Swazilaand promises border post upgrade

Swaziland’s main border post with South Africa will receive an upgrade this year designed to relieve traffic congestion and eliminate long queues of trucks awaiting customs inspections. Government’s 2013 budget, unveiled last week, has accommodated the first major construction at Swaziland’s border post at Oshoek (known as Ngwenya on the Swazi side) since a public reception building for passport inspection was built ten years ago. However, this is the first large-scale expansion of the facility’s notoriously narrow truck parking areas, which were originally designed to accommodate the road freight traffic volumes of the 1970s. FTW reported last year kilometre-long queues of trucks on the South African side of the border post, which is the principal point of entry and egress for road freight traffic to and from Gauteng. However, border post expansion has long been hampered by the presence of police housing and other buildings crowding the facility. The police housing will be demolished to make way for truck parking, an inspection area and possibly a weighbridge. With the money officially budgeted, construction tenders will go out in the next few months and work may proceed this year, unless government experiences another cash crunch crisis. Altogether, government will offer R308 million in road infrastructure tenders in 2013.