Pretoria -The Gauteng provincial government has assured the public that measures will be put in place to assist drivers and learners at license testing centres across the province.
"We are going to reinforce our teams and ensure that we deploy more people to the centres to deal with issue of queues, amongst other things, until such time that we have completed what we need to do," Department of Roads and Works spokesperson Philemon Motsoaedi told BuaNews.
This follows the suspension of the province's centralised telephonic booking system. The province has decided to revert to the manual localised booking system, apologising to the public for the "inconvenience caused by the shortcomings" of the centralised booking system for drivers' licence testing.
With effect from Monday, 4 October, all bookings for drivers license testing will be done at local license testing centres. No block bookings will be allowed.
Several testing stations were plunged into chaos following reports of major challenges in the booking of drivers and learners licenses at the provincial call-centre this week.
On Monday, the Department of Roads and Works attributed the problem to a series of challenges ranging from a contractual dispute to technical capacity troubles experienced by the call centre.
Motsoaedi on Friday said the call centre had been struggling to cope with the volume of calls since the department took over the operation and management of the call centre, mainly due to technical issues.
He said the department terminated its contract with Sibize Calling International about a month ago and since then the call centre has been struggling due to migration from the company's system to that of the department.
"As a result of this migration from one system to the other, a lot of challenges have been reported...this was made worse by an outcry from people that they can't get through the call centre to make their bookings so we had to close it for now to allow the processes to take place," he said.
Premier Nomvula Mokonyane on Thursday apologised to the people of Gauteng for the inconvenience, promising a full investigation.
Motsoaedi could not say how long drivers license applicants would have to wait before they could use the call centre again but said contingency measures were in place to assist testing stations across the province.
The department urged people to be patient during this period.
