Big problem with South Africa’s new driver’s licence card machine plans

The South African government has still not selected a company to provide a new driver’s licence card printer machine, over two years after being notified that the current printer had become obsolete.

The country’s sole driver’s licence card printer is currently broken down after a technical issue following two weeks of “routine maintenance” between 5 April 2023 and 19 April 2023.

The repairs are expected to take a further two to three weeks as it requires replacing a part that needs to be acquired from the original equipment manufacturer in Germany.

It is at least the third time the machine has broken down in about a year and a half.

The first and most severe downtime occurred in November 2021, when flooding of an adjacent building caused an electrical short on the machine.

The downtime added to a severe backlog in renewals created by the Covid-19 pandemic and led to roughly 2.1 million expired licence cards not being renewed by the end of March 2022.

The machine was repaired by late January 2022 but again suffered a four-week breakdown in September 2022.

The driver’s licence card machine is over two decades old, and the authority responsible for producing South Africa’s driver’s licence cards — the Department of Transport’s Driver’s Licence Card Account (DLCA) — admitted as far back as March 2021 that it was obsolete and required replacing.

However, the replacement only seemed to become a priority for the transport department after the first major breakdown in November 2021 and the ensuing frustration from motorists, civil action groups, and opposition parties.

On multiple occasions, former transport minister Fikile Mbalula had promised the new machine’s procurement was imminent.

Fikile Mbalula, former Minister of Transport and current ANC secretary-general.

The original tender document for South Africa’s new licence card, which will be printed with the new machine and is due to enter a pilot phase from November 2023, was first published in January 2022.

According to that document, the winning bidder would have had until March 2022 to manufacture and assemble the card system. That date came and went.

Then, in his introduction to the DLCA’s 2022/2023 annual performance plan presented to Parliament in May 2022, Mbalula said a new printing machine and licence card would be rolled out in the 2022/2023 financial year.

In September 2022, Mbalula said the machine’s procurement process would be initiated in October 2022.

According to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), a revised tender for the machine and cards was published in November 2022, with a closing date at the end of the month. That was subsequently extended.

Outa CEO Wayne Duvenage told CapeTalk the tender has actually been published and withdrawn five times over the past few years.

The most recent version was published on 5 April 2023 and is only set to close on Friday, 5 May 2023.

Duvenage said this back-and-forth made the already complex tender processes even more difficult and expensive for interested parties.

“Companies put in these tenders and do a lot of work. They have to put down deposits and show that they can do this, and then it gets withdrawn,” Duvenage said.

“There are other agendas at play here. They seem to be corrupt agendas.”

Wayne Duvenage, Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse CEO

Duvenage said Outa would ask the government for specific details on the winning bidder if the tender is finalised.

“We want to see who gets this, at what cost, how does this compare to international pricing, is it in-house, is it external?” Duvenage said.

Outa said the “chaotic” delays meant South Africans should not expect a new machine soon.

The organisation also raised doubts that cost was an issue, as it accumulated a surplus of R448 million in the 2021/2022 financial year, when it initially said the machine was obsolete.

Outa has also questioned the Department of Transport’s claim that the machine’s latest breakdown would not cause any further delays in card issuing.

“No driver’s licence cards have been produced since 5 April, and none will be printed for another two to three weeks, but production has not been impacted? Really Department of Transport, how is that possible?” the organisation asked on Twitter.

According to the DLCA, the machine can print about 300,000 cards in a month.

With the total downtime expected to be nearly two months, the number of renewals that will be backlogged could be well over that.

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