No chance of licence extension

2003-04-16 20:32

Cape Town - The government on Wednesday ruled out another extension for motorists to convert to credit card driver's licences, and vowed to get tough with those who did not do so by the end of the month.

Replying to questions in the National Assembly, acting Transport Minister Jeff Radebe said the authorities would act against those who failed to meet the April 30 deadline.

"As we indicated two months ago, there is a tendency for South Africans to wait until the last moment, as we saw towards the end of February.

"We have not seen those crowds again, in these two months (of the extension), so those who think they will crowd the licensing offices at the end of April with the mistaken belief that we are, again, going to extend the time, they are making a big mistake.

"Come the first of May, those that don't have a valid driver's licence in terms of this conversion, the law will take its course," Radebe said.

The department of transport extended the deadline to convert licences from the end of February to April after it became clear that hundreds of thousands of drivers would not make the cut-off.

It was estimated that by the end of February, more than one million drivers had not converted their licences to the new format.

The conversion was instituted to help clamp down on fraudulently issued licences.

Radebe said the department would make every effort to assist those that wanted to convert, to do so, including increasing officials' hours of work.

Cabinet, in a statement released after its fortnightly meeting on Wednesday, also appealed to drivers to adhere to the deadline.

"The meeting noted the process of conversion of drivers' licences to the credit card format, and urged those who have not yet done so, urgently to acquire the new licences before the expiry of the deadline on 30 April 2003," it said.

Radebe also said it was not true that more than half of the licences issued since 1998 were fraudulent.

The reference to this - made in a written reply to a parliamentary question earlier this month - came from information from an informal survey conducted in 1998, the year the conversion to credit card licences was introduced.

Therefore, it did not represent the situation at this time.

"The impression should not be created that of the five million licences, 2.5 million are fraudulent. That is not the case," he said.

- SAPA