{"id":918514,"date":"2022-01-22T07:57:07","date_gmt":"2022-01-22T07:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/news\/2022\/01\/22\/carping-point-fikile-mbalula-and-the-big-drivers-licence-mystery\/"},"modified":"2022-01-22T07:57:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-22T07:57:07","slug":"carping-point-fikile-mbalula-and-the-big-drivers-licence-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/01\/22\/carping-point-fikile-mbalula-and-the-big-drivers-licence-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"Carping Point: Fikile Mbalula and the big driver's licence mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Johannesburg – Wednesday was supposed to be the big reveal, the day when Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula was going to tell us \u2013 and show us – what the catastrophic crisis has been with the production of licences. The story to date is simple. There\u2019s one machine. It\u2019s made in Germany. It\u2019s broken. No one is able to renew their licences.<\/p>\n

The machine should have broken down at some stage, it\u2019s been churning out these licences since at least 1998 when I got my first card licence. If it hadn\u2019t broken down since then, that\u2019s nothing less than a tribute to the German engineers who made it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But no, prior to the big reveal, Mbaks announced: \u201cThere\u2019s much about the process that is not understood.\u201d As the inimitable Richard Poplak quipped on Twitter; \u201cIt\u2019s like the f….r just launched the James Webb telescope from the top of Luthuli House\u201d. But of course, Wednesday came and went and we\u2019re still waiting for the big reveal. Apparently Mbaks got his Wednesdays wrong, he\u2019ll tell us next Wednesday \u2013 or maybe he\u2019ll be playing with his trains again.<\/p>\n

If you place your ID card and the driving licence side-by-side, it\u2019s difficult to understand what the fuss is about. The ID card is, short of having it on your smartphone, incredibly high tech compared to the driver\u2019s licence: there are microdots, holographs and other anti-forgery devices. By contrast the driver\u2019s licence doesn\u2019t look like much advanced than the student cards that were issued at Rhodes University in the 1980s. It\u2019s Michael J Fox in Back to the Future \u2013 although we are well past 2015. It shouldn\u2019t even have been that difficult to make them here, they\u2019re that basic.<\/p>\n

In fact, here\u2019s a revolutionary thought, why don\u2019t we just incorporate driver\u2019s licences on the Home Affairs ID card? That way, in a truly digital space, the law enforcement officer just scans the barcode to find out whether you are who you say you are \u2013 and whether you should be behind the wheel. Even better, you can go to a bank to get it, if the system isn\u2019t down at Home Affairs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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MORE ON THIS<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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But no, that would mean breaking silos in government \u2013 and especially ministries \u2013 so the door has been opened, officially, to people driving with expired licences through no fault of their own. Or they can pay a couple of bob to have their pix sellotaped to a temporary licence, which can literally be issued from the boot of the car of one of the many entrepreneurs that sit with their printers hooked up to car batteries outside testing and licencing centres. Maybe some of them are.<\/p>\n

The surprise is that any of us are surprised.<\/p>\n

The ANC has had some truly stellar characters over the years, international icons. Being a broad church though has also meant that it\u2019s also housed some real lemons; chancers, charlatans, incompetents, braggarts, bullies and bullshitters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In that pathetic pantheon, Minister Fokop, the friend of boxers and taxi bosses alike \u2013 but not motorists or commuters – truly is the undisputed champion of his weight division. He wears the crown (and Dame Edna glasses) with a panache that truly is to the manor born.<\/p>\n

The Saturday Star<\/p>\n

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Johannesburg – Wednesday was supposed to be the big reveal, the day when Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula was going to tell us \u2013 and show us – what the catastrophic crisis has been with the production of licences. The story to date is simple. There\u2019s one machine. It\u2019s made in Germany. It\u2019s broken. No one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-918514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}