Sars gets royal lambasting over Oshoek border delays.

Mbabane – Swaziland’s parliament is up in arms over what they view as incompetence in the handling of new customs procedures implemented by Sars last week at SA’s borders with the landlocked kingdom. The resulting interruptions in border post operations – on Monday the busiest border post at Oshoek, which handles most traffic to and from Gauteng, was closed for two hours when a computer glitch shut down the system – caused Swaziland’s Foreign Affairs Minister to be stuck in queue. He missed an appointment in SA. Although FTW was unable to ascertain what exactly was missed by the minister, MPs felt it was of sufficient national interest that they used the “international incident” to lambaste Sars. “You wonder why they decided to install a new system just on the eve of the World Cup. Such a thing makes one wonder whether our relations with our neighbour are still what they are made out to be,” said Princess Ngcengencenge, a royal family member who is an appointed member to parliament. Her Royal Highness wondered whether SA’s border posts with other neighbouring countries were similarly affected, or if only Swaziland suffered. She moved a motion for the Minister of Home Affairs to get answers from his SA counterpart, and find ways to reduce queues and congestion at Oshoek. Watching from the sidelines with bemusement was the country’s commercial road freight industry – no strangers to border post delays. Asking not to be identified by name or company, one operations manager of a Matsaphabased road freight firm said: “If it takes a member of the royal family being inconvenienced to open government’s eyes to border post congestion and this brings some relief, it’s a good thing.”