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Traffic officer monitoring vehicles at a roadblock.
Civil rights group, the Organization Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has called on Transport Minister Barbara Creecy to temporarily suspend fines and temporary licenses for motorists affected by the printing backlog of driving license cards.
Last month, the department reported a printing backlog of over 700,000 cards after a breakdown of the country’s only card printing machine earlier this year.
OUTA’s Head of Legal, Advocate Stefanie Fick, has demanded a moratorium on penalties for motorists who are waiting for their renewed cards.
“You’ve applied for your driver’s license in time, now you are waiting. Why should you then spend another day in the queue to go ask for a temporary driver’s license? Or you’ve already applied and got a temporary driver’s license, but now time has overcome (sic), and you sit with a temporary driver’s license that’s also expired. Why should you then go again and pay for something? I think it will be easy for the department to say, if you can show that you have applied for your driver’s license, that should be enough and that law enforcement should not give you a ticket,” says Fick.
