The Kazungula Ferry is a pontoon ferry across the 400-metre-wide Zambezi River between Botswana and Zambia. It is one of the largest ferries in south-central Africa, having a capacity of 70 tonnes. The service is provided by two motorised pontoons and operates between border posts at Kazungula, Zambia and Kazungula, Botswana.[1]
It links the Livingstone-Sesheke road (which connects to the Trans–Caprivi Highway at Katima Mulilo and forms part of the Walvis Bay Corridor) to the main north-south highway of Botswana through Francistown and Gaborone to South Africa, and also to the Kasane-Victoria Falls road through Zimbabwe. It serves the international road traffic of three countries directly (Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana) and of three more indirectly (Namibia, South Africa and DR Congo).[2]
In 2003 the ferry was the site of a disaster when a severely overloaded Zambian truck capsized one of the pontoons and 18 people drowned. The accident was blamed on the lack of weighbridges in Zambia to check the weight of trucks.[3]
At Kazungula the territories of four countries (Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia) come close to meeting at a quadripoint. The more likely scenario is that the international boundaries contain two tripoints joined by a short line, less than 100 meters long, forming a boundary between Zambia and Botswana across which the ferry can, in principle, travel without entering either of the other two countries. The ever-shifting river channels and the lack of any treaties addressing the issue mean that no quadripoint legally exists at present.[4][5]
In August 2007 the governments of Zambia and Botswana announced a deal to construct a bridge at the site to replace the ferry.[6] The existence of a short boundary between Zambia and Botswana could, in theory, allow the bridge to be built without impinging on the territory of the other two neighbors. Practical considerations, however, may require the bridge to cross territory of one or the other of them. Zimbabwe already has a bridge with Zambia at Victoria Falls, 70km from Kazungula. Namibia already has a crossing with Zambia at Katima Mlilo about 150km upriver. For those travelling from South Africa to Zambia's copperbelt or Lusaka by road, routes through Zimbabwe are several hundred kilometres shorter.