Good afternoon. Everyone agrees that one stop border posts would be a good thing for Mozambique. You only need to look at the painfully long queues, several kilometres long, of lorries waiting at the border crossings of Ressano Garcia on the South African border (2,000 lorries a day can appear at the border on their way to the port of Maputo) and Machipanda on the Zimbabwean border to see how slow it is to convey goods across the country’s frontiers. In cross-border trade, time is money. The quicker the border can be crossed, the lower the cost of doing so and the lower the cost of imported goods and Mozambican exports. A one-stop border post would greatly reduce the amount of time spent at separate checkpoints operated by the authorities on both sides of the border.
The full Daily Briefing continues below for Pro subscribers. Subscribers to the Zitamar News tier can read the top half, including the full leader article, here.
Implementing one-stop border posts, however, is taking a long time. Plans to roll out the border posts have existed on paper for several years; in fact, an agreement with South Africa on setting one up at Ressano Garcia was signed as far back as 1998. But so far, only one single-stop border crossing has been set up, at Calomué on the Malawian border. This is not even the busiest border crossing with Malawi, let alone among the busiest of all the crossings. But the effect of streamlining border procedures would be greatest at the busiest crossings. As well as handling trade with Zimbabwe, the Machipanda border crossing also deals with transit traffic on its way to and from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. Funding for setting up single-stop border posts at Ressano Garcia and Machipanda is on offer from the African Development Bank and the World Bank respectively. Plans published last year indicated that the Ressano Garcia border post was meant to be being set up by now, in time to open next year, but those plans have not been carried out.
