As the country gears up for the Easter long-weekend holidays starting next week Thursday, the Border Management Authority (BMA) and Department of Home Affairs have confirmed that it’s all systems go for their joint operations. BMA’s Commissioner Dr. Mike Masiapato accompanied by Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber addressed the media about their agency’ state of readiness in Pretoria. Speaking on You FM Newshour, BMA’s Director of Communications Mmemme Mogotsi said that they’re ready for a busy Easter period.
“We’re very prepared in terms of processing the expected increased number of people that will be approaching our borders this coming Easter weekend. What we have done from our side, we have increased our human resources on the ground not only that, but we have also increased operational hours as well to ensure that we are able to process as many people as possible. We normally have our borders close at a particular time, so this time we had to request the Minister of Home Affairs for a concession for extra hours in terms of operation at the borders,” said Mogotsi.
In addition, Mogotsi said that they’ll be working closely with all law enforcement agencies to guard the protect the country’s ports of entry and exit.
“We’re working with the SAPS, SANDF, SARS, the Road Traffic Management Corporation, the Cross-Border Road Transport Agency (C-BRTA) and other traffic management authorities in various provinces.We ‘re anticipating a busy period and we are ready,” explained Mogotsi.
Furthermore, Mogotsi said the agency has beefed up security measures to deal with corruption and monitor they’re service, including the illegal crossing of undocumented foreigners into the country.
“In this regard we have procured 40 body cameras for staffers at various borders to root out corruption and monitor the service they provide. Body cameras will play an integral part of monitoring BMA staff at some of the country’s land and sea borders to root out corruption.This form part of our efforts of using technology to assist in illicit activities at the country’s land and sea borders, and we’re able to successfully monitor what our staff was up to in different borders across the country,” remarked Mogotsi.
She highlighted that during a pilot project in December they recorded a 215% increase in the prevention of illegal crossings into the country.
“What we have experienced during the past festive season when we had drones borrowed to us by the Department of Agriculture, we were able to see a pattern of illegal movements as to where people are crossing areas that we were not aware of.Now this time we will be deploying those drones in five of the ports of entry so we will be able to ensure that we do a reactionary measure whereby when we see people crossing, we will be sending our reactionary tactics teams to go intercept that movement,” said Mogotsi.
