‘Holistic approach is crucial to improving regional logistics’

Southern Africa must pool its resources to re-imagine its railway sector otherwise repetition of services and red tape will see its efforts fail. Deputy Minister of Transport, Jeremy Cronin, said there was no point in wasting resources in every country, setting up a rail safety regulator. “We are wasting by being repetitive and by having so many regulators we create our own red tape that causes major delays and confusion.” He said while it was important that South Africa did not sell itself as “Uncle Sam in Africa”, it had to take a leading role in creating synergy in the region. “We need one single regulator to implement a uniform policy across the region that will facilitate and allow for the increase of trade. In this one stop borders are very necessary.” He said while Chirundu – the first one-stop border in Southern Africa had been in operation for some time, it was having little impact on the movement of freight as the focus remained on passengers. “We must make it easy to move freight and that means having systems across the countries that allow for this. As Africans we have many technical problems as well as a lack of capacity, but finding solutions to this is important.” Cronin said a logistics system was more than just establishing a cross-border rail network. “It includes the entire package – all transport, but also Customs, taxes, engineering, construction. We have to pool our resources and share across our region to bring rail back to this part of Africa, but also to allow us to create an infrastructure that is easy to use and to our benefit.”