Joburg’s vehicle licence paper shortage exposes deeper government failure

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JEREMY MAGGS: South African motorists are once again, I see, paying the price for a licensing system that appears unable to perform even its most basic functions.

Johannesburg licensing centres have reportedly run out of the secure paper needed to print vehicle licence discs and registration documents, while motorists continue to battle long queues, unreliable online systems and repeated service interruptions.

Government is promising, it says, greater digitisation, but why is a modern licensing network still being brought to a halt by paper shortages and ageing technology?

Let’s turn our attention to Wayne Duvenage, who’s the chief executive officer of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa). He is following this situation carefully. Wayne, how can a major city simply run out of paper required to issue vehicle licences?

WAYNE DUVENAGE: Yeah, the major city is running out of everything – petrol and so on. This is just bad planning. Why? It is specialised paper, so it has to be ordered.

You have to plan for this and it’s not like they didn’t know that they were running out of paper. It’s not like they don’t know how many people are coming to have their licences done and renewed. So this is just sheer incompetence, quite frankly.

JEREMY MAGGS: The way I see it is it’s not necessarily an isolated problem as far as Johannesburg is concerned, but probably a symptom of a wider national dysfunction.

Listen/read: Is Joburg financially attractive?

The problem has been brought to the fore here in Johannesburg. But there are wider repercussions and implications, I imagine.

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WAYNE DUVENAGE: Yeah, there are. Jeremy, people plan their days, they take time off work to go and get these licences done. It takes a long time. It’s a hell of an effort to get there and then be told that we’ve run out of paper, basic stuff, is just unacceptable.

As you were saying, we should have been far ahead of where we are, modernising the whole licensing system, which should be digitised by now, on our phones.

We’re still running very old systems. I don’t know why the Department of Transport is just not getting their act together, getting all of this coordinated properly so that we can move into the new age of technology. We are so far behind.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you have a concern that the licensing system, as it stands right now, Wayne, maybe creates opportunities for corruption and even middlemen because the official process is working so poorly? Surely this is open to corruption?

WAYNE DUVENAGE: It certainly is, absolutely, and that’s what we get a sense of so often, people don’t want to modernise, people don’t want to digitise. You could have the whole driver’s license [system to prevent] corruption, but it seems like there’s a lack of a desire to do so. So we, the people, keep suffering the consequences.

JEREMY MAGGS: On a practical level, do you have any advice as to what kind of proof people should keep if they have tried unsuccessfully to renew their licences? How do you mitigate?

WAYNE DUVENAGE: Well, it’s very difficult to have proof other than to try and photograph that you were there. But no police officer is going to do anything about that when you say, I have tried, so please be lenient with me.

You do have three months of your licence expiring to be replaced. I just think you’ve got to go ahead of time, two or three months before. You can’t go earlier than three months, I think, and just [putting] them under pressure.

But what we’ve got to do as society is keep putting government under pressure to modernise and to get up to speed and not allow these problems to happen.

JEREMY MAGGS: When that happens, government comes back and says it is considering replacing physical licence discs with electronic verification. But again, one’s got to ask the question, is the country technically ready for that? Probably not.

WAYNE DUVENAGE: Yeah, it is. It should have gone there some time ago. In fact, we did a whole presentation to the department to push the licence renewal period out to 10 years so that it reduces the pressure on the licensing department by half, by the way.

We did the research, right back when Fikile Mbalula was still going to do it, then we found out they had already approved it in 2013, and then they rescinded that decision.

They were really all over the place. Now, Minister Barbara Creecy has said they’ve looked at it, they’re going to go to eight years. This was long ago, and here we sit and we say, well, why are you procrastinating?

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Read: Validity period of driving licences still up in the air

Eight is not quite ten years, but it’s a lot better five years. That would ease a lot of pressure. All of this nonsense.

So they make a decision, but they just, I don’t know, it’s like rabbits in the headlights, and the headlights are just stuck. They cannot proceed with the decision they’ve already agreed to.

JEREMY MAGGS: So who’s ultimately accountable when licensing centres can’t provide these basic services?

WAYNE DUVENAGE: The Department of Transport is ultimately responsible. They will blame the provinces. Like when we pointed out all the vehicle testing corruption that was happening, they blamed the provinces. We said, but you have the national mandate for road safety, if vehicles aren’t roadworthy, you’ve got to oversee this.

Then, on this issue, they’ll blame the licensing centre for not ordering on time, or the City of Joburg for not having money to pay for the paper.

It’s just that everybody points to everybody else but if you’re the Minister of Transport, this ultimately sits with you.

You need to get everybody into the room and say this is grossly unacceptable from the provincials down to the local government and say, fix your nonsense if you’re not ordering on time.

By the way, you could automate that whole ordering system – how many licences have been issued, how much paper you’ve got. It’s not difficult.

It’s not rocket science, Jeremy, it’s just a lack of will and competence.

We keep saying so many problems exist because the wrong people are in the positions because it’s a cadre deployment issue, I think.

JEREMY MAGGS: Lack of will and competence, Wayne Duvenage, but is it also a lack of money? Does the funding exist to fix this?

WAYNE DUVENAGE: Yeah, I believe we have enough money in this country to fix anything. If every rand was spent where it should be spent, then we’ve got the funds. It’s just that too much money goes missing for the wrong reasons.

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As we were saying earlier on, corruption is probably the reason why they run out of money because they’re not spending it in the right areas.

JEREMY MAGGS: So just a final one then, apart from the minister calling everyone into a room to crack the whip, what other immediate intervention do you think the transport authorities need to make clear as far as this current disruption is concerned, or do Johannesburgers simply have to live with the problem?

WAYNE DUVENAGE: We shouldn’t have to live with the problem. The authorities in the Department of Transport in Joburg that run the licensing [department] need to have the paper ordered.

What they should have done – and by the way, this hasn’t just happened yesterday, it’s been going on for some time – they should have rushed off to wherever they have to go and get this paper and get it delivered.

Now you’ll have a courier problem or a back order problem. It really isn’t difficult. Whoever is in charge of transport in the city must take responsibility.

But so should the MEC (Member of the Executive Council) for transport in Gauteng, who should be visiting the next day when they see that type of [issue].

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These are basic errors, they should have got involved, the minister should have got involved because it’s not like they don’t know about it. They all know about it.

This is the biggest city, so when people in Joburg start queuing up and are then told that we’ve run out of paper, it really is a problem.

JEREMY MAGGS: Wayne Duvenage, thank you very much indeed. Chief executive officer of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse.

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