SECUNDA – Ridge Times received numerous complaints from frustrated and angered residents about poor service delivery at the licensing department.
For one reluctant citizen, it had taken six trips at different allocated occasions to complete three personal vehicles registrations and a change of ownership.
“In the end, it is the lack of effective management that causes the degradation of a community.
“These issues are larger than the staff themselves,” said the disgruntled vehicle owner who wishes to remain anonymous.
She told the Ridge Times that when she wanted to renew multiple, personal vehicle licences she was told she was only allowed to do one licence renewal at a time and if she had wanted to do more than one, she had to return on a Tuesday.
“Why are services spread to specific days of the week? And if they have to insist on this ridiculous notion, then at the very least there would need to be proper and visible signage: of which most notifications are just handwritten.
“The worst excuse I had to understand was that I had to return the Tuesday because I had multiple issues. This is ridiculous.”
Another disgruntled resident went to Kriel, but was turned away and told to use the licensing department within their jurisdiction.
They told the Ridge Times they were turned away by Secunda licensing department at 12pm on a Friday.
“They just told us we must come back the following Monday because they were done for the day,” said the infuriated citizen.
For others, standing in the line is just as frustrating, especially being set back a few seats by “line jumpers”.
“People are paying to get a place in front of the line while we have to get here early and hope to have our licence renewed.
“We dare not say anything because we are then victimised by those jumping the line,” said a citizen standing in the line.
Upon investigating the Ridge Times reporter confronted a “line jumper” and was sworn at.
Those standing in line said that complaining to security will not help because the security is involved with the line jumpers’ dealings.
No original registration application forms, systems being offline and insufficient staff are also among many of the complaints received.
People providing legit queuing services have also raised their concerns saying they are only allowed to register five documents on one allocated day a week.
The Ridge Times spoke to the director of transport administration and licensing for Mpumalanga, Mr MG Vuma, regarding complaints received.
“We have a big challenge with Queue for you (Q4U) people. There are about 20 and they increase daily. These are people who come to our centre with a lot of applications to license vehicles on behalf of other people.
“We initially said we can only help them on a Tuesday. For that, we had to cancel the car dealers for this particular day.”
Mr Vuma said they are also short-staffed.
“In the past two weeks three of our employees were on sick leave, so only two are working. One for the public and one for bulk transactions.”
He also said on one of these days the systems were offline in the morning, however by the afternoon the office was able to function.
“We told Q4U members that we can help them but they can only do two documents per person so that the other members of the public can also be assisted.
“If we take more than two applications it will block the queue of the ordinary citizens.
“Q4U started complaining and banging on the doors that they want all their documents to be done since we couldn’t help them,” said Mr Vuma.
He went on saying that in essence, they are making sure that clients and the community do not suffer because of the Q4U people since they are increasing by the day.
“We have opted to give them Tuesday because they were blocking the queues every day,” said Mr Vuma.
