People travelling to and from Zimbabwe are confronted with the bad conditions at Beitbridge Border Post, where they are met by swarms of flies and the stench from rotting leftover food and rubbish dumped next to the road. This is neither a welcoming nor a healthy situation for anyone.
Just a stone's throw from the entrance/exit gate, several vendors prepare meals for passing travellers. Along the N1, where their stalls are set up, is a large dumpster, but the vendors claim they are not allowed to throw leftover food into this bin as it quickly rots. As a result, it gets discarded next to the road. "We have leftover food nearly every day. Where else must we dispose of it?" they want to know.
Truck drivers seem to get a raw deal from this. "This situation is not good for us. Sometimes we spend a week or more next to the road before crossing to Zimbabwe. I do not always feel like preparing my own meals, so I buy from these vendors. But the stink from the rotting food and other waste dumped by the side of the road is a great concern," said one of the drivers destined for the Congo. He had arrived at the border a day before and was waiting to cross into Zimbabwe.
One of the vendors, whose stall is separated from the smelly dumping place by a street, told this newspaper that a company used to be responsible for collecting the waste and cleaning up the rubbish strewn all over the place, but they had apparently not been there for some time now.
"It has been six months now since someone came to clean up. Workers from the waste company used to tell people to dump their waste in one place, and they would come on a regular basis to pick it up," said another vendor, called Mavis. She has been selling tomatoes and vegetables for more than 10 years from her stall near the border's entrance/exit. She said she often lost customers because of the bad smells and the flies.
But Wilson Dzebu, spokesperson for Musina Municipality, said the dumping situation at the border was a recent development. "This situation only started recently and is caused by hawkers at the border who do not use the bins placed in the area. They just throw their waste on the ground," he said, adding that the waste collectors were sometimes not able to pick up the trash because of the truck congestion along the N1.
Musina Municipality undertook to deploy a team to start cleaning up at the border, starting on Tuesday, 7 December 2021, with the promise to maintain the area on a weekly basis and increase the frequency of waste collection from once a week to twice a week. A team of environmentalists also joined in to conduct an awareness campaign to remind hawkers of how to manage their waste.