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Senior Reporter
BEITBRIDGE Border Post was on Friday evening heavily congested as travellers, mostly tourists in last hour rush, thronged the country for the 20th session of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) general assembly in Victoria Falls.The UNWTO general assembly, which is being co-hosted by Zimbabwe and Zambia, exploded into life on Saturday and will end on Thursday.
This is the first time that the assembly is being held in Southern Africa and second ever that it is being held in Africa after Senegal hosted it in 2007.
The event is a bi-annual event held on equal rotational basis among member states. On Friday evening, Chronicle also observed that South Africa’s N1 highway leading to the border post was jam-packed with cars heading to Zimbabwe.
The assistant regional immigration officer-in-charge of Beitbridge Border Post, Mr Charles Gwede said most of the travellers who passed through the border were tourists.
“We had an increased volume of traffic at Beitbridge Border Post during the run up to the UNWTO general assembly, particularly on Friday evening when we handled several groups of tourists on the entry side, who were heading to Victoria Falls,” he said.
Mr Gwede said immigration officials did not encounter problems in clearing the travellers.
“We had put mechanisms in place to speed up the clearance of travellers as we had anticipated a surge in movement due to the UNWTO event. Our officials managed to smoothly clear the travellers without problems,” he said.
There was also an improvement on the South African side as travellers were cleared quickly compared to other days.
South African Revenue Service (SARS) last week reportedly temporarily closed its commercial section to upgrade its system in an effort to speed up the customs clearance process.
The border post is usually characterised by long winding queues of travellers forcing people to spend several hours waiting for both customs and immigration clearance.
Beitbridge is one of the busiest inland ports of entry in sub-Saharan Africa, which handles a huge influx of travellers daily including commercial traffic destined for other countries such as Zambia, DRC, Malawi and Tanzania.
Online Reporter