Fighting a Losing ‘Ngungula’ Battle

The ground is littered with cuca beer bottle tops and the smell of petrol hangs heavily in the air. Both are of Angolan extraction and flow freely at the Oshikango bus stop.

A visit to the Helao Nafidi town council this week left me with a realisation that the police are fighting a losing battle against ‘ngungula’: the illegal art of fuel importation through the Namibian and Angolan borders. The fuel is sold in Namibia for a fraction of the price at the official pump. 

The constabulary are visible and combative, marching about with great purpose. But, apart from confiscating a few small sausages from Angola in brightly coloured plastic wrapping, they didn’t net any serious contraband.

Of that, Oshikango drips in excess.

The bus stop is a bustling market of wood sellers, food vendors and hawkers of tiny bottles of whiskey that originated in neither Scotland nor Ireland, and are residing in Namibia as legally as a sack of cannabis. 

Vendors cluster close to the Angolan border, hoping to catch the lucrative foot traffic of day visitors to the town’s legitimate shops. 

But the police and local council don’t want them there. They view this vibrant, albeit chaotic, micro-economy as a stain on civic order. 

To solve this, the authorities, in their infinite bureaucratic wisdom, built another omataala (open market). It sits pristinely on the other side of town, far away from the border, far away from the foot traffic, and miles away from the instant, bush service station that the ngungula traders and their steady flow of customers set up. 

Asking a small vendor to move is like asking a shark to set up shop in the desert, but the council official in his air-conditioned office undoubtedly considers it a brilliant compromise.

And so, the grand farce plays out several times daily. A police bakkie rolls up, its blue lights flashing with institutional rage. 

The officers jump out, trying to look imposing but the border is a sieve and the local youth possess the agility of panicked gazelles. They sell five litres of petrol for anything between N$85 and N$95. Namibians pay around N$23 a litre of petrol.

The regular police visits unleashe a sudden flurry of activity – traders cover their wares in black bags while others scamper away from the scene. 

The formal business owners, sitting inside their empty brick-and-mortar petrol stations, watch through pristine glass windows, weeping into their tax returns as thousands of litres of untaxed petrol pass right by their dry pumps.

As soon as the police vehicle departs, the market reconstitutes itself with magical efficiency. The teenagers return, grinning, and tapping their five-litre jugs with righteous triumph.

Talk of rent-seeking is rife, of course. Rumours swirl that a few shiny coins or a cold beverage often buy a very specific, temporary blindness from those responsible for enforcing the law. 

Even here, where Namibia washes out into Angola in a few muddy streams, human nature remains delightfully predictable. But even here, it is Namibia, mos. 

The authorities will continue to issue stern press statements, the local council will keep building empty market stalls in the middle of nowhere, and the ngungula vendors will keep fuelling Oshikango, one illicit, beer-scented litre at a time.

– News always deals with serious matters. Here we give you the other side.

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