The Life Enrollment Unit (LEU’s) machines that the municipality use at the License Office are the property of the Road Traffic Management Committee (RMTC).
No municipal official is allowed to work on the machines except technicians from RTMC.
This was the reaction of the Municipality following a message on Facebook by a resident complaining about computer systems that were down at the license department. The message was sent to the municipality for comment on 25 October but they only replied on 7 November.
The extremely frustrated resident posted on Facebook “on Thursday last week (18 October) only a small group of people’s licenses had been renewed. On Friday, Monday and Tuesday the system was off.
My wife and at least two other people have temporary licenses that have expired. They must get new glasses after they had operations. On Monday and Tuesday she went before 07:30 and already there was a lot of people waiting. After 08:00 somebody came out of the building telling them that the system is off. They also can’t say when it will be running again.
Some of the people waiting there took time off at work. One woman said she went to work at 05:00 and then had to break from work to get there. Other people had to take leave to be there. There was also students who are busy with exams.
It is a waste of expensive working hours. On inquiry it seemed that the problem is local but that technical people from Johannesburg has to come to fix the problem.
This creates two problems: It seems that he authorities don’t want to learn from the private sector about decentralization. Managers of big organizations will tell you that it is cheaper and more effective to have a local technician which might not always be very busy but can immediately fix a problem which otherwise can take days to solve. The other problem is that the system engineers did not build in a back-up. There must be an alternative if the system does not work.” said the angry resident.
The spokesperson of the Municipality, Mr Willie Maphosa said that on the said date the problem with the facility was logged in at Provincial Government for immediate attention. However, it was unfortunate that the technician arrived only a week later to fix the machines.
In the meanwhile the municipality could not undertake any renewals, professional driving permits or take any new appointments as no eye tests, fingerprints or anything else could be done without the LEU machines.
However, our officials at the testing site did go out between 7H30 and 7H45 to inform the public that the machines were out of order and notices to this effect were displayed all around the vicinity.
