News in Brief

Major Backlog of Driving Licences in South Africa

South Africa’s Department of Transport (DoT) announced that the country’s only driving licence card personalisation machine is back up and running after breaking down last month.

The DoT has updated the public that the driving licence card production machine is back in full production. This follows the department’s statement in May that the machine was taken out of production for three weeks in order to replace a broken part identified during routine maintenance.

The testing of the machine after the part replacement took another two weeks before it was certified to go back to full production. This will see an increase in production from the 60,000 cards produced over the past three weeks during the testing period to about 120,000 cards per week. The machine has printed an average 2.85 million cards per annum in the past two financial years. Since its commissioning in 1998 it has printed over 60 million driving licence cards.