THE Forbes Border Post will undergo a massive upgrade to improve the quality of services, a Cabinet minister has said.
Forbes Border Post, about 10 kilometres from Mutare, is one of Zimbabwe’s major border posts with Mozambique on the highway to the port of Beira.
In an interview on the sidelines of a tour of the border post on Sunday, Transport and Infrastructural Development minister Felix Mhona said the upgrading and modernisation of the border post would improve the quality of service within the transport sector.
“We have observed that this border post is no longer coping in handling and managing bigger volumes of traffic. As the second republic, we are moving in to rehabilitate and have a bigger border post,” he said.
Mhona said the rehabilitation project would begin in the next two months, adding that Cabinet had approved the project.
“The Cabinet has approved this project. What we have at the Beitbridge Border Post is exactly what we are going to see at Forbes Border Post. The feasibility studies are already underway and the engineers are already on the ground,” Mhona said.
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There will be dry ports established at the border with the project including feeder roads to and from Mutare.
The border post serves almost half of the Sadc region, and clears about 900 haulage trucks everyday, resulting in long and winding queues of trucks which at times stretch to Mutare city centre, thereby causing congestion.
Long queues of haulage trucks have become a common sight on either side of the border as the demand for service outweighs its current capacity and this often breeds corruption and illegal entry along the porous border.