The Department of Transport has filed papers with the Pretoria High Court, requesting it to set aside the contentious contract for new driving licence printers and re-run the tender process.
According to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), the department filed papers to overturn the R898 million contract.
The filed papers also request the court to re-run the tender process and allow the Department of Home Affairs to print driving licence cards in the interim.
This follows the department awarding the contract to procure new driving licence printers to Idemia South Africa last year.
However, this was derailed after Transport Minister Barbara Creecy requested an audit of the tender procurement process by the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA).
The audit found that Idemia had “failed to meet key bid technical requirements”, with AGSA citing non-compliance within the prescribed procurement processes due to inadequate budget analysis, inconsistent application scoring, and failure to evaluate bids correctly.
As a result of these findings, the process of securing a new card printing machine has been delayed, and the backlog of unprinted cards due to the current machine’s frequent breakdowns has grown substantially.
To solve this problem, Creecy recently announced in the budget vote speech for the 2025/26 financial year that the department had signed a deal with Government Printing Works (GPW) to print licence cards.
“To ensure we have a backup solution, we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government Printing Works,” Creecy said.
“We expect that this backup solution will be able to print driver’s licence cards within three months.”
The GPW is an agency that reports to Home Affairs and specialises in printing important national documents such as passports, visas, birth certificates, green ID books, and smart ID cards.
This makes them well-suited to printing driver’s licence cards as well.
Court paper details
The papers filed by the department with the court outline various flaws in the tender application process.
These include issues such as a R400 million cost escalation from the Cabinet-approved budget of R486 million for the signed contract, resulting in a total of R899 million.
Additionally, the papers indicate that the tender used outdated pricing and omitted the printing material costs.
Issues with scoring and machine assessments, bidder non-compliance, and weak documentation are also cited.
The report from the AGSA, which first determined issues with the tender process, is included in the submitted papers.
The department also included its own internal procurement assessment and an external review as supporting evidence.
Outa has noted that it’s unclear whether Idemia will oppose the legal challenge.
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