Tony Robinson writes:
There is a simple solution to the problem of renewing driver's licences – take the job away from the municipalities.
We know from the Auditor-General's reports that most of our municipalities are poorly managed, in financial trouble and many are unable or unwilling to deliver the basic services they were established to provide. So let's help them by taking the licence load off their backs.
There was a similar situation with road worthy certificates some years ago and the problem was solved by allowing the private sector to set up testing stations. Municipalities and car dealers breathed sighs of relief.
The long licence queues outside municipal offices would disappear and the staff could concentrate on improving service delivery.
We could then go even further and end municipal responsibility for testing learners and drivers. In fact, this should be an urgent requirement because the system has failed and more than a thousand people die each month on our roads, most of them killed by bad drivers.
In South Africa the road death rate is 25 for every 100 000 people. That is almost as bad as our murder rate of 35,8 per 100 000 people. (The international average murder rate, by the way, is seven, which is about a fifth of our performance.)
A better way to understand the slaughter on the roads is to look at fatalities in relation to the number of cars in action because a vehicle is involved in every fatal crash. This should make our figures look better because of our relatively low car ownership rate, but don't count on it.
In the United States there are 14 deaths per year per 100 000 vehicles. In most of Europe the figures for road deaths are below 10 per 100 000 cars and go as low as three in Norway.
In South Africa every batch of 100 000 cars kills 134 people every year, despite our near perfect driving conditions.
The main reason for this continuing disaster is plain bad driving, and every bad driver was given his or her licence to kill by one of our municipalities or their corrupt employees.
Our non-solution to this frightening problem is to make drivers renew their licences every five years. This may eliminate the partially sighted, but it does nothing to improve skills on the road. It is just a costly bureaucratic exercise and the only ones to benefit are the companies that make the plastic licences. But perhaps that was the plan.
A better plan would be to talk to the insurance companies. They know who the bad drivers are from their claims records and they could be called in for retesting and probably retraining. If the industry doesn't co-operate we could have a random process to select a few candidates each month for retesting – the kind of lottery you don't want to win.
But it would be cheaper that the present mess and it would save lives.
Until that happens, the good people of Knysna will have to queue for driver's licences every five years and rather more frequently for alternatives to the undrinkable municipal water.
