New Musina China City raises smuggling concerns

The opening of the giant China City centre at Musina (formerly Messina) in Limpopo province may make for an ideal sales point for goods smuggled in from neighbouring states by truck drivers, according to an executive with one of SA’s major cross-border road transporters. If it’s retail, he said, it’s not a problem, but if it’s wholesale, he is concerned that his drivers will be bribed to smuggle goods across the border. The first step for FTW was to contact Lyn Botha of clearing agents Sediba, based in the border town. “According to the terms of the municipal by-laws,” she told FTW, “it must be wholesale” – information that may lead to smuggling hassles for our concerned trucker, and his fellow cross-border transporters. Not that it’s any new problem, according to Basil Ferreira of Mbere Express, a truck monitoring operation also based in Musina. “It’s not that China City will start a new thing,” he told FTW, “as the smuggling problem exists already.” Not that drivers are hauling big loads of smuggled goods. Road transporters, according to Ferreira, tend to try to load their trucks to capacity both outbound and inbound, and drivers with big loads of smuggled goods would soon be nabbed when weighbridge weights exceeded what was on the truck’s waybill. The number one smuggled item (particularly from Zimbabwe) is cigarettes, said Ferreira, with a number two being whitening cream smuggled in from Zambia, because it’s a banned substance in SA. But, if truckers want to prevent their drivers smuggling goods, he added, the best bet is to use satellite tracking. Notify drivers that China City is a “restricted zone” en route and calls there are banned, he told FTW, and check your sat-track for calls there, or any other unexplained stops nearby.