16 Mar 2026

Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) has restored its systems following a technical breakdown last week that caused a truck congestion at Kazungula One Stop Border Post (OSBP).

The truck congestion pilled from Lesoma to Kazungula covering a 10-kilometre stretch on the A33 road en-route to Kazungula OSBP. In an interview, ZRA deputy commissioner- operations in charge of the Southern region, Mr Enock Kasapato stated that the authority had resolved the system outage which included technical failure of a scanner. The system outage caused a backlog of processing cargo transits, resulting in the long queues.

“A lot of transporters prefer this border which leads to an increase in volume of traffic to Kazungula and because of the appreciation of the Kwacha, people are importing a lot this year,” said Mr Kasapato.

He highlighted that ZRA had adjusted the risk engine so that some consignments were routed to non-intervention areas, to allow them to proceed to the green range channels without inspection at the border. He said they had applied measures such as creating multiple lanes to serve clients at the border with a target of processing 500 trucks in comparison to 300 on a normal day.

Furthermore, he said the authority had commenced preparations to implement the 24-hour operations of the Kazungula OSBP following an announcement by the two head of states at the Kazungula Bridge Authority launch recently. These extended operations he said would address the truck congestions in future as they would be processed even during the night.

Mr Kasapato explained that Kazungula OSBP experienced a lot of traffic because there were various imports headed to Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. He highlighted that most of these haulage trucks carried consignments that were a high risk, thus needing thorough checks at the border.

Mr Kasapato said ZRA had implemented the accredited transport programme which qualified those accredited to fast track their documents without queuing. The officer stated that the congestion on the road was worsened by the fact that there was no truck reserve area in Kazungula where trucks could stop as they awaited processing of documents.

In most cases trucks that were south bound entering Botswana through Kazungula OSBP carried no cargo hence did not take long to be processed at the Botswana side. BOPA