South Africa
OUTA meets Mbalula amid plea to extend driving license validity to 10 years─── 12:09 Fri, 18 Mar 2022
Extending South Africa's driving license validity period from the current five years to ten years could help ease the massive backlog of expired licenses.
That's the motivation by OUTA, who recently made presentations to Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula.
OUTA's Andrea van Heerden says, according to their research, the current five-year period is too short considering that thousands of drivers have not renewed their licenses due to Covid and a failing government system.
She says their argument is based on hard research across several countries and thousands of citizens.
"That includes African, Asian and UK countries. What we found is that the average of the 35 countries that we surveyed, the average validity period is 8.5 years.
"So that forms part of our research that we conducted, and we also did an online survey last year June where we have 3 685 participants from all over South Africa just kind of expressing their frustrations."
OUTA is expected to meet with the minister again next week for feedback on their presentation.
