The Minister of Transport, Fikile Mbalula, has urged motorists who still need to renew their licences to do so immediately, as there is only a week left until the final deadline for the renewal grace period.
According to Mbalula, there will be no further extension beyond this period as law enforcement will now penalise those who willfully disregard the law and fail to renew their expired licences, while assisting those with genuine challenges.
Mbalula made these comments during the release of the preliminary statistics for the Easter weekend, where he also provided an update on the grace period for expired licences.
The Minister indicated that motorists must understand that they have to utilise their booked slots to help the department tackle the backlog in a meaningful way.
“We urge these drivers to ensure that they honour their commitment and take up the slots, which would ordinarily have been used by others who have difficulty in finding slots closer to where they live.
“We have overcome the capacity constraints that delayed the production of driving licence cards due to the machine that broke down last year. The Driving Licence Card Account trading entity is now working 24-hour daily shifts to clear the backlog of driving licence cards,” he said.
Currently, South Africa has a backlog of 1.3 million expired driving licence cards that have yet to be renewed, and an analysis of the backlog by age of drivers, who have not renewed their driving licence cards, shows that motorists between the ages of 25 and 50 years constitute 68% of drivers who have yet to renew their licences.
Meanwhile, by Wednesday, 27 April 2022, the government had produced a total of 789 600 driving licence cards.
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