Border unmanned as BURS strike bites

Oarabile Mosikare | Monday July 27, 2015 15:11

Last week an Industrial Court decision granted the more than 1,000 Botswana Public Employees Union (BOPEU) members permission to engage in industrial action against BURS.  Last Friday, The Monitor visited Tlokweng border gate, which is one of the busiest to assess the situation on the ground. At this border, 20 workers had downed tools in the morning shift and were gathered under a tree outside the border gate.

To keep themselves busy and to fight off the cold weather, they sung and danced to strike songs. At the counters, few people were busy at work helping the travellers to South Africa.

In the morning there were few travellers who checked at Tlokweng border gate to travel to the neighbouring South Africa. From the South African side, there were few trucks and vehicles that crossed into Botswana in the morning.

Obviously the service was very slow and clearing agents were overwhelmed by the workload.  The convener of the strike at the border, Edward Tswaipe explained that they were busy mobilising their members to join the strike in numbers.

Tswaipe explained the challenges they met in the first few hours of the strike.

“We had shift challenges. We wished to have both shifts joining the strike. We are trying to get more comrades from the second shift in the afternoon to join us,” Tswaipe explained.

The first shift at Tlokweng border gate started at 6am and the second shift at 3pm. He also said they had challenges of new employees on probation at the border gate.  He explained that there were also interns working at the border and they cannot legally join the strike. Nevertheless, he was happy that the outcome was that they were able to affect revenue collection.

“The employer is risking the security of the country because goods coming in are not properly assessed,” said Tswaipe. He said BURS could not depend on clearing agents to do the job because they are not fully-fledged employees of BURS.

Because the majority of customs officers deployed to the border were on strike, lots of goods were passing through.

“The customs officers are highly technical people and lots of goods are passing through.”

One of the customs officers on strike chipped in that clearing agents’ job is to process the forms and submit them to BURS officials so that they reconcile them. “Since we are on strike the forms the clearing agents are filling are piling up in our offices,” explained the custom official.  Another claimed that there were issues of physical search on travellers and there was nobody doing the job. The preventative men are assigned to do physical search and majority of them have joined the strike.

“We hold the BURS commissioner general [Keneilwe Morris] accountable for all the illicit goods entering the country and lost revenue,” said Tswaipe.

Another employee said it was possible criminals would take advantage of the strike and smuggle illicit drugs into the country.  “Majority of preventative men is here with us. Who will stop drug smugglers?” wondered the BURS official.

The situation was different at the BURS headquarters near Naledi. It is estimated that there are 200 employees working at the headquarters but about only about 50 of them joined the industrial action.  The rest of employees were busy at work serving the customers. The strikers were concerned that majority of their colleagues had betrayed the struggle and reported to work.

They said they were planning to withdraw some cashiers as the strike continued so that the employer would feel the pinch.