After a brief period of some respite at South Africa’s N4 Lebombo border with Mozambique, the volume of ore trucks has again increased, bringing with it the same old issues – crime, damage to road infrastructure, and a highway packed with trucks and attendant safety and security concerns.
Over the past few weeks, tipper drivers have frequently queued on either side of the border, grappling to squeeze through a transit simply not designed to carry spikes in the trucking of coal and manganese to the Port of Maputo.
In a desperate bid to prevent a repeat of the queue chaos seen at the corridor crossing recently, stakeholders met at a local church in Komatipoort to agree on prevention and control measures.
According to Cobus Botha who heads up the Nkomazi East Farmers Association, a lieutenant colonel from the South African Police Service (Saps) attended the meeting and pledged tighter law enforcement of the queue, threatening to impound the trucks of transgressing operators.
Whether this will have the desired result, considering past law enforcement failures that necessitated taxi bosses enforcing violent vigilante control over drivers skipping the queue, remains to be seen.
Botha says improvement through law and order is possible.
“It’s all they can do at this stage, to control the queue. They (Saps) have brought up 15 more officers from KwaZulu-Natal to help control the queue, staging additional police at the Sasol petrol station near the border (the scene of regular queue-related violence), along the Strydom Block Road (south of the N4), and at Monkey Bridge in the Hectorspruit area.”
He said it was all intended to control traffic, especially at night when drivers skip the queue, ensuring that trucks fall into line single file in an orderly fashion so that ordinary commuters can safely use the highway.
“The problem isn’t necessarily with the tippers at the moment, but with general cargo trucks. This was clear from the meeting. Tip truck operators are generally willing to cooperate, but it’s the general cargo trucks that are taking chances.
“They skip the queue, saying they’re carrying perishables but aren’t. And tippers that are carrying perishables such as bulk loads of sugar, onions, and potatoes, are grouped with the coal and manganese carriers. So it’s causing a lot of enmity between operators.”
Botha said because of the waiting time at the border, a lot of drivers were falling back on old tricks – using roads meant for agricultural means to bypass the N4 queue to the border.
Apart from the southern Strydom Block road that makes a triangular detour through farming territory, pounding gravel tracks graded by farmers to dust, there is the Tenbosch Road north of the N4 that loops around via Marloth Park and the Crocodile River to Komatipoort.
“A lot of the trucks queueing on the N4 carry abnormal loads that aren’t meant for roads like Tenbosch. These roads can handle trucks serving citrus farms south of the Kruger National Park and are not meant for carrying tippers loaded with coal.
“Tippers are destroying our roads when they use roads like Tenbosch. You must see what that road into town looks like. It’s breaking up.”
Botha added he wasn’t not too confident that anything urgent would emerge from Barbara Creecy, the new transport minister.
“Her previous portfolio was environmental, right? (forestry, fisheries and the environment). Well, we complained about ore trucks tipping coal dust out of empty buckets by the side of the road, posing a pollution risk from black soot leaching into groundwater.
“Nothing was done about it.”
