Table of Contents

Introduction

The effects of the lack of appointments

The Call Centre booking system for Learner's and Driver's Licences (Gauteng)

The Real problem behind all the difficulties we have experienced for 7 years

SAIDI'S Solutions

INTRODUCTION (Back to top)

Representatives of the Gauteng Provincial Government have been meeting with three representatives of Driving School/Instructor Associations every month in an effort to try to address our very real concerns, with the shortage of test appointments an ongoing MAJOR concern.

As a result of these meetings, we have been promised the most accurate up-to-date statistics regarding the number of learners’ licence appointments allocated, compared to the number of drivers’ licence appointments. The comparative proportions are frightening, and the long-term implications terrifying! Driving instructors are not complaining about nothing here when we demand more legal drivers’ licence appointments. 

We as driving instructors have always known this. This is what we have all been saying for years!

THE EFFECTS OF THE LACK OF APPOINTMENTS (Back to top)

• People cannot get employment in most cases without a driver’s licence.

Our major concern is that if the public can’t get legal driver’s licence appointments they will, in many cases, drive illegally.

• These unlicenced drivers are a very real threat to the rest of us!
• They do not even try to comply with the law. They have enough to concentrate on just getting from point A to point B without getting caught!
• Bad attitudes:

Many drivers are angry because they know they are guilty of driving illegally, but are simply unable to drive legally due to the country’s lack of taking responsibility for providing the correct services due to cut-backs in budgets on essential services, so they feel justified in driving illegally.

• The new budget for 2009/10 by has already been allocated for Transport, most of which is to go to the Gautrain apparently. How much longer must we wait to be given adequate numbers of examining officers?
• An interesting question is, “Who has siphoned off the money previously allocated to providing these services – before 2002 that is?” There is no accountability either it seems.
• Poor driving standards with badly trained drivers or untrained drivers moving freely on the road system: There is an almost complete lack of law enforcement which makes it quite possible for almost any illegal driver to escape being arrested for his entire driving career.
• The result? - Carnage on our roads!

We are hearing of so many shocking fatal collisions lately.

My own brother, father to two teenage boys, died tragically on 19 May 2009 as a result of a collision with an unlicenced truck driver doing a u-turn in the middle of the road.

Heinrich Hattingh (an East Rand driving instructor), and a friend died on 17 May 2009 in a tragic car accident.  

Four little girls (aged 9, 8, and twins of 4 years old- see the article on page ….) died in one family when a car did a u-turn in Hornsnek in Pretoria in the first week of May this year.

Every day our newspapers are filled with so many similar cases.

We are not always aware of how serious the road carnage actually is, but when we start talking and sharing family and friends’ stories, we begin to understand what is actually happening.  

This is SHOCKING! We at SAIDI are starting a new petition against the lack of law enforcement on our roads. Please sign in and tell us what you have seen. In fact, you are welcome to sign in every single day and tell us of your experiences. 

SAIDI has a responsibility to our members, the authorities, as well as to the public. However we have been patient with the many problems caused by the introduction of the Gauteng Shared Call Service Centre, and compliant for so long and there is still no improvement in the number of drivers’ licence appointments being made available.

We are working flat-out with the authorities, (since we do NOT believe in rebellion against the Government), to correct the structures that are in place to meet the need of the population - especially our members’ needs! However, we believe we also have the responsibility to confront head-on structures that we have tried to address through the normal channels without success, publicly on our website if that is what it has to take before the necessary changes are put in place. We choose to believe the saying “The pen is mightier than the sword.” In today’s times that can mean e-mailing and websites. We want our website to be a mighty pen addressing issues of driving instructors’ concerns and the concerns of the public on an international scale. South Africa can not afford the reputation of not:

1. Enabling the public to obtain legal driving licences.
2. Enforcing the law leading to close to highest-in-the-world fatality statistics.

SAIDI represents individual driving instructors. Our first concern is to assist our members. They carry a very heavy responsibility training new drivers to be responsible, competent and law compliant with very little back-up or help from anyone. That is quite clearly SAIDI’s role. We are here for our members and want to help them.  (We can offer valid solutions to the following problems – see our last point).

