James Hall MBABANE - Truck drivers are taking back routes into the Matsapha Industrial Estate to avoid Swaziland’s only weighbridge, which opened just last month. “Heavily overloaded big trucks are causing destruction on the roads north of Manzini,” Officer Jason Magagula of the Swaziland Royal Police Force told FTW. The truckers want to avoid overloading charges they had been spared for five years while the weighbridge was not functioning. It was erected when the Manzini-Mbabane highway was built in 1998. Truckers are driving north through the hills of Mbekelweni and into Manzini, where they take city streets through the eastern suburbs to get to Matsapha. “Manzini’s streets are taking a beating. Fines are given to trucks as a deterrent to overloading, which wrecks the roads. South African and Swazi truck drivers have been spoiled because the system wasn’t working for a long time,” Manzini City Councilman Mandla Dlamini told FTW. Alerted by community members to the truckers’ subterfuge, police have started patrolling secondary roads in the kingdom’s central region in search of weighbridge dodgers.
