2 weeks Ago
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) has maintained that the transport department's new driving licence contract is extremely expensive, even when considering the new service provider will supply three card printing machines instead of one. Transport minister Barbara Creecy revealed that procuring these machines would cost R1 billion in a recent Parliamentary response to questions from the political party Rise Mzansi. That came after months of obscurity from the Department of Transport (DoT) under former minister Sindisiwe Chikunga about delays in rolling out the new cards and the tender processes for a new card provider.
Creecy revealed the department would be paying R334 million for each of the three driving licence card printing machines it was buying from French firm Idemia. The minister's response was the first confirmation that the department would have more than one machine printing the cards after it previously said it would stick to just one printer. The transport department previously justified having just one machine as necessary to prevent corrupt officials from printing fraudulent licence cards.
Civil action groups and road law experts were not convinced that this argument held water. The current machine is 26 years old and has repeatedly broken down in the past few years, including in a two-month outage in late 2021 and early 2022, causing a Covid-hit licence renewal backlog to surge to 1.3 million.
In her Parliamentary answer, Creecy also revealed that the old machine's maintenance expenditure was R21 million in the last five financial years, working out to R4.2 million per year. While not an insignificant number, the total price of the new machines will be 238 times greater than that annual spend.
However, few would argue that a replacement is not in order, particularly given the machine had broken down 159 times during its lifetime,...
Hanno Labuschagne.
