Minister visits Beitbridge ahead of Easter rush

A ministerial oversight visit has taken place at the Beitbridge Port of Entry in preparation for the Easter Weekend, which is one of South Africa's busiest travel seasons.

Home Affairs Minister Dr Leon Schreiber was accompanied by Border Management Authority Commissioner, Dr Mike Masiapato.

One of the main challenges has been the issue of capacity across the ecosystem not just with the Border Management Authority, said Masiapato.

"But we try our best with what we have and make sure that we are able to implement the mandate that we are given by law."

He explained how technology has made a huge improvement to operations.

"What the minister was observing together with myself was the use of drones for the purposes of monitoring the activities in the port, in the corridor as well as the vulnerable segments on the borderline.

"So, under normal circumstances without technology such as drones we would have to have a lot of people doing patrols around the port as well as some kilometres away from the port looking for people attempting to enter the country illegally. So that has been very costly and very intensive from a human resource perspective but what we do is we put the drone in the air and just assemble teams for response purposes.

"When we see people attempting to enter the country illegally, we just then deploy those particular teams to go and do targeted interception.

"We've also been able to show the minister how the body cams are used and the officials doing the work. And that assists us particularly in dealing with issues of corrupt activities."

Masiapato said the official plan for Easter will be unveiled on 29 March.

To listen to his full discussion with 702 and CapeTalk's Mandy Wiener, click the media player below: