A queue of north-bound trucks at South Africa’s Beitbridge Border Post with Zimbabwe has been cleared, Mike Fitmaurice of the Transit Assistance Bureau (Transist) has confirmed.
Sunday afternoon’s bottleneck was caused when trucks from two different parks, one at the border and another five kilometres south, left at more or less the same time, cramming into the control zone area.
Fitzmaurice, who is often scathing of cargo procedures at the border, said non-compliance by some truck drivers remained a serious concern.
He said waiting time south of the border often related to trucks idling at the weighbridge, refusing to proceed.
“It takes less than a minute to get weighed,” he said.
On Sunday afternoon, Transist received footage of one truck standing about 90 minutes, holding up the queue into the weighbridge area.
“This shouldn’t have to be,” Fitzmaurice said, “unless there was something wrong.”
He stressed that under ordinary circumstances, load weighing was a quick and fluid process.
Asked why an operator’s rig was holding up others, he said it was often because of overloading and the expectation that a corruptible official might approach the truck and wave the driver through for a ‘fee’.
He said although in-transit carriers heading to Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were almost completely avoiding Zimbabwe because of bad roads and logistical snags, the Limpopo crossing remained busy.
“There are a lot of loads from South Africa heading into Zim this time of year, and the border will most likely get very busy.”
The in-transit guys were almost all going through Botswana, he added.
