Dear Freight News team
I read with interest your post from February 14, “SADC members call for corridor-wide approach to border challenges.”
The first paragraph reads: “Member states of the Southern African Development Community have called for a corridor-wide approach to infrastructure development and trade facilitation to address emerging challenges along the entire North-South corridor.”
A paragraph on or so, it continues with another wordy gem: “A corridor-wide approach hinges on the pillars of customs and trade facilitation, transport and trade-related infrastructure, security and immigration. The meeting further recommended an action matrix, whose main recommendations will ensure trade facilitation along the North-South corridors.”
I’m particularly amused by the following phrase, “action matrix”, but have to wonder, what does it really mean?
To be very honest, it sounds as if someone contracted Deepak Chopra as a speechwriter for a SADC executive.
The problem with corridors in our region is that the public sector representatives whose job it is to help the cross-border logistics community with notoriously problematic borders, such as Kasumbalesa, are the same overpaid people who couldn’t point out the front end of a truck if their lives depended on it.
The trade facilitation they speak of in such highfalutin terms remains absent on corridors such as the North-South route to the Copperbelt because hinterland transport snags, and pretending to sort them out, is the real reason for their existence.
Without them, there would be no reason for funding from commodity-based manufacturing economies like Germany to help sub-Saharan resource countries with their minerals exports.
Over the last 15 years, the European Union has ploughed hundreds of millions of euros into the public service sector of sub-Saharan countries for “fact-finding” missions to improve cross-border logistics.
Every time the EU invests in seeking solutions for nagging “exports evacuation” – another nice-sounding phrase I’ve read somewhere – government ministers and their useless cronies flock to expensive events where speakers feel very smart to “observe protocol” ad nauseam before they indulge in vague nonsense.
The reason why they come up with crap like “action matrix” is because behind the high-minded camouflage lurks cluelessness.
These funding parasites aren’t in the business of solving border problems and related trade and transport issues. Their business is begging-bowl politics. If they succeed in sorting out old issues like recurring congestion problems at borders like Beitbridge and Kasumbalesa, the funding will most likely dry up.
Where some sort of effort is made to open the bonnet and see what’s happening in the engine, it’s the very process of so-called “solution-seeking” that’s the actual problem. Recently, it was reported that cargo flows at Beitbridge had much improved following a survey that detected a truck release level of 75% for three hours or less on the Zimbabwean side of the border.
What the survey failed to show was that this success rate was at Zimborders, the private concessionaire at the border, but that unnecessary delays at Condep (Container Depot) and 100% cargo scanning continue to cause non-tariff barriers.
It also didn’t make mention of northbound trucks waiting south of the border for a day or more to receive their release documentation from Zim.
Had the survey been conducted unannounced, as opposed to informing border personnel that service delivery at Beitbridge was about to be evaluated, the rosy picture of the survey would have been more akin to exposing the ongoing incompetence of various government agencies.
It’s a joke, to be very honest. When I read nonsense like “action matrix”, it makes me think of the suits that often attend meetings intended to troubleshoot border problems in our region. They come with fancy clothes in government convoys to talk about trade issues they know very little about.
There are exceptions, of course. One of them was John Rocha of the dtic, sadly lost to logistics because of his untimely death last year. He was a straight shooter, but he was up against fat cats who are only in it for the money, lots of it, euros by the bucketful!
Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t popular people for various reasons, but they’re right about cutting the purse strings of certain funding agencies. The reason is very simple—funding is a racket.
It pays for people who think they know how to help the logistics community but don’t own transport companies and lecture us on what to do.
Because they’re not in the trenches like the rest of us, they don’t know how tough it is to run a logistics business in the sub-Saharan cross-border trade.
They only arrive when the cameras flash and the spreads are laid out after high-level meetings. They like the trips to exotic destinations to “accumulate learnings” and all the other spoils.
As long as these leeches prey on logistics, long-distance haulage will remain hobbled by the high-paying business of bottlenecking.
Yours in pit-to-port road freight.
Anonymous
