Efforts by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) to prevent groceries bought in South Africa from being smuggled north across the border have resulted in truck queues stretching for kilometres south of Beitbridge.
This morning that queue was said to be about 12km long, stretching all the way to the China Mall on the outskirts north of Musina.
The backup comes after Zimra decided over the weekend to check each and every truck, according to Mike Fitzmaurice, chief executive of the Federation of East and Southern African Road Transport Associations (Fesarta).
On the WhatsApp group of Fesarta’s Transit Assistance bureau, Transist, transporters also complained of police exploiting the situation south of the border.
“They’re going up and down the line charging at least R500 to escort a truck to the front of the queue,” Fitzmaurice said.
Over the weekend one transporter told Transist that drivers were complaining that the cops were charging R600 for trucks wanting to jump the queue.
The same transporter said: “We haven’t moved one metre since 3am this morning.”
In addition to Zimra’s decision to tighten up on truck checking, staff working for the revenue authority also decided to embark on a go-slow for reasons unexplained.
However, the fact that Beitbridge is a 24-hour border comes at an added cost for long-distance truck drivers.
A Transist member said: “We as transporters are under increasing pressure as these delays affect our turnarounds. Drivers’ lives are endangered. They don’t sleep for two to three days as the queue crawls along, and when they are finally released they are exhausted. It is dangerous for all road users.”
Fitzmaurice said driver fatigue had resulted in serious accidents in the past.
Recently, in a truck park in Chirundu on the Zambezi border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, a mechanical horse was burnt out after a truck driver, edging along in a slow-moving queue, presumably tried to cook in his cab on a little gas burner.
“They often do things like that,” Fitzmaurice said at the time.
“They do everything in their cabs because they don’t want to lose their places in the queues.”
Speaking to Freight News this afternoon he said he was in the process of talking to Zimra in a bid to clear the queue.
“There are better ways to deal with smuggling. Checking each and every truck causes massive delays and forces drivers to sit in their trucks for days waiting to get through the border. By the time they finally get through they’re unfit to drive.”
It’s not the first time that border backups and their dangerous by-product, driver fatigue, have been brought to the attention of authorities.
It’s also not the first time that the corrupt practice of law enforcement officials bribing truck drivers waiting in border queues has been exposed.
