Zambia continues to grapple with processing Copperbelt cargo since a portal used to generate Payment Registration Numbers (PRN) by the country’s tax authority suffered a systems failure more than two weeks ago.
Earlier this week, Mike Fitzmaurice, chief executive of the Transit Assistance Bureau (Transist), said although the service had been restored within three days, it left the system inaccessible to transporters.
He said because PRNs could now only be generated by a customs officer, drivers had to queue while the Zambian Revenue Authority (ZRA) tried to reduce the backlog, apparently without much success.
Attempts to expedite a more effective resolution for the non-tariff barrier has since been met with stonewalling by the ZRA, it seems, while the back-up of incoming trucks builds by the hour on crucial corridors.
Fitzmaurice told Freight News that when he tried to intervene on behalf of industry, he was told to follow protocol, going through the bureaucratic ranks only to meet a dead end.
One of the worst affected corridors is the route from the Port of Dar es Salaam, responsible for handling most of the supplies and bulk industrial cargo used on Zambia’s own copper mines.
But the impact of stalled transit cargo is worse for copper and cobalt extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reliant on Zambia for its own Copperbelt logistics.
Although information by drivers and transporters on the ground is still filtering through, the bottlenecking at Tanzania’s Tunduma crossing into Zambia at Nakonde, is badly affecting movement on the Dar Corridor.
On Wednesday morning, Transist heard from a driver who said trucks were queuing across two lines as transporters pushed for faster passage through the choke point.
The Kazungula One-Stop Border Post (OSBP) between Botswana and Zambia is another pressure point in the system.
Used for supplies coming in from Namibia’s Port of Walvis Bay and the Port of Durban in South Africa, one of the fastest Copperbelt crossings has now become one of the slowest.
If cargo into Zambia remains an issue, it could mean that transit operators reconsider driving through Zimbabwe on the actual North-South Corridor route, currently still spurned because of transit costs at borders like Beitbridge, road conditions in Zim and corrupt law enforcement.
Information received from Transist on Wednesday morning supported this notion.
A member of the trade intervention bureau said: “Truck stops on the Zambian side at Kazungula are completely full. Trucks cannot find any space and are now being forced to park and sleep in the streets. We are sitting ducks at this stage.”
The frustration was amplified by the same operator: “This situation is completely unacceptable and is the direct result of the ZRA not doing their job properly. Their inefficiency is creating a serious security risk for drivers, trucks and cargo. Something must be done immediately!”
According to Fitzmaurice, the current situation shows a lack of government agency resourcefulness when it’s most needed.
Not being resilient enough when systems fail comes at serious cost to transporters serving Copperbelt clients.
At about noon on Wednesday, the queue estimation by Transist was some seven kilometres from the weighbridge before the border.
As the weighbridge is itself about five kilometres away from the OSBP, it means trucks were idling at least 12 kilometres south of the crossing.
Earlier this week the queue at the Dar Corridor transit was said to be worse.
Although this could not be confirmed, the lion’s share of imports to the Copperbelt flow through Dar, and volume increases are most likely due to front-loading cargo related to the situation in the Persian Gulf, responsible for about 90% of sulphur demand on the mines.
Fitzmaurice estimated that it cost about US$550 for every day a truck waits at one of Zambia’s borders.
At Kazungula alone, about 640 trucks were waiting to get into Zambia earlier this week, resulting in delay-related expenses of about R5 808 000 per day for cross-border hauliers, Fitzmaurice said.
