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Generally speaking, being on excellent terms with neighbours is very good news for any country, and Zimbabwe is on very good terms with all its neighbours and enjoys all the benefits that brings.

However, this also makes borders porous. We do not have the sort of border security that so marked, say, the Nato-Warsaw Pact border across central Europe in the days of the Cold War with the fencing, large troop deployments, sensors and the like.

And this means people can cross borders easily.

Even the most difficult border to cross, the Zambezi River separating Zimbabwe from Zambia, just needs a small boat.

The Limpopo at low water has hundreds of crossing points where people can wade or paddle across, the Shashi bordering part of Botswana is a minor river and the Mozambican border fairly often requires some local knowledge to actually know where the line is.

As a result, people move backwards and forwards without a great deal of effort. Sometimes this is pretty innocent and causes minimum harm.

The Mozambican border, either straight lines at each end or a line connecting a long row of mountain peaks in the middle, is a typical colonial border in Africa splitting communities and very nearly splitting villages.

But far more dangerous and costly is the rife smuggling and the extra efforts made by longer-distance travellers to avoid border posts and health checks.

These are the people who have to go out of their way to avoid a border post, using the main road on one side to get near the border, walking a moderate distance along paths or crude tracks, crossing the border, walking back to the main road on the other side and then continuing their journey.

Their reasons cannot be condoned and are a far cry from someone popping across a colonial line to visit their aunt on the other side.

While smuggling on the eastern, western and northern borders can be a serious nuisance, especially when trucks carrying contraband use new unauthorised roads cut in the bush on the Mozambican border, there is general agreement that the South African border is the main smugglers’ path to illegal riches.

Consumer goods tend to flow north, largely because these are made in a very wide variety in South Africa so just attract VAT there and are thus relatively cheap.

A lot of people find it worth their while to skip paying the modest customs duties at Beitbridge and arrange for them to be ported across the Limpopo River.

The professional smugglers charge, but not much and they have calculated their fees to be lower than the customs duty.

The big item going south are cigarettes.

Over a quarter of all cigarettes smoked in South Africa are believed to be smuggled from Zimbabwe, some hidden in special vehicle compartments or in mislabelled boxes and channelled through Beitbridge, but large quantities carried in backpacks over the Limpopo River bed.

While South African tax authorities complain that some Zimbabwean manufacturers abet this illegal trade, this is unlikely as Zimbabwean excise duties on tobacco, and for that matter alcohol, are collected at the factories or at the point of import.

What drives the trade is the fact that the wholesale and retail prices of cigarettes in Zimbabwe, even with the duty prepaid at the factory, are a lot cheaper than the wholesale and retail prices in South Africa and other SACU states, with their far higher duties.

Cigarettes can be bought legally in Zimbabwe, at Zimbabwean taxed prices, smuggled over the Limpopo at modest cost, and sold for a decent profit to dealers on the other side who can then sell to smokers, again at a profit, but at a price well below South African retail prices.

Covid-19 has added another large group of paddlers. Most countries around the world, and Southern Africa is no exception, see decent health checks at border posts as a good way to slow, and hopefully limit, the spread of infection.

People have to have negative test results, from the more expensive diagnostic test, and quite often need to be quarantined as well. This is the case at the moment, which put a damper on many family reunions this festive season.

Others just decided to paddle rather than stay on their side or go through checks.

South Africa and Zimbabwe have recently been co-ordinating efforts far better than in the past, with simultaneous patrols on both sides of the Limpopo.

This makes each patrol far more productive, since a group cannot escape to the less guarded side of the river when challenged by a patrol on one side.

The results have been startling and expose the size of the problem. During the last three weeks of last month, just 21 days, 13 387 people were caught on one of the sides of the border.

On Sunday January 2 an astonishing 632 were arrested. The costs, incidentally, of those patrols are a drop in the ocean compared to the huge tax losses on both sides when it comes to organised and informal smuggling.

What makes those arrest figures more worrying still is that we do not know how many dodged the patrols and the fact that these patrols find things a bit easier at the moment with the Limpopo rising and so cutting the bulk of the illegal crossing points. Come winter a lot more people could sneak across without being caught.

But at least there is now practical, as well as theoretical, agreement that these huge illegal movements of people are a joint problem that require a joint plan and joint action to combat.

Too often in the past authorities on both sides did not see outward smuggling as that serious, just inward smuggling. But since someone’s outward smuggling is someone else’s inward smuggling you win when you combine operations to stop both.

While solid and very friendly relations between neighbours help create the problem of porous borders, they also offer the solution.

That solution must now be followed up and the large successes by the authorities on both sides in recent weeks, which highlight just how porous the border is to illegal crossings, used to overcome doubts over the need for effective action and the huge gains from joint effective action.