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Mozambique: Work On One Stop Border Post Starts in June
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
21 February 2008
Posted to the web 21 February 2008
Maputo
Work on the long awaited "one stop border post" between Mozambique and South Africa will begin in June, and construction work will take about 18 months, according to a timetable for the job discussed by technical teams from the two countries in Maputo on Thursday.
On this schedule, the one stop border post at Ressano Garcia will begin operating in 2010, the year in which South Africa is to host the football World Cup. That event is expected to boost tourism significantly, not only to South Africa itself, but to the entire SADC (Southern African Development Community) region.
DanilO Nala, head of the Mozambican technical team, said the new, streamlined border post will be of great advantage to importers and exporters in speeding up customs clearance, and will also treat travelers in a more rapid and convenient fashion.
Currently, travelers and vehicles must pass through two border posts, one on each side of the frontier, which ensures that it takes much longer than it should for people and goods to move between the two countries, and makes the whole procedure much more expensive - particularly because on the Mozambican side the customs clearance post for goods vehicles is four kilometres distant from the border post for travelers.
Under the current system, it takes 20 to 40 minutes to process individual documentation, and three to five hours to clear goods vehicles and their contents.
It is hoped that the one stop border post will cut clearance times by 50 per cent, leading to the elimination of the long queues that sometimes build up at the border post.
"With just one stop, we shall cut by half the time taken to process documentation, because information and communications technologies will be in use, served by a data base on the persons, goods and vehicles crossing from one side to the other", said Nala.
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The new border post will be on the "no man's land" between the two existing posts. It will operate on the basis of the electronic recording of documents such as passports or import certificates.
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