The hell of pointless bureaucracy: My hostile trip into driving licence renewal purgatory

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

After Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula trumpeted the “request-a-slot” initiative, I duly requested a slot and was sent a date and time for 21 September. Armed with all the paperwork and three credit cards – clearly in an effort to stop corruption – all I needed to do was submit my driving licence application, register some fingerprints and pay.

The first part of the process was easy. It took 15 minutes to queue, sit in front of a complex machine, which encased a laptop, fingerprint reader, eye-test goggles and a camera. The man who assisted me was helpful – we laughed when he told me the machines kept breaking down – and off I went to pay.

And entered the wasteful bureaucracy where hostile civil servants treat their customers with not only disdain but an almost constant cold-shoulder attitude whenever you asked any kind of (pressing) question. This is keeping the country’s economic heartland from functioning properly.

It started with the cashier queue. I entered a room where all the chairs were occupied by grumpy-looking civilians, and was pointed to a man in a green mask, standing against a room divider. By way of gestures, like the hand signals of prisoners who are forbidden to speak, I worked out I should stand next to the man who would be my companion for the next hour of purgatory.

I am no religious scholar, but I know enough of the classics, especially the depictions of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, and this was living proof of the hell of pointless bureaucracy. One of author Franz Kafka’s most famous books was about a man accused of a crime and never told what the crime was while going through a trial.

This was my first queue crime – and I was involved in a few more bizarre and pointless encounters with other petty tyrants behind counters – whose only power was to force people to sit and wait. The wait for the cashier was because the “system is down” – a phrase I heard four times and which clearly contributed to my long wait. I had always thought that the Department of Home Affairs was the nadir of this bureaucratic purgatory, but the traffic department is a close competitor.

To spend some time inside any of the labyrinths of the South African civil service is to experience the ultimate in passive-aggressive behaviour. When I moved to the separate building for car licensing, I stood in a queue to get inside, then was told to sit in one of the waiting areas. After 40 minutes, I went up to the counter – where the woman was screaming “next” – and asked her if I could transfer the car. No, I was in the wrong queue. Go to counter 13.

As befits the superstition about that number, the civil servant – who was wearing a white Chiefs football shirt and had cool tattoos – was the most painful of the petty tyrants. I went up and asked the other people in the block of chairs if they didn’t mind me just asking what the procedure was. Chiefs fan was passive aggression incarnate.

I made the mistake of saying that I had been waiting for “an hour”, which included the time that I stood outside. Chiefs fan looked at my ticket and argued that it was only “half an hour”. No amount of remorsefulness on my part could help. Perhaps I shouldn’t have pointed out that it was 40 minutes and not an hour.

I kept asking him: “Please can you tell me what the correct procedure is?” He ranted about sitting in the queue in the block of chairs in front of me. Ironically, when I returned with the manager after another 10 minutes of trying to explain the problem, those people were instructed that they were sitting on the wrong chairs. I was actually the only person in the queue for counter 13. Not that it mattered.

The manager took me to counter 14, where the lady behind the massive slab of glass couldn’t move any slower. She also spoke in a whisper, despite my numerous requests for her to speak up so that I could hear her through the glass and her face mask. Eventually, I asked her if there was a problem. “Yes,” she replied, I “didn’t say sorry” to Chiefs fan. I kid you not.

I could go on (and on and on and on) about the mindless obsession with making people stay in their queue – expect these agents to seemingly do as they please – but everybody knows this pain.

I have spent enough time, throughout my life, in this warren of retribution to understand the psyche of these civil servants. They exude passive aggression, wait for the slightest slight (in my case calling 40 minutes an hour) and then their slow retribution starts.

They are trapped in eight hours at work, therefore they will condemn their customers (the people who pay their salaries) to the same purgatory.

But the queues were seemingly only for citizens who followed the rules and clearly not for the many so-called agents who performed this mundane task for others.

I watched the way innumerable people walked straight to the front of any queue, coming backwards and forwards with armfuls of papers. While sitting there, I started asking what their numbers were and how long they had stood in the queue. None of these guys were like us cowering citizens, afraid of falling foul of a vindictive petty tyrant. The queue rules didn’t apply to them.

Mbalula likes to claim this request-a-slot and online payment option (if only I could pay online) has solved the massive backlog of expired driving licences in Gauteng. Only on Planet ANC could anyone believe that. On the ground, the years of ANC incompetence are highly visible. The fancy machines used for updating your licence were “always breaking” and the contract had ended for those. I wonder whose ANC NEC family member got the contract?

It’s certainly these IT problems that are holding up the system, but it is just as clear that the misguided focus on pedantry nonsense is more important to the people who work at the traffic department than the actual job they are supposed to do. Come on Mr Fix, as Mbalula likes to call himself, here is a real problem you can fix. Sit in the Sandton testing station for an hour and watch how broken and corrupt it is. But be careful that you don’t offend the queue police.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.