What is role of police on our highways?
IHAVE had much pleasure writing this piece concerning members of the Zimbabwe Republic Police. The officers are now trading fairness with money when they mount their roadblocks. What are the roles and duties of police details when on our highways?
I am a transport broker with businesses in countries like South Africa, and, most truckers whom I sub-contract destined for Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi and Tanzania opt to go via Botswana.
The Zimbabwean route provides a short transport link across the entire breadth of Southern Africa, but most companies in road logistics are now prepared to go against the academic notion that “the shortest way to a point is through a straight line”, with some comparative advantage, and use the long Botswana route for alternative cost- effective logistical advantages as a mitigatory measure.
Under normal circumstances, sometime before, it used to take nine days transit time to travel from South Africa to Malawi, and had reduced to three to four days. From South Africa to DRC, it used to take approximately 15 days, but now it takes about four to five days, all things being equal. To a layman like me, police presence on our highways is good on safety and security, but only if it is not abused or used as a tool for corruption.
If professionally used, police presence relates closely with human lives on a larger scale, via visible monitoring and checks on visible hazards, at identified help points.
In discharging their esteemed duties, I believe police should also know and make moves which comply with international protocols like the SADC Protocol on Transport and Communication, which seeks to attain the goal of reducing transport costs and transit times, in order to increase competitiveness. In Zimbabwe, compared to other regional countries, the ratio of police in terms of distance and vehicles is highly unproportional and unreasonable. Their presence on the roads has posed a danger to commerce and international trade.
The delays met by cross-border drivers on police-mounted roadblocks, and demands for cash on roadworthy vehicles, pushes up transport costs and the price of consumer goods, where it is estimated that it costs about $400 per day per truck.
The drivers themselves complain of delays, for example, those operating on a 10-12 day working permit often have problems when other non-tariff delays are experienced on the road, for example at roadblocks.
These delays are used by police to confiscate the driver’s passport or licence to foster instant compliance on spot fines, in a bid to avert the danger of having permits expire along the way, and they, in most cases, target those drivers with only one or two days left on their work permits, this is corruption.
Accordingly, it goes without saying that the heavy police-mounted roadblocks and absence of designated checkpoints in Zimbabwe is responsible for the inflated costs incurred by transporters and ancillary businesses along the transit supply chain, which is in direct violation of the harmonised Transit Management Systems as agreed in SADC and COMESA countries, which I am sure Zimbabwe is a signatory to. Roadblock officers are frustrating commerce, thus posing structural bottlenecks to performance.
The delays, coupled with other delays at borders, tollgates, etc, cause serious unpredictabilities, which means that it is difficult for transporters and agents to plan logistics.
This has a knock-on effect that can disrupt schedule and cause an accumulation of demurrage charges.
I believe that is why they say every police officer in Zimbabwe wants to work in the traffic section, they rake in fortunes on a daily basis.
To this end, I make an appeal to the responsible arms of Government and other quasi- Government bodies to address these issues.
Checkpoints as in Zambia, control loss of revenue by creating a conducive business environment, train police officers to minimise the risk of error to the absolute minimum, while the advantage of maximum accuracy is retained continuously.
General transporters risk being priced out of business and the Zimbabwean Government is losing millions if not billions of dollars of revenue from those trucks bypassing our ports of entry.
In discharging their esteemed duties, I believe police should also know and make moves which comply with international protocols like the Protocol on SADC Transport and Communication, which seeks to attain the goal of reducing transport costs and transit times, in order to increase competitiveness.