This article was first published by Business Brief on 13 January 2025
It is downright ludicrous that South Africa has only a single machine capable of producing driving licence cards. In November 2021 an electrical fault caused the machine to break down. It took two months to get the machine back online, causing the backlog of licenses to grow by over a million.
The stated reason for there only being a single machine to produce licenses is to prevent corrupt officials from being able to product fraudulent cards and flood the country with them. But this stated aim has already failed. Fake licenses are a mainstay of South African roads – and that’s when non-compliant drivers even put in the effort to get a fake license. Lack of enforcement has led to countless drivers taking to the streets without a license. The specific number of these criminals cannot be determined, as they are unregistered and uncountable by their very nature.
It is clear that having a single machine does not stop the proliferation of illegal drivers. If anything, the difficulty of getting a license may encourage the illicit market in fraudulent licenses. So, if the stated aim of there being a single machine is to prevent the spread of fake licenses, the system is failing dismally.
Rather than maintaining a single, outdated machine that is prone to breakdowns and backlogs going into the millions, the entire driving license infrastructure needs to be privatised and decentralised. Yes, this will lead to episodes of corruption. But the current system already allows for corruption anyway. We cannot hold back the entire country just because some people are criminals. We allow criminality and corruption to cause even more damage by stifling ourselves in an effort to stop it from occurring.
Allowing banks to perform tasks previously monopolised by Home Affairs has shown how effective public-private partnerships can be. Allowing banks to issue IDs and passports has improved service quality, made the process much more convenient, and reduced wait times dramatically. A similar system should be adopted for the production and issuance of driving licenses.
Currently, the production of licenses is already outsourced to a private company, but this process has been fraught with corruption. The tendering process was corrupt, with appropriate candidates being whittled away for petty reasons. However, even if the tendering process hadn’t been terrible, outsourcing a single private company to perform a government function doesn’t solve the problem.
The inherent advantage of the private sector is that it is compelled to perform well due to competition. If it fails at its task, it loses business to a better alternative. The problem with tenders that select only a single private company is that they run into the problems inevitable from any state-backed monopoly. There is no incentive to perform well. Consumers cannot vote with their wallets. They get paid if they perform well or not.
So, the solution to the driver license backlog is to introduce many competing producers. Ideally, every province, and perhaps even every municipality should have its own machine. Lock in every machine to a sophisticated digital registry similar to the smart ID system. The system can check in with reputable traffic departments to generate a bar code or similar technology to prevent fraud. These codes will be linked to an individual and their ID number so that the card itself doesn’t matter, only the code it contains.
Traffic officers can then be outfitted with an app that they can use to scan the code and confirm it belongs to the correct individual. The onus on fighting fraud is with technology, rather than a simple piece of card that is easy to counterfeit.
We don’t need to stifle production to fight corruption. We just need to use advanced technology. Technology that already exists and is in use in other parts of our society.
When choosing local companies to produce licenses, the tendering system should be avoided as much as possible. It is built to encourage corruption and favouritism. Rather, construct the system in such a way that the codes are generated centrally and without favour, and the production can be performed by any company that merely registers with the traffic department in order to receive the code.
If done right, driving license production could eliminate the backlog in days. And we can prevent any further backlogs from ever occurring again.
