adminThupeyo Muleya Beitbridge Bureau
THE volume of traffic which passed through the Beitbridge border post during the just ended Easter holidays increased by 50 percent compared to last year, the department of immigration has said.
The assistant regional immigration officer-in-charge of Beitbridge, Notius Tarisai said a total of 103,833 travellers accessed the border post between April 2 and April 6 as compared to 50,967 during the same period last year.
He said the volume of traffic continued to increase as many people were now travelling on valid travel documents.
Tarisai said other travellers now preferred to access the country through the same border post because of a raft of measures employed by the department to ease congestion and speedy the flow of traffic.
“We cleared a total of 53,000 arrivals and 50,833 departures between April 2 and April 6 as compared to 35,115 entries and 15,852 departures between April 17 and 20 last year. Though the volume of traffic has increased, the situation is still manageable,” he said.
Tarisai said they recorded an increase in travellers leaving the country.
He said they had separated traffic on both sides of the border into buses, private cars, returning residents, transit and commercial.
“Travellers are being directed accordingly to the various service points as they enter the border post. We suspended all off and leave days for our officers so as to ensure that we operate at full strength throughout the Easter holidays.
The number of people using this border is increasing though it is difficult to tell because of the clearance systems we have introduced as border authorities,” said Tarisai.
“You will note that the Department of Immigration is now operating at full strength following the deployment of 26 more officers in December 2014. Further, other stakeholders including Zimra have deployed more relief officers to clear travellers during the Easter holidays”.
Tarisai said they had opened more immigration service points within the border with tourists and transit travellers being cleared inside the main building while others were being assisted outside.
He said they were now working with a staff complement of 71 workers compared to 52 the previous years.
Tarisai said they had deployed their security guards to all exit and entry points to prevent touts and dealers from entering the border.
“Touts and conmen have a tendency of causing unnecessary congestion hence we have adopted a no nonsense stance on them. In a bid to avoid unnecessary congestion we separated traffic into various categories and you will note that the buses are cleared through the tagging system (first come first serve basis) so that we don’t clog the border post,” said Tarisai.
He said they had since aligned operations with their South African counterparts for the period running from March 27 to April 13.
Tarisai said they had created an express route for motorists who would want to access gate passes from Zinara.
Online Reporter