Legal bid to extend driver licences in South Africa

Civil society group Afriforum has announced legal action to extend the grace period for expired driver’s licences beyond the March 2022 deadline.

Afriforum has instructed its lawyers to prepare a legal letter to the Department of Transport demanding that the grace period for the renewal of licences be extended for a reasonable period beyond 31 March 2022.

The civil rights organisation said is further considering the possibility of taking on a trial case in the event that the grace period is not extended, and a member of the public is punished for driving without a valid licence as a result of the government’s own inability to provide this service.

This may set a legal precedent confirming the unlawfulness of punishing members of the public for the department’s own service delivery failures, it said.

“If Afriforum is successful in obtaining a further extension of the licence grace period, it will give members of the public much-needed breathing space to finalize the renewal of their licenses.

“This is only fair since the current backlog of licence applications was caused by the department’s own systemic and deep-rooted failures in the first place,” says Reiner Duvenage, campaign officer for strategy and content at Afriforum.

“Members of the public are frankly fed up with the department’s feeble excuses for its shocking standards of service delivery. This is why AfriForum is acting on behalf of its members and the broader public by continuing to apply pressure on the Department of Transport to fulfil its responsibility of providing proper service delivery.”

10-year licence needed

Civil society group Outa says the government will need to extend its March driving licence deadline as the country cannot address its steep backlog in the coming weeks.

The group says hundreds of thousands of motorists are still struggling to have their expired driving licence cards renewed, and has accused transport minister Fikile Mbalula of trying to deflect the administration chaos onto the public, instead of taking ownership within the department.

Outa said the government will need to extend the deadline for all those who have expired licence cards, as this is an administrative problem, and to speed up the decision on whether to extend the validity period for the cards from five years to 10 years, or not.

“We believe the minister needs to extend this 31 March deadline and take into account that he has to consider the 10-year licence renewal period and its impact on the current situation,” said advocate Stefanie Fick, Outa executive director.

“We strongly feel that a 10-year licence renewal period should apply to all driver’s licence cards in current circulation, meaning that all driver’s licence cards should have five years added onto the current expiry date. If this were the case, then the 31 March expiry date becomes obsolete, and the country can move on without having to attend to the current mess unfolding.”

Mbalula has indicated that there is still a backlog of 534,000 driving licence cards waiting to be printed and that there have been 3,641 transactions over the last 16 days.

Although the minister said the backlog will be cleared in time, Outa said it is sceptical of the administration’s capacity to do this.

It warned that there are likely several hundred thousand motorists with expired licence cards who have been unable to access the renewal system and will not meet the deadline of 31 March 2022, which applies to licence cards that expired between 26 March 2020 and 31 August 2021 during the pandemic lockdown period.

There is also the question of those motorists whose cards expired after 1 September 2021, who have also been caught up in the current chaos of the backlog and received no help, it said.

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