Dear All

I have been in Chirundu since Wednesday last week and spent most of my time here attending to the truck congestion that prevailed for most of the past week. Apart from all the local 5 truck-ins being full to capacity, trucks queued for approximately 4,7km along the Chirundu-Harare highway. Through the joint efforts of SFAAZ, ZIMRA, VID, ZRP and Immigration, the backlog was contained yesterday through an operation that was intensively executed on Saturday 6 July. I had the honour of being asked by the stakeholders to chair the “crisis” meetings that we had throughout the period. Ministry of Regional Integration and International Co-operation together with Ministry of Industry and Commerce officials who had visited Chirundu on a different mission were also in attendance.

By end of day yesterday the situation had almost “normalised”. All trucks that arrived on Saturday had crossed the border. The remaining trucks numbered less than 50 and had arrived on the same day. For the record, 360 trucks (northbound) crossed the border on Sat 6 July up from 264 that crossed on the 5th and 270 that crossed on the 4th. The average truck movements for the month of June was 223 (northbound) and 221 (southbound).

The following were identified as the main reasons for the resultant congestion:

• Beira Port becoming more popular than Durban. The truck turnaround time had, therefore, become much shorter, resulting in more trips per truck.
• There has been a marked increase in truck fleets. Big truckers had more than doubled their fleet since 2011.
• Some traffic had diverted from other routes (e.g Tete and Vic Falls routes) in preference for Chirundu.
• Limited crossing capacity on the bridge.
• Difficulty in prioritizing tankers and open bulk trucks before entry into the Customs Control Zone on the Zimbabwe side of the border.
• Lack of co-ordinated approach amongst stakeholders.
• Limited border post operational hours.

Stakeholders agreed that the long term solution to the challenges at Chirundu is to let border operate 24 hrs daily. My personal take is that the border needs to open at 0600hrs and close at 2200hrs daily for commercial traffic. This would achieve the balance between the need to extent the operational hours and the obvious need for increase in staff for both Government departments and Customs Clearing agents (shortage of residential accommodation is the major challenge here). To achieve this, the law has to be amended and an appropriate recommendation will be made by the association.
Meanwhile, a task force comprising of ZIMRA, VID, ZRP and SFAAZ has been established to monitor the situation on the ground and to take corrective action when necessary.

Regards
Joseph Musariri

Chief Executive Officer

The Shipping & Forwarding Agents’ Association of Zimbabwe