Zimbabwe and South Africa have decided to implement a range of measures to curb congestion and weed out criminal activity at the Beit Bridge border post during the coming festive season.

The border is usually a hive of activity during the festive holiday as it will be characterized by long winding queues of traffic as mostly Zimbabweans would be travelling to their country to spend Christmas at home.

The measures include setting up clearance centres away from the border. South African Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor told Limpopo Mirror that congestion at the border is of concern to both countries. “Apart from increasing staff deployment to ensure quick processing of documents, we will create centres away from the border post for multi-border transport,” she said.

She recently attended the 8th session of the Zimbabwe/South Africa Joint Permanent Commission on Defence and Security in Bulawayo.

“After clearance, the travellers will then be escorted to pass through the border. We will extend our services from this month to February to allow smooth movement of people,” she added.

She said the two countries agreed to intensify defence and police patrols along the border to curb illegal migration and smuggling.

“Our customs departments will enhance searches of vehicles using scanners to see that all the vehicles passing through the border are legal,” she said.

The deputy minister of Home Affairs of Zimbabwe, Mr Ziyambi Ziyambi concurred with Pandor. “We discussed that issue and agreed to have regular meetings between the two countries. We agreed to increase staff complement on both sides to allow smooth flow of traffic. This has to start as early as this week. We will also engage the customs department over these issues and intensify border patrols for security purposes,” he said.

The Beit Bridge border post is the busiest inland port of entry in sub-Saharan Africa handling an average of about 30 000 travellers and more than 2 500 cars per day during peak periods. Queues tend to stretch up to 20km during the period with travellers spending three to four days waiting for customs and immigration clearance.

The two ministers said efforts were underway to facilitate a second phase of documentation exercise for Zimbabweans after the initial one, which benefitted more than 200 000 people. A significant population of Zimbabweans is based in South Africa many of whom are staying there without legal documents.

“That is an ongoing process. We continue to engage and we are discussing that. We want our people to regularize their stay there,”

Ziyambi said.

Pandor could however, not rule out the possibility of a second documentation phase: “We introduced the documentation exercise for Zimbabweans as a pilot process. After this we must report the outcome to our government to see if the process ran well and map the way forward. We are committed to ensure that Zimbabweans obtain legal travel documents,” she said.

The two countries have also signed a memorandum of understanding on migration to abolish visa requirements to ease the movement of people in both countries.