Brother, I am human: Bus touts part 1

"Brother I am human, the company will pay me if I take you to buy a ticket, and you pay the same price"

So I was greeted by a tout as I approached the bus station in Lusaka. Like almost every bus station in Africa, the terminal in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, is flooded with touts or bus boys. As soon as they see you heading towards the gate and they sense a traveller they surround you, trying to find out where you are going and then leading you to the ticket office. The station in Lusaka is not that large,there is room for perhaps fifty or sixty buses, and there are twenty or thirty companies, all pretty much serving the same destinations for the same price. Thus the tout has a limited opportunity to catch you before you get in to the terminal and to drag you to a window to get his commission. A tout explained to me that where a bus ticket costs 90,000 Zambian Kwacha (US$20), the tout will receive 5,000 kwacha (US$1.25). Passengers with or without a tout will be charged the same, bus companies have simply calculated their fares on the basis that most people will come with a tout and the company will only receive the ticket price less the commission. This is fairly standard practice across Africa.

Likewise in most African countries, whilst the population - particularly between 18 and 35 years, is booming, levels of unemployment and under employment are high, and continue to grow despite the best (but usually fairly feeble) efforts of local governments and the pointy heads from NGOs and the IMF and World Bank.

So, on the one hand taking people to a ticket window provides otherwise unemployed people - usually young men - with an income that they would not otherwise have. It can be presumed that most young men are either supporting their own family, or their parents and siblings, so several people probably live off this meagre income. The income probably dissuades them from turning towards petty crime as the principal way to gain an income, making places safer for tourists like me to visit. On the other hand the touts actually provide little of use - most passengers could find the ticket window/bus themselves, whilst driving up the price of the ticket. (As the ticket price is set taking in to account payments to touts, passengers don't really have a choice in the matter because even those who don't use a tout are effectively paying for the touts.) This tout component of the price means that transport is more expensive, and the flow on effects on the cost of goods and services throughout society is inflationary - as price of the goods or services carried on the bus are higher because of the tout payment, the person purchasing the good or services will increase the charge when they sell them on, so on and so on ad infinitum. The price goes up for now real benefit - the evidence of this is the high price of transport and goods in Zambia.
Further, accepting touting as a means to generate employment seems to be self defeating, it discourages people from finding or creating jobs which require skill and training and actually provide a beneficial service, and instead encourages young men to remain in a low skilled job which is more lucrative.

What is a poor, ignorant tourist to do when confronted by a tout with such a request?