In what is widely regarded as a recipe for yet more freight frustration on the North South Corridor (NSC), from this Wednesday truck drivers entering Zambia will be required to furnish border officials with a medical certificate proving that they have been tested and cleared of having the coronavirus.
This is after the Ministry of Health in Lusaka ruled that unless truck drivers could prove that they were Covid-clear they would not be allowed into the country.
At the behest of its members the Federation of East and Southern African Road Transport Associations (Fesarta) engaged with the relevant authorities over the matter. “But they won’t back down,” Fesarta chief executive Mike Fitzmaurice said.
He added that authorities had even indicated that they were willing to help obtain the relevant certificates for drivers at borders such as Chirundu, a testing procedure that ordinarily takes up to three days.
And although the certificates will be valid for 14 days, it is generally felt that one two-week period will not be enough for a return trip in and out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s copper mining province of Haut Katanga.
“It can take up to 10 or 11 days to complete a trip in and out of the Copperbelt, and it also depends on what load you’re carrying. Taking fuel up to Lubumbashi is one thing but say you’re taking flat-bed load up and returning with copper from Kolwezi, it could take up two weeks in the DRC before your load is cleared. It means a lot of transporters will require two certificates - one on the northbound journey and another to come back.”
At a cost of about R850 and $30 for each test, transporters also feel that it will add to delays at Zambia’s notoriously problematic NSC borders of Chirundu and Kasumbalesa with Zimbabwe and the DRC respectively.
“It’s bound to happen,” Fitzmaurice said.
“Recently we’ve had such issues with congestion at Chirundu that it sometimes took trucks up to five days to get through the border. Now we have this too - and let’s not even mention Kasumbalesa.”
The level of frustration among road freighters on the corridor was such, Fitzmaurice said, that the restriction would most likely be exploited for the sake of criminal expediency.
“Mark my words, within in a few days you’ll have fraudulent certificates for sale to truck drivers that can afford it.”