Easter has arrived early at South Africa’s Komatipoort border with Mozambique, where transporters and truck drivers are capturing and sharing video footage on industry WhatsApp groups all showing the same thing – lawlessness and government inaction.
Sources who leaked the footage to Freight News and whose names are withheld to protect them, say transgression on the N4 Corridor crossing to the Port of Maputo vary in degrees of delinquency and dangerous criminality.
Overloaded trucks, cars skipping the road freight queue, ‘trade facilitating’ law enforcers at various checkpoints, illegal cargo and panga-wielding robbers attacking pedestrians in plain view – it’s all happening at the Lebombo Border Post.
The most disturbing video content shows a man on the side of the road being accosted by four assailants, one of whom wields a panga.
The assailants seem to be pulling the man’s pants down but through translation it’s been confirmed that the truck driver who took the video, saw how the victim was stripped of cash and other belongings.
Although the victim was clearly pleading with his attackers, the panga wielder at one stage hoists his weapon as if ready to strike.
“These are border hoppers,” a source said, “a common problem at the border, yet though we report it to the police nothing gets done about it.”
On the cargo side of things, trucks heading into Mozambique are queuing all the way from the BP garage close to the border gate to Kilometre Seven, the truck-staging area before the N4 turn-off to Komatipoort.
With mineral volumes through the border being relatively low at the moment, it’s not the queueing of complying manganese and coal tippers that’s a problem, rather the brazen and apparent free-for-all lawlessness.
Sources say overloaded bakkies (pick-ups) pass the queue without being stopped, despite clearly carrying informal cargo.
Overloading extends to interlink maize trucks with a gross-vehicles mass limit of 56 tonnes, of which 22 tonnes is the truck itself.
Although trucks are not allowed to carry more than 34 tonnes, footage has been captured showing how some maize trucks carry at least twice the legal payload, “and yet nothing gets done,” the one source said.
At the maize warehouse, the BP garage and at the control-zone gate known as ‘The Canopies’, various government agency representatives are accused of turning a blind eye, while transporters allege it’s a waste of time to report wrongdoing.
In one of the videos shared with Freight News, a traffic police vehicle can be seen following a clearly overloaded bakkie to the border gate without stopping the vehicle.
An industry stakeholder said all related government agencies and law enforcement departments had been told about what’s going on at Lebombo – to no avail.
The stakeholder said the situation at the border made a mockery of the statement released earlier this week by the Cross-Border Road Transport Agency, in which a commitment was made to increased vigilance at South Africa’s trade corridors with its neighbours.
