Licence renewal fiasco

ZULULANDERS might have been wondering why long queues have lately been forming outside the licencing office at the Civic Centre

For those who don’t know, the traffic authorities no longer send out vehicle licence renewal notices.

To have your vehicle licence renewed, you now have to go the licence office, present yourself with your ID book and proof of residential address.

This seems (again) to be the result of a decision by some official sitting in his air-conditioned office and having no idea what the practical ramifications of this new practice are.

There are about 84 000 registered vehicles carrying a NRB registration plate.

This means that on average, about 7 000 renewals needs to be done every month. Considering that there are on average 22 working days every month, it means that 318 renewals have to be processed every working day.

That does not sound like a lot, but if one considers that the licence office is open from 07h30 to 14h45 every day, there are 435 minutes available each day to do the renewals and this excludes time taken off for tea breaks, lunch breaks, computers going off-line and so on.

This means that the licence office has to on average, process a renewal every 1.5 minutes!

We all know this is impossible and that is why people have been spending between 2 to 2.5 hours in the queue to have their licences renewed.

Some of course are turned away when the office closes for the day and have to return another day.

To make matters worse, people have to queue in the searing heat with no shade in sight.

No thought has obviously been given to the elderly or disabled or people who are self-employed who cannot leave their businesses unattended to have their vehicle licences renewed.

It is difficult to determine the rationale behind this decision, but if it has anything to do with weeding out criminals and such like, you can rest assured that they will not be caught out by this procedure as they would by now have bribed their way out of this situation anyway.

Can we please have sanity restored to the licence renewal process, otherwise we are going to have hundreds of unlicensed vehicles on our roads; not because people do not want to pay their licence fees and stay on the right side of the law, but because our officials have made it impossible for them to abide by the law.

H DE WET