The North Gauteng High Court has declared the tender for new driving licence card machines unlawful, ordering the Department of Transport to cancel and re-advertise it within 30 days.
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The court ruled that the appointment of Idemia as the preferred bidder was irregular, unlawful, and invalid following concerns raised by the Auditor-General (AG).<\/p>\n
The AG report identified multiple instances of non-compliance with the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), Treasury regulations, the department of licensing\u2019s own processes.<\/p>\n
It also found that the bid evaluation committee deviated from the criteria specifications when awarding the tender to the French company.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Transport Minister Barbara Creecy welcomed the ruling, saying it vindicates the department\u2019s decision to approach the court in the interest of transparency and clean governance.
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To prevent disruptions, the court has allowed the department to temporarily outsource the printing and issuing of licence cards to the Department of Home Affairs, while a new service provider is sought.
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The ruling follows months of delays caused by a breakdown of the licence card printing machine early last year. The backlog was only cleared in December when 2.2 million cards were eventually printed.
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Meanwhile, the government has also approved a prototype licence card developed by the Government Printing Works, with the Cabinet expected to consider the proposal as part of a longer-term solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The North Gauteng High Court has declared the tender for new driving licence card machines unlawful, ordering the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[397,398,403,400,399,401,96,402,406,405,404,131],"class_list":{"0":"post-9554","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-south-africa","8":"tag-ewn","9":"tag-ewn-news","10":"tag-ewn-south-africa","11":"tag-eye-witness-news","12":"tag-eyewitness-news","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-news-today","16":"tag-prime-media-plus","17":"tag-primedia-plus","18":"tag-primedia","19":"tag-south-africa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}