Not a comedy show: Little optimism for Mbalula’s pledges

In a dispatch from the front lines of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, our minister-in-tweet, Fikile Mbalula, promises that we will soon be able to make online payments for car and driving licences.

That must be comforting to the almost 400 000 people who have paid for, but are still waiting for, their driver’s licence cards.

The department of transport has only one machine to print the cards – but it is broken. And it has been sent
to Germany to be fixed. Do not adjust your set.

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This is not a TV comedy show.

This is real life in South Africa.

Mbaks now swears that there will soon be a “new card” produced by “new machines” […] and the whole product and system will be “on par with the developed world”.

That, Comrade Minister, is something we should have had back in the 1990s, before the well-connected Schabir Shaik hijacked the process to leave us with the substandard cards we now have.

Of course, he was financially supporting a certain someone from northern KwaZulu-Natal at the time, so he perhaps needed that lucrative card tender…

Looking at the state of much of our transport infrastructure, it is difficult to be filled with optimism by Mbalula’s latest promises.