Yet more evidence has come to light of what it costs long-haul transporters serving the copper mining area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who have no recourse other than transiting through the notoriously fickle border post of Kasumbalesa.
For weeks now the crossing between the Copperbelt and Haut Katanga provinces in Zambia and the DRC respectively have been like a tourniquet on the transport industry, costing hauliers time and money, and severely compromising the humanitarian rights of drivers.
For days on end truckers are forced to idle south of the border while government officials – when in attendance – spend their time pointing fingers at one another.
Zambia says it’s because the DRC is busy with border facility upgrades north of the border.
The DRC claims it’s because of Covid protocol being resisted south of the border.
Transporters mostly agree that hold-ups appear to be a Zambian issue, with facilities south of the border being so bad the situation is best described as gridlocked.
Brief flickers of hope that the once relatively smooth transit would be unblocked emerged when the queue shrank to the little Zambian hamlet of Chililabombwe some 20 kilometres south of Kasumbalesa.
At one stage trucks stood bumper-to-bumper all the way to Chingola, about 50 kilometres south, where the T3 leads south to Kitwe.
It’s fitting that it was there, in Kitwe, that Mbahupu Hippy Tjivikua of the Walvis Bay Corridor Group recently highlighted what waiting time meant for drivers.
Representing a country whose corridor feed to its principal port is dependent on ramped-up efficiencies at congested crossings such as Kasumbalesa, the group’s executive said it was unacceptable that drivers sometimes had to wait five days before finally getting into the DRC.
This morning a bulk freighter hauling Hazchem to Lubumbashi in Haut Katanga provided hard facts to underscore Tjivikua’s sentiments.
“We have a truck that arrived at the first checkpoint between Chili and Chingola on the 3rd of May at about 15:30. He moved slowly and throughout the following evenings, finally reaching the border at about 11:30 yesterday. When he finally left the border on the DRC side, it was 14:40.”
Let’s just stop there for a moment: that’s almost two days to travel less than 50 kilometres and pass through a border.
On top of the waiting time and the cost to trade, there is the deleterious condition of the roads in Zambia, a country famous for – or notorious for – having the most tolled road network in Africa.
The same transporter shared information with Freight News of drivers reporting tyres and undercarriage parts like spring shackles not lasting because of the crater-like road surface in Zambia.
A colleague of Tjivikua’s, Lesley Mpofu, who heads up the Trans-Kalahari Corridor Secretariat, had similar gripes to share with industry when he told a Southern African Customs Union gathering in Gaborone recently that transport costs were pushing cargo businesses to the brink.
Inefficiencies at crossings, corridors and the like, he said, had been calculated by the African Union to cost transport and trade about $75 billion per annum.
The cost that hasn’t been calculated though is the impact on the mental wellbeing of cross-border transporters and their drivers, who are subjected to inhumane conditions while border officials and their executive superiors perfect the art of thumb rolling.
