Aarto and demerit points not the panacea for road carnage and lawlessness — we need effective policing

There is a blinkered notion that Outa’s high court challenge has scuppered the state’s Aarto Act and its gazetted driver demerit point system, which was intended to be government’s panacea to the high number of road fatalities and South Africa’s poor driving culture. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that Aarto is unconstitutional and would have culminated in challenges arising from many metros and municipalities to extricate themselves from the flawed and costly act. In 2021, the City of Cape Town had already expressed its intentions to distance itself from the Aarto scheme, and others would have followed suit, had it not been stopped in its tracks by Outa’s court challenge.  

Essentially, every municipality and metro has a constitutional right to distance themselves from the Aarto scheme foisted on them by the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA), because it usurps their executive powers to manage these affairs within their own jurisdiction. Of greater concern — no matter how noble the RTIA’s plan to introduce a standard national traffic infringement and licence demerit system — Aarto has become too complex and unworkable within the context of South Africa’s poorly administered transport landscape.  

Giving credence to this “unworkability” point is the fact that the scheme has struggled to get off the ground over the past 13 years. Announcements were made as far back as 2009 of Aarto’s “imminent” launch. The past two years have been peppered with last-minute postponements and new proposals of a multi-stage launch programme, which have failed to generate the necessary traction.  

The Aarto Act and its regulations are steeped in design flaws and ill-conceived administrative processes which set it up for failure long before it got to the starting blocks. Furthermore, the scheme’s success will forever be hampered by its reliance on a very inaccurate National Traffic Information System (Natis), as well as a broken postal service. The designers of Aarto’s numerous regulatory amendments have also assumed that our road users have a highly digital connectedness to the internet, which is not the case in South Africa.  

More worrying though, is whether the state will acknowledge its poor habit of ticking the “public consultation box” by way of meaningless roadshows, and a blind belief that laws and regulations are sufficient for the introduction of complex schemes.

First and foremost in the design and development of successful public administration systems is the need for a deep dive into how the regulations and processes will impact society’s engagement with the state, thereby authentically obtaining public buy-in and support. Only once this is done from a listening (as opposed to telling) perspective, can the authorities begin to develop the efficiencies required within the scheme’s design, including effective enforcement processes. The Aarto scheme was sorely lacking in this approach. 

The notion that administrative systems that rack up points for bad behaviour will somehow solve our high levels of road fatalities and poor driving culture is a grossly flawed one. Addressing the carnage on our roads will need to be done through visible and professional policing, where law enforcement officers are trained to engender a culture of good road behaviour, while focusing on the removal of unlicensed drivers and the numerous unroadworthy and unlicensed vehicles that proliferate our roads.   

Every effort must first be made to improve the accuracy of our Natis vehicle registry system, which also needs to operate in a “live” environment, thereby ensuring that vehicle ownership details are promptly captured and updated in the system. Anything that discourages an online environment, such as exorbitant fees to conduct self-service processing, is taboo. Unfortunately, the RTIA has been hell-bent on designing the Aarto scheme and its related administration processes to generate millions of extra rands for themselves, while foisting a cumbersome and costly dispute resolution and enquiry process onto the road user. 

Futility resides in the administrator’s belief that just because demerit point systems work in some countries, this should be a given in South Africa. In those countries where these systems are successful, they have excellent administrative competencies and vehicle registry systems that are accurate and interconnected to other areas of government administration, which operate at a high degree of efficiency.

Outa’s court challenge has in fact done the Department of Transport a favour, by preventing another embarrassing “eToll-style” failure to another state-managed scheme. One sincerely hopes the department will now take this opportunity to engage with the many stakeholders who have tried to raise the flags and point out the scheme’s many flaws and unworkable processes, let alone its unconstitutional situation. DM