Border management systems’ intelligence and annotations on existing transit challenges in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Existing Border Management Systems (BMS) present challenges and opportunities to countries in their individual capacities as well as in their various groupings. These BMS include, both, on and off-site logistics related to the passage of people and cargo across countries’ borders. BMS also includes the hard and soft infrastructure components that go into the passage of people and cargo across countries’ territorial boundaries. The challenges and opportunities differ in extent from country to country. The border, being the entry and exit point for a country, is the playground for a myriad of human and cargo movements related problems and opportunities. These challenges and opportunities have crosscutting implications on the country’s security facets (be it economic, environmental, social, political, ecological security (etc). For all known border related challenges, various initiatives have been rolled out across the world with varying degrees of success. It is against that background that this chapter seeks to present some of the initiatives being used in various parts of the world. This chapter does not aim to recommend these initiatives to any country. The aim is to expose policymakers to what others are doing. This can serve as their learning and reference tool. In the opinion of the authors, there are times when local policymakers seem to be surrendering the occurrence of some incidents to fate. These are times when, from the scholars’ point of view, policymakers’ deportment shows that some problems do not have solutions. Whilst policymakers will be saying, ‘we are looking into it,’ evidence on the ground will be showing that they are thinking, ‘this problem does not have a solution’. This demonstrates a clear case of lack of innovation spirit and risk-taking which should be part of solution hunting. Such is the case with most border related challenges in less-developed countries. On a lot of forums, as evidenced by various-