BEITBRIDGE - ECOCASH NOW ACCEPTED

Econet's mobile money transfer service.

Recently we noticed that the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority has put up signs indicating that they finally are accepting mobile money transferes to pay duty and other obligations. (Of course Econet terms and Conditions apply).

The questions that has been on our minds was why it took them so long to adopt this method of payment when Zimbabwe as a nation is struggling with a cash crisis and almost everything is paid for using plastic money.

We haven't seen the official announcement other than a statement in the 2018 National Budget Proposals where the finance minister stated that government departments would start accepting mobile money as a form of payment.

So far we have noticed that its only Ecocash that is being accepted,we do not know when the other mobile money transfer platforms will join in.

At Beitbridge there is still the issue of so many monies being paid to so many different government departments whose payments systems differ as much as the departments even though they are all collecting money for government.

Zimbabwe banks right now are sometimes giving depositors money in coin form yet Zimra and most government departments do not accept payments in coin form.

The Vehicle Inspection Department and Immigration do not accept payment in Bond notes, only cash USD and/or Rand whose exchange rates are around R15 to USD1.00. They insist on getting paid in foreign currency. Which in this case is cash United StatesDollar or South African Rand.

The Zimbabwe Republic Police Post at the border now accepts payment in Bond Notes but their rate of exchange if one is paying in South African Rand is around R14 to USD1.00. We understand sometime back they used to refuse payment of fines in Bond notes and insisted in fines being paid in USD cash or South African Rand only.  

The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority has for some time now been accepting duty payments from bank card holders for quite some (which now is almost the form of payments for most duties), this has made life easy for the importing community. We have however noticed the Revenue Authority faces constant system challenges making the whole revenue collection system unreliable and difficult to work with. We hope as promised by the authorities the system will be running with little or few  outages in the near future.

Its our hope that with the re-alignment of government institutions at the border it will be easy for travellers to pay for the numerous government dues in time and with little difficulty and give them time to do what they love most - travelling.