who 40 minutes before assured you that there’s no way she could help you without your fiscal id. All in all, and to make the story short, I spent about a hundred dollars in gasosa that day. I am currently waiting for the vehicle property card, for the fiscal id, and for the Angolan driver’s license. These were all different gasosas. Some of these documents are known to take years to be ready (literally), in the absence, that is, of further, and greater, gasosa. Luckily you can usually drive (or do whatever documents allow you to do) with the respective receipts. Well, you may have to extend the receipt’s validity, in which case you know what you’ll have to do. On a related note, the IMF said Angola will grow by 35% this year (!). If they’re any precise on their numbers, it can only be more than that. Anyway, I can drive now.