The Road Traffic Management Corporation’s (RTMC) National Traffic Anti-Corruption Unit recently arrested a Limpopo licensing examiner for allegedly assisting four applicants get learner licences without being tested.
Three of these individuals were foreign nationals who cannot read, write, or speak English. They are currently in custody at the Lebowakgomo Police Station with ongoing investigations expected to yield more arrests.
As per the RTMC, the examiner was caught red-handed assisting the applicants in the classroom during their exam.
When questioned by the authorities, the candidates confessed to paying a fee of R3,000 each to the examiner, indicating that the black market for driver’s licences has experienced considerable inflation in recent years.
Last year, the RTMC similarly apprehended a corrupt licensing official in the Eastern Cape for assisting learner’s licence students in passing their tests. However, he only charged R2,500 a pop.
In 2022, another case out of the Eastern Cape revealed that fraudulent learner’s licences could be obtained by paying an examiner a gratification of R1,500, according to an IOL report.
A thriving industry
Illegal licences are a big industry in South Africa.
Back in 2022, the Department of Transport flagged over 190,000 fraudulent licences on its system which it attempted to cancel as part of its efforts to rid Driver’s Licence Testing Centres (DLTC) of corruption, Sowetan Live reported at the time.
However, it seems that this has done little to stem the epidemic.
Just this week, the City of Cape Town noted that in the past year alone the metro has seen over 400 instances of people trying to complete transactions like renewing driver’s licences or obtaining public driving permits using unlawful means.
It also reviewed 297 suspicious licences. Of these, 16 were confirmed to be fake and were revoked.
Not only do individuals who obtain illegal driver’s licences cost the national fiscus billions of rands every year in lost revenue, but they also contribute to the high rate of fatalities on the country’s roads.
Rob Handfield-Jones, road safety expert and managing director of driving skills company Driving.co.za, estimates that corruption in South Africa’s driving licence industry has likely added over 300,000 excess road deaths over the past 25 years.
Tender document showing South Africa’s new licence card
The prevalence of fraudulent licences is one of the primary reasons the country is getting new driver’s licence cards in the near future.
The new documents incorporate “smart card” technologies like intricate watermarks and user biometrics that can store data and be channelled through multiple authentication systems.
This will make it far more difficult to illegally modify or create counterfeits.
Furthermore, they will be compliant with the International Information Technology Personal Identification Compliant Driving Licence (ISO18013) standard and subsequently be valid in countries outside South Africa.
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