Driving permit process made easier"…but then!
Nov 17, 2014
I have been reading in the news lately how the process of acquiring driving licenses has been made easier, but I feel that this bit of news is one sided, simply providing the view of the Transport Licensing Board.
trueBy Deo Tumusiime
I have been reading in the news lately how the process of acquiring driving licenses has been made easier, but I feel that this bit of news is one sided, simply providing the view of the Transport Licensing Board.
A proper balance of the news would have gone an extra mile not only to capture the perspective of the drivers, but also assess the implication of the charges involved and analyse the process more deeply.
I think that the charges involved in processing a driving permit are extremely exorbitant and must be reviewed. To renew a driving permit, one is required to pay sh56,000 to Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), and an additional sh60,000 to Face Technologies, the company contracted to issue the permits.
This brings the total cost to at least sh116,000. My question is: Why this double charging? I can understand that URA needs to use all sorts of ways to collect money from the public for national development, but these collections must be justifiable.
I would also understand if URA charged a fee on commercial drivers, but I do not quite understand why they should charge so much of a private driver simply renewing his permit.
I am sure that URA clearly understands that these same Ugandans already contribute taxes in lots other ways including the perennial Pay as You Earn tax deducted off salaries before the money even hits on employees’ bank accounts.
To charge sh56,000 for a driving permit is simply too much. What for? The Revenue Authority should charge taxes based on value addition to products and services, and not merely for the sake of collecting money. In any case, why doesn’t URA collect the tax from Face Technologies, the company doing so much business in producing driving permits?
Process made easy! This is simply a joke. By asking drivers to download payment forms from the URA Website, this is nothing to be proud of.
It is built on assumption that everyone has access to the internet and that this internet is readily available and free at that, which is not true at all.
At Face Technologies itself, one has to go through at least five stations before being issued a temporary document and on a bad day, the queues are really too long. Besides, everyone must visit Face Technologies at least twice before securing a permit, which obviously involves so much in transport costs and time wasted.
If someone has paid the fees and is merely renewing his permit, why can’t it be issued on the first visit? In fact when I recently visited Face Technologies for my permit renewal, I reached the counter and one attendant told me to come back after one week saying that my documents were not ready. This, despite the fact that I had actually exceeded the time given by URA by three days, knowing how slow things often are in Uganda. I was about to turn back in frustration, when one kind lady asked me to hold on, and she searched and actually found my documents.
I am not happy at the way different government departments tend to duplicate roles whilst serving the same clients. If URA must charge a tax for a driving permit anyway, why don’t we pay at once to Face Technologies and then URA can collect the percentage due to them without making the same driver move up and down? This is done with other companies by way of the invisible Value Added Tax, and I am sure it can be done.
Perhaps one other thing that shocked me during processing of my driving permit renewal was a section that required me to fill in whether I had done a road test. I asked the lady attending to me what exactly I was to fill in that section and she smartly told me to leave that blank.
In my view, and given the never ending accidents on our roads, this section ought in fact to be the most important. Instead, URA and Face Technologies seem to be simply interested in collecting money rather than assessing drivers’ competence.
I have often told traffic officers that normally stop us to check our driving permits; that having a permit is not a guarantee that someone knows how to drive. Drivers should be given spot tests to examine their competence as a way to curb accidents.
The coming of automatic vehicles has meant that any Tom, Dick and Dee can now drive a car as long as they are able to step on the accelerator and brake. As such, driving in Uganda has become a question of life and death given the increasing number of half-baked drivers who know so little about basic etiquette.
These are things that a company in charge of transport should be mostly focused on and not merely how much money they suck from others’ pockets.
And while at Face Technologies recently, I found a white lady was also in the queue to renew her permit. She spent more than half an hour arguing with one officer.
From what I eavesdropped of the conversation, the lady was scheduled to travel out of the country and wanted to have her permit renewed before her flight. However, she was told that the policy requires everyone to wait for a full week before getting their permit. The officer insisted, “A policy is a policy and it cannot be changed”.
The white lady inquired whether she could use her International Driver’s Permit in the meantime, and the officer told her that this could only be possible, if that permit were issued in Uganda! She pulled it out and read the instructions written on it, and among the countries she was permitted to drive in, Uganda was included. Hmmm…
So for me, having headlines on how acquiring driving permits has been made easier, is not good enough, unless it can be substantiated.
The writer is a communications consultant