Outa welcomes new driver’s licence card but calls for 10-year renewal period

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) has welcomed transport minister Fikile Mbalula’s plan to introduce a new driver’s licence card, saying it will improve service delivery to motorists.

On September 2 Mbalula said the new card has design features that comply with international standards, and will replace the current driver’s licence card introduced in 1998. The production equipment was procured in the same year and the technology has become obsolete, he said.

The department will start the procurement process for the new production infrastructure in October and pilot the new card from November 1 until March 31 2024. The current driver’s licence card and the equipment used to produce it will be decommissioned on April 1 2024. There will be a five-year period of transition from the old card to the new one, and the existing cards will be recognised as valid until March 31 2029.

Mbalula has yet to announce whether the renewal period of the licence card will be extended from the current five years.

He said the average card validity period of almost 10 years was applicable in developed countries, which had far better road safety ratios than SA. 

“This is an important factor in validating a longer renewal period in line with international best practice,” he said.

Outa CEO Wayne Duvenage has been a strong proponent of extending the card’s validity period to 10 years.

“Outa met with the minister in March this year to discuss its request to extend the validity to 10 years, something we have advocated for the past two years. We also presented the minister with our own research into this matter. The outcome of research undertaken by the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) and the minister’s decision on this will determine Outa’s next steps on this matter,” he said.

“Outa’s research shows that there is no correlation between better road safety and shorter validity of cards. “It is therefore of utmost importance to Outa that the RTMC’s research is made public for us to compare it with our own findings and, thus, we urge the minister to show us the research.”

Mbalula said that to date more than 2-million cards had been produced to address the backlog that had resulted from restrictions imposed after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. He said the department had not only been able to reduce the turnaround time for card production to pre-Covid levels but had also improved on those levels.

“We have successfully reduced the waiting period for a driver’s licence card from 58 working days in April to 10 working days in July,” he said.