Twenty-seven tonnes of frozen Horse Mackerel fish destined for a client in Maputo was lost when looters ransacked a refrigerated truck before setting it alight as post-election tempers flared at the N4 Maputo Corridor border post of Ressano Garcia in Mozambique.
According to Giel Nel, area manager for Nel Snel transport, the high-grade quality fish had been packed in 1 375 20-kilogram boxes, and were on the last leg of a 2 690-kilometre journey from Walvis Bay to Maputo via Upington in the Northern Cape when the cargo, worth about R800 000, was lost.
He said the Volvo truck along with its cold-chain trailer was worth about R4.2 million and was one of the first 18 trucks that protestors at Ressano stopped when they started blockading the border.
“They took the keys to trucks where they could so the vehicles could not be moved after forcing drivers to park across the road. Some drivers managed to buy their keys back but I told our driver to be safe and make sure the truck was secure.”
Because a spare set of keys was more than 2 400 kilometres away in Windhoek, Nel said the transport community rallied around to bring another set of keys back to Ressano to move the trucks.
That was on Tuesday afternoon, before a relatively peaceful protest descended into anarchy, bringing fiery chaos to the usually peaceful border post village.
Nel said they were about to move the truck before civil unrest ripped through Ressano, causing the Border Management Authority to close the border.
He said, from what he heard, the burning of trucks and cars and the wholesale destruction of property, including border-control facilities at Ressano, could have been avoided had it not been for a child getting shot.
“I heard that kids were coming down from KM4 (the Kilometre Four truck staging area) going down the hill into the dip towards the cemetery area where the protests usually start. One of the children appeared to aim a rock at an oncoming car and a shot went off. That’s when it all boiled over.”
The same cemetery area in Ressano, between the border gate and KM4, is where, at about 3pm today, November 14, protestors prevented truck movement from proceeding to the Port of Maputo.
Earlier protestors apparently tried to gain access to rudimentary border processing facilities that had enabled a recommencement of trade through the volatile transit, but Mozambican soldiers chased them off.
A port official confirmed that no trucks were moving through from the gate to KM4, and that only loads that had been processed were proceeding towards the port.
This has also been confirmed by other trade facilitators.
Nel, who was in Komatipoort when Freight News spoke to him, said he personally went to check on the status of border traffic and nothing was moving.
Also handling loads for HFR Transport, he said the multinational retailer that they truck for to Maputo, was completely stuck, with overdue time-sensitive loads that could spoil and back-haul bananas not being picked up.
“I’m hoping that by Saturday the border is working otherwise we’re going to have a serious problem. Shop shelves in Maputo are running empty.”
The latest update from the violent post-election protests by supporters of the opposition party, Podemos, is that their presidential candidate, Venâncio Mondlane, is showing no sign of backing down from his claims that the ruling party, Frelimo, had rigged the October 9 elections to stay in power.
The refrigerated truck that was set alight and destroyed before it could be moved.
