Illustrative image | Early morning traffic on the M1 south on 9 June 2025. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla) | Driving licence cards. (Photo : Gallo Images / Sowetan / Antonio Muchave) 
I wonder if you remember the day you passed your driving licence test?
I remember mine so clearly. That’s partly because the universe conspired to allow me to get mine while I was still at school. As a result, I could show off dramatically by arriving at school sometimes under my own steam.
One of my great teenage memories is of the look on my younger brother’s face when I came to fetch him from his (rival) school … and how frustrated and angry he was at just being younger. Obviously he had it coming.
Since then, it’s something I’ve taken for granted. Because under our system, once you have a licence it’s yours pretty much forever. Unless a judge takes it away from you or you are found unfit to drive (because you cannot see properly, for example), you have the legal right to drive in the Republic of South Africa.
It’s such a simple legal principle.
Which is why I find having to carry a driving licence card around with me all the time so infuriating.
It is the easiest thing to lose. But more than that, it’s the easiest thing to forget.
When I first got my licence, one actually didn’t have to carry it around with you when you were driving. For me, it was contained in my green ID book.
I’ll never forget, as someone approaching legal adulthood just as apartheid was ending, how my little green ID book had space for one driving licence, a firearm licence and four additional firearms licences (how many guns could an 18-year-old ever really need?).
But then the law changed and in came the cards (courtesy of one Mr Schabir Shaik, then “financial adviser” to Jacob Zuma and the recipient of the second most scandalous medical parole decision in SA history).
Intrusive
Now, whenever I go into some Sandton office park, I’m asked to produce my driving licence card. I find it really quite intrusive.
First, I have to find the thing. Then someone scans it and I don’t really know what for. And then I often have to produce it again to get out of the parking lot.
I’ve tried putting the card in my phone cover (because while you might forget your licence card, you’ll never forget your phone), but the scanner can’t see through it.
But what makes it all so much worse is that you have to renew your licence card every five years.
Why? The plastic still works.
Like my toothbrush, it will still be around in the year 2425.
There is an alternative to this nonsense.
You could have an electronic system, a card that could live on your phone.
Proof
The only reason the cards exist is to serve as proof to a police officer that you are legally allowed to drive. That could surely live online; you could give an officer your ID number and they should be able to check a database using their phone.
That can hardly be that difficult.
Frankly, I smell a rat.
When you consider the sheer amount of corruption in our driving licence centres, and the way in which they are run, I can’t help but feel that perhaps no one wants to shut down a system that enables corruption.
When a provincial transport MEC says in public that to get a driving licence requires bribery at every stage, you know the system is broken.
I also object, furiously, to the five-year renewal period.
It’s completely arbitrary.
During the Covid pandemic, the Transport Minister (Fikile Mbalula at the time) just prolonged the validity of licences because the driving licence card printing machine had broken down again (like the 1980s movie Highlander, there can be only one…).
But I wouldn’t mind a system where once you got to say, 70, you had to prove you could still see properly every five years. Or even be required to have a driving test every now and then.
That I’d get. But to subject everyone to a new test and the long queues, and the corruption and everything that goes with it, smacks of something else.
Especially when you often have to give up a day’s work just to get a piece of plastic to replace the piece of plastic you already have.
When I first got my licence, many car keys were pretty big. The key ring had to carry keys that could go into an ignition, sometimes a remote, sometimes house keys.
If you got a call while driving, the most you could hope for was that your younger brothers would take a message.
If you were late for the Friday episode of MacGyver, you missed it. Forever.
So much has changed since then, so much that was physical has become virtual.
It’s time for our driving licences to switch to a new lane. DM