The regional streamlining of supply chains will depend on five areas of a Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), but it’s two of these that will be crucial to South Africa as a perceived sub-Saharan leader – coordinated border management (CBM) and a national single window (NSW) system.
According to Bruce Ellison, consultant for the World Bank’s trade and investment team, South Africa has, as a whole, made great progress across a number of the TFA’s best practice elements.
Apart from the two highlighted areas, the other three include transparent and efficient policies, risk management, and authorised economic operator programmes.
However, addressing last week’s “summit” by the South African Association of Freight Forwarders, Ellison said CBM and NSW were critical areas where South Africa could really step up and become an interactive, modern, border trade environment.
Speaking at a time when the Beitbridge crossing between South Africa and Zimbabwe had yet again descended into chaos, the sub-categories of CBM and NSW made for some prescient reading.
As per a TFA slide Ellison used during his presentation, CBM will require: coordinated border operations, collaborative policy and governance structures, cooperation with neighbours, and the new Border Management Agency (sic) to work alongside SA Revenue Customs (Sars) at the borders.
As for the other TFA element crucial to South Africa, establishing an NSW system, the slide stipulated that it would require a single provision of electronic information to regulatory agencies, and interconnected trade systems for clearance and release, including permits and pre-border activities.
“Single windows are a complicated but important part of the overall journey,” Ellison said.
He added that it was equally important to tie all TFA elements into a coordinated and integrated approach.
In other words, working as one, which many transporters and trade facilitators say is not the case, as there appears to be a constant disconnect between South Africa’s various public sector stakeholders – the Department of Home Affairs, the Border Management Authority, Sars, and the Cross-border Road Transport Association.
Ellison summed it up saying: “There is the challenge in South Africa at the moment of getting all these agencies’ agendas together.”
