Africa-Press – South-Africa. The Department of Transport on Sunday announced that the country’s only driving licence card machine is back up and running after breaking down last month.
According to transport department spokesperson Collen Msibi, the machine was taken out of production for three weeks to replace a broken part that was identified during routine maintenance.
“The testing of the machine after the part’s replacement took another two weeks before it was certified to go back to full production,” said Msibi.
The department as saying the machine underwent routine maintenance from 5-19 April, when a problem was encountered.
“The technical team encountered a breakdown which requires replacement of a critical part from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM),” Msibi said previously.
Now, with the machine up and running, it will increase production from the 60 000 cards produced over the past three weeks during the testing period, to about 120 000 cards per week.
The backlog is currently at 350 000 cards for the past five weeks.
Msibi said the machine had printed an average of 2 850 000 cards per year over the past two financial years. Since its commissioning in 1998, it has printed over 60 million driving licence cards.
Msibi added:
The department is currently working on introducing a new driving licence card, as approved by Cabinet in August 2022.
It said that the new card will be launched before the end of the current financial year.
“It will also bring new card production machines to replace the current machine. This signals the new dawn in the driving card environment,” Msibi added.
Last year, the department experienced a major backlog in the printing of licences after the card machine broke down and needed to be sent to Germany to be fixed.
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