Cargo processing at South Africa’s Limpopo River crossing into Zimbabwe has slowed to a trickle because there’s not enough diesel to keep generators going.
This emerged after power utility, Eskom, announced it was implementing stage 6 load shedding to stabilise the grid, with resulting effects rippling right across the country.
South-bound traffic at the busy Beitbridge border (BBR) in particular is heavily affected as systems south of the transit can barely keep pace with demand north of the border.
According to Mike Fitzmaurice, Chief Executive of the Federation of East and Southern African Road Transport Associations (Feesarta), it’s anyone’s guess where the southbound queue could be sitting as transporters wait to pass through customs.
He estimated that it could be anywhere between three and four kilometres.
This morning, a member of Fesarta’s Transit Assistance group said he had trucks stuck in Zimbabwe taking a day to cross the Limpopo.
Disillusioned with what’s going on, the cross-border operator said it was utterly frustrating how BBR officials and government agencies such as the Border Management Authority (BMA) were bungling basic things.
Fitzmaurice said it was probably because Saturday’s sudden escalation from stage 4 to 6 took border officials by surprise.
“Four-hour outages at regular intervals mean they can’t keep pace with throughput requirements.”
He said northbound processing was also affected.
“Trucks that have been released already can proceed into Zimbabwe but because it appears they didn’t buy enough diesel to see them through this difficult time, South Africa’s side of the border is affected on the whole.”
With nothing concrete offered by authorities about what’s being done to remedy the crucial crossing, the most important connecting point for supply chain between South Africa and Zimbabwe, transporters are at breaking point.
“Where is the BMA?” said the transporter Freight News spoke to.
Remarking on past announcements (*) that the agency would receive R124.9 million in government funding to kit out its personnel with uniforms and 4x4s, a transporter with trucks stuck in Zim said: “They have all the money in the world to make all the plans in the world but they can’t keep their sh*t together.”
* Read this for context: https://tinyurl.com/yasnhez7.
