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How to say no to a R250 driving licence booking fee proposed by government

Last week Minister of Transport, Fikile Mbalula, published proposed amendments to the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) Regulations of 2007 and there are good and bad aspects of the proposal.

To start with the good, the RTMC is looking to make the National Road Traffic Information system (NATIS) a lot more robust. Going off of this proposal, it looks like the entity wants to move much of its operations online. This means, if adopted, this amendment would allow motorists to book a renewal online, request a change of ownership and event request an electronic copy of an accident report.

While the booking of a driving licence can already be done online in Gauteng this would give motorists a lot more options. That is, if NATIS actually works.

We’re in the process of renewing a driving licence and we are yet to complete a booking on NATIS which is unfortunately our only option. The website is often down or slow to the point where timeouts are common, at least from our experience. It’s just not a very good system. The issues with NATIS have been further compounded by the pandemic and there appears to be a constant backlog at licence testing centres.

Which is why the bad news is very bad.

Not only does RTMC want to make NATIS more robust, it wants to charge South Africans for the privilege of booking a driving licence renewal.

Proposed fees published by RTMC.

As you can see in the table above, the RTMC is proposing a R250 fee to book the renewal of a “credit card format driving licence”. This is over and above the fee charged to renew the licence.

As mentioned, this is a proposal at this stage and the public has been invited to submit comments.

These comments must be submitted by 3rd October 2021 to either Advocate Ngwako Thoka or John Motsatsing via the email addresses below or mailed to Department of Transport, Private Bag X193, Pretoria, 0001 marked for the attention of either Thoka or Motsatsing.

The email addresses follow below. Please note that we format email addresses this way to avoid scrapers and nefarious individuals from simply copying and pasting the information. Simply replace the [at] with the @ symbol and the [dot] with full stops.

  • thokan[at]dot[dot]gov[dot]za
  • motsatsj[at]dot[dot]gov[dot]za

Make sure your comment is concise and be civil. Nobody wants to pay more but take your time and formulate a coherent reason as to why you agree or disagree with the proposed amendments.

The proposed amendments can be found here.

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