It has been revealed that South African taxpayers have been forced to pay over R16 million in maintenance and overtime due to the lengthy periods the country’s only licence card printer has been out of commission.
This is according to comments from Transport Minister Barbara Creecy, who was responding to enquiries about the license card machine at the Parliamentary Q&A.
The R16 million accounts for expenses incurred since the start of the 2022/23 financial year to the present, and the 129 days the license machine has been non-operational.
This downtime is divided as follows:
- 2022/23 – 26 working days
- 2023/24 – 48 working days
- 2024/25 – 17 working days
- 2025/26 – 38 working days
Thanks to these periods of downtime, maintenance and labour costs have spiralled into the extreme.
Labour costs are a concern as the machine requires four employees to operate, with overtime pay necessary to compensate for the time lost due to breakdowns.
The 26 working days the machine was non-operational in 2022/23 resulted in R9,267,862.33 in expenses for repairs and maintenance, with an additional R1,435,376.79 paid for overtime.
In the following financial year, the 48 working days the machine was offline led to R1,651,772.57 spent on maintenance and R1,608,102.52 for overtime costs.
The 2024/25 financial year saw a marked improvement, with the machine being offline for only 17 working days.
This allowed for a much lower maintenance and repair cost of R544,747.64, while overtime costs remained relatively consistent with previous years at R1,351,473.78.
As of the current financial year, 2025/26, the machine has thus far been offline for 38 working days and has accumulated R624,988.10 in maintenance and repair costs.
This figure will obviously increase should the machine continue to be non-operational for lengthy periods of the fiscal year.
It’s also noteworthy that it’s been reported that there has been no paid overtime yet.
Therefore, as of the present and since the beginning of the 2022/23 fiscal year, breakdowns of the license card machine have cost a total of R12,089,369.90 in maintenance and repairs and R4,394,953.09 in overtime, for a grand total of R16,484,322.99.
This has also resulted in a backlog of 733,000 license cards as of 15 May 2025.
Legacy issues and tenders
A report commissioned by the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) in 2022 found that the license card printing machine should have been replaced in 2009.
The consistent breakdowns are therefore unsurprising given the machine’s considerable age.
To address this, tender advertising was done to secure an alternative machine, with Idemia securing the tender in August 2024.
However, a few days after this, Creecy would announce she’d requested an audit by the AGSA into the procurement of the tender.
This audit concluded that Idemia had “failed to meet key bid technical requirements”, with the AGSA citing non-compliance within the prescribed procurement processes due to inadequate budget analysis, inconsistent application scoring, and failure to evaluate bids correctly.
Additionally, it noted that other bidders weren’t unfairly disqualified as they had also failed to meet some of these bid specifications.
When asked about the progress made towards securing a new machine, Creecy noted that a declaratory order must be sought from a competent court on the tender to acquire a new machine.
This would cancel the tender awarded to Idemia based on the findings of the AGSA.
For now, though, South Africa will continue to use its current license card printing machine when possible.
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