Efforts by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) to catch up with the age of digitisation will have to wait until 2021 because of capacity constraints.
This after the sub-Saharan road freight industry was given a December 1 deadline for cross-border transporters to sign up for electronic manifest declarations (EMDs).
Initial grumbling from private-sector concerns fell on deaf ears despite the Federation of East and Southern African Road Transport Associations (Fesarta) attempting to seek an extension of the deadline.
In an exhaustively detailed explanation sent to Fesarta, Zimra made it very clear that all preparations were in place and postponement of the new process was consequently not deemed necessary.
From the get go though it soon became apparent that Zimra itself was not in a position to cope with the number of transporters complying with online registration of electronic manifests.
“We told them so from the start but they wouldn’t listen,” Fesarta chief executive Mike Fitzmaurice said.
A lag of login details followed and, as a result, Zimra’s humble-pie moment involved allowing the industry the leniency they had initially asked for.
It means that transporters arriving at borders such as Beitbridge will be able to do manual manifests provided that they can prove registering for Zimra’s new EMD regime but that they are still waiting for login details.
Transporters arriving at Zim borders who haven’t registered will be pulled from the queue and required to apply for electronic manifests.
Fitzmaurice said it was expected that EMDs going into Zim would be fully operational early next year.