1. We cannot accept the lack of legal driver’s licence appointments as supplied to us by the Gauteng Provincial Government under any circumstances. It started in 2002 and is still continuing in 2009.
2. We are horrified that dedicated driving schools are being forced to close down due to the present lack of appointments compounded by the recession. Families left without an income, loss of self-respect, status, debt, and secondary issues such as family violence, alcoholism, suicides in some cases.
3. We are appalled that no training for a single driving instructor has been provided for by the country for the whole of South Africa’s history! We are all trying to do the best we can, paying for advanced courses etc. but with great training and a standard minimum level of training for all driving instructors, we can become far more professional!
4. We are absolutely unwilling to continue operating in competition with fly-by-night illegal instructors without the authorities preventing them from working under their noses, while we have 14 (and more) weeks delay just to acquire fingerprint clearance EVERY YEAR and can be illegally and unfairly arrested  by the Metro Police while waiting, by the Metro Police!!!

THE CALL CENTRE BOOKING SYSTEM FOR LEARNER’S AND DRIVER’S LICENCES (GAUTENG) (Back to top)

• We all thought the problem of the lack of test appointments lay with the call centre, but we now believe we were WRONG!

We were privileged to visit the call centre on the 8^th May 2009. Having seen how it actually works, corruption is, as far as we were able to establish, impossible, since so many checks have been locked into the system. (However, in spite of this, we know there will always be some who unbelievably, against all odds, manage to get around the system somehow, but we know too that excellent anti-corruption people are working desperately hard to root them out as a matter of urgency. Agents are not allowed to have cell phones with them).

• How the appointments are released onto the system:

Test centres submit their available appointments on a regular basis. Appointments that are available are sent in by computer at midnight every night, and the agents are unable to enter the system before 7am every day, or after 7pm. 350 agents man the phones all day, but the exercise is futile. Without appointments, they are subjected to abuse from furious members of the public, begging, etc. Whenever the few available appointments are released they are immediately snapped up by the “starving” public, by phoning 0860 4288 364, and by 7:20 every day there are none left! 

• What happens to unconfirmed appointments?

Cancellations, as in unconfirmed appointments, are added to those normal appointments at midnight, and come onto the list of available appointments at 7am every morning too. If an appointment is not confirmed for a second time, it is again released into the system after a standard set number of days has elapsed. This process is continued in an effort to fill every single appointment. Sadly numerous appointments are wasted due to no time being left to handle them according to these corruption correcting procedures. This may have something to do with the number of examining officers who are standing around test centres with no appointments, in spite of our desperation to obtain them.

• What can we do with appointments students booked before taking any driving lessons, and which are obviously too soon for us to have completed training them?

Due to the lack of appointments for so many years, many members of the public have panicked and gone ahead and booked, and then they phone us to arrange lessons afterwards. Sometimes they phone with a test at the end of the same week! Obviously they will never be thoroughly trained to be safe legal competent drivers by that time. If we do try our best to accommodate them, it ends up with a high percentage of failures, and incompletely trained drivers who might have mastered the minimum requirements to just manage to pass, but how will that driver cope in South African driving conditions, and what threat do they pose to the rest of us? It is like throwing lambs to the wolves! It is not possible to offer appointments back which we know will be of no use to our students. The system is not yet geared up to handle “returns”, and there is a threat of corruption in this case, meaning that one instructor can “return” an appointment, and tell his friend to phone just after him to try to secure it for his student.

THE REAL PROBLEM BEHIND ALL THE DIFFICULTIES WE HAVE EXPERIENCED FOR 7 YEARS (Back to top)

In spite of two new testing centres being opened at this stage with about four examiners each (Xavier South and Three Rivers), it becomes crystal clear that the shortage of (well-trained) examining officers is the real issue causing us all so much trouble.

We are therefore not attempting to close the call centre as we had first thought necessary, but instead we are now petitioning the Government to appoint well-trained examining officers as a matter of urgency.

SAIDI’S SOLUTIONS (Back to top)

1. Shortage of driver’s licence appointments - double up or even times four per hour.  (i.e. 16 tests per hour compared to four in some testing stations).
2. Driving schools being forced to close down – increased appointments will correct this.
3. No instructor training available – we have comprehensive training programmes.
4. Fly-by-night instructors – train them. Help them to become legal, or get rid of them by bringing in laws compelling us to produce proof of qualifications.

However, the decision to pay for the selection process and training hundreds of additional examining officers rests in the hands not of the Gauteng Provincial Government, but of the individual Municipalities. It would appear that they are deaf to the cries of the public they are paid to serve! We would be wise to ask our councillors to address this matter on our behalf in town council meetings.

If every instructor across Gauteng does this, we will get action, I believe.

Perhaps the dedicated new Government will assist us to rectify the disgraceful history of the last seven years’ lack of service delivery to the public with untold expense to the economy as well as the private sector?

Article reference:

SAIDI0000030

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