South Africa must say goodbye to five-year driving licences
Extending South Africa's driving licence validity would bring the country's driving laws into line with many first-world countries in Europe, America, Asia, and Australasia, as well as some developing nations.
The civil action group, the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA), has repeatedly called on South Africa's transport minister to consider extending the validity period to
10 years.
South Africa wants to keep the five-year driving licence, because apparently renewing a plastic card is now a recurring government gig...
Every five years, you leave your hab, cross half the metroplex, find the correct transport bunker and join a queue already wrapped around the building. All this so the state can confirm that your face, fingerprints and eyeballs are still running the same firmware.
Welcome to Licence Renewal 2077, choom.
You arrive before sunrise, thinking you are clever. There are already eighty people ahead of you, one food vendor, two broken chairs and a security guard who has seen too much.
Then comes the sacred announcement.
“System is offline.”
Naturally. The system is not merely offline anymore. It has been zeroed. Gone beyond the Blackwall. Nobody has seen it since Tuesday.
Meanwhile, plenty of countries issue licences for ten years. Their governments have apparently worked out that driving ability does not expire every sixty months like discount synth-meat.
But here the whole biz must repeat. New photo. New eye test. New fingerprints. New fee. Same face, same eyes, same chaos.
OUTA says extend it to ten years, which sounds like basic street logic. Half the admin, half the queues and half the number of citizens burning leave days inside a building where the air conditioner has been dead since the old net.
Of course, some corpo behind a polished desk will say, “But road safety.”
Darling, the card is not driving the vehicle.
A freshly printed licence does not stop an oke from doing 140 while eating a pie, sending a voice note and overtaking on a solid line. You can renew that man’s card every three months. His judgement will remain permanently corrupted.
Then there is the temporary licence, a piece of paper so fragile it looks like it was printed by a resistance cell in somebody’s garage. You carry it around like classified intel while waiting for the real card printer to wake up from cryosleep.
Maybe the machine is broken. Maybe the contract expired. Maybe nobody bought toner. Nobody knows. That information is above your clearance level.
This is not public admin.
It is a side gig.
Objective: renew licence. Difficulty: psycho. Cost: eddies, petrol and one full day of your remaining lifespan. Reward: a plastic card that expires before the trauma does.
A ten-year licence will not fix every problem on South African roads, but it will at least reduce the pointless grind. People have jobs, kids and actual biz to handle. They cannot keep reporting to the Department of Transport like summoned NPCs.
Make it ten years. Upgrade the system. Cut the queues.
Because Night City has chrome implants, flying vehicles and rogue artificial intelligence.
South Africa is still waiting for the card machine to come back online.
