With three weeks left before the Aarto roll-out in metros and smaller municipalities, Minister of Transport Barbara Creecy has revealed that some local governments are still not ready. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sharon Seretlo) 
Minister of Transport Barbara Creecy said on Monday that South Africa’s driver’s licence demerit system, scheduled to come into operation on 1 December, will now be postponed to July because some municipalities assessed are not ready.
The implementation of the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) was due to begin on 1 December 2025, in staggered phases.
In July, Creecy told Parliament: “Research has shown that more than 80% of road crashes are due to human error and thus call for behaviour-changing efforts on our part. To ensure positive changes in road user behaviour, the department will roll out the Administration and Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Act (Aarto), central to which is the demerit system that systematically aims at containing road user behaviour.
“The Aarto will be rolled out in different phases according to municipal readiness from 1 October 2025 for the 69 municipalities which are ready for the roll-out. This is Phase 2 of the Aarto roll-out programme, while Phase 3 will be rolled out on 1 February 2026 for the 144 municipalities that will only be ready then,” she added.
With three weeks left before the roll-out in the metros and smaller municipalities, the department has now revealed that the respective local governments are still not ready.
On 31 October, the Department of Transport published more than 600 pages of amended regulations in anticipation of Aarto’s launch.
National Transport spokesperson Collen Msibi said the postponement came amid a departmental readiness assessment of some municipalities that were to form part of the first implementation phase.
“Some of the issues identified during the assessment, in the main, include that law enforcement officials and back office personnel [are] not yet trained, the different systems used by municipal law enforcement have not yet been ‘harmonised’, and neither has the funding of this process.
Read more: Second phase of Aarto traffic offences Act will kick in on 1 December
“The department will soon publish the new proclamation with new staggered implementation dates, the 1st of July 2026 being the official implementation date. The phased approach of implementation will still be maintained as initially envisaged,” Msibi said.
The initial roll-out, according to the Government Gazette, was intended to take place in the eight metros – City of Johannesburg, City of Tshwane. Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, City of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Buffalo City and Mangaung.
Another 69 smaller municipalities were also to have been included in the now-postponed roll-out.
The Aarto Amendment Act was signed into law on 13 August 2019, and the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA) was provided with R545-million to fund the roll-out.
The draft regulations for the implementation of the law, including the demerit system, were published in January 2020. With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rollout was postponed to July 2020, also to recapitalise the RTIA.
When the period for public comment on the regulations closed in December 2020, the Department received 9,288 public submissions. The public participation process was completed by May 2021. It was then announced that the staggered phasing in of the process would begin in July 2021 and that the fourth phase would be finalised by the end of 2022. DM