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Licence renewal debacle drives home the pain of accessing state services

Very few things in life are surely as frustrating than standing in a queue to renew a driver’s licence, apply for a passport or ID card or an unabridged birth certificate.

It usually involves taking leave from work – something most of us can ill-afford – standing in long queues in the scorching sun and then sometimes not even coming away from an eight-hour ordeal with what you need. Most of the time, offline IT systems is the excuse government spit out to people.

Whether the online system is the genuine reason why this process is so painful, it shouldn’t be.

Everyone has to renew licences. Everyone has to apply for new cards. There should be an easier alternative in this day and age.

Technology should be our friend, not our foe. What’s worse is that service – and we use this term loosely – at government departments during the Covid pandemic has probably deteriorated. Now it seems violent protests by driving school owners, which has resulted in the shutting down of licensing departments, is the new scourge.

For the last two weeks the Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni metros closed several centres to protect their staff and infrastructure after some offices were trashed and staff intimidated and attacked.

It seems the protests have been sparked by the introduction of the new online booking system, which driving school owners said was unusable. They say the online system has disadvantaged them financially as they could no longer make bookings on behalf of clients for a fee.

Tshwane MMC for roads and transport Dikeledi Selowa said: “We will not tolerate lawlessness…. Protesting driving schools owners should not be allowed to hold customers to ransom.”

We’re sorry to be the bearer of bad news ma’am, but that’s already happened.

The question is: what is being done about it, as the licensing crisis deepens? Heading to the courts won’t, for now, help Joe Public in the queues.