We can eliminate driving licences & improve road safety

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

08 October 2017

There is a basic truth about university education: no university in the world can offer degree courses on the latest technologies. The reason is that the process of designing and approving a programme is so long that, by the time it is completed, technology has moved on and the course is outdated!

The same can be said about government services. The bureaucratic process of designing and approving a service can take so long that, by the time it is launched, it will be outdated.

After several years of planning, the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) announced that it will roll out the smart-card based driving licenses. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when smart cards are going out of fashion and are being replaced by smart-phone applications – so-called “Apps”.

I think NTSA should borrow a leaf from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) and Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA): do away with physical driving licenses altogether and replace them with virtual ones residing in a central database.

The licenses would be organised by National Identification (ID) numbers of the owners – the same way voter details are kept. For the purpose of inspection, all NTSA and Police Traffic officers would be issued with smart phones containing a verification App.

When stopped on the road, drivers would be required to produce their ID and the officer enters the number into the smart phone. In a few seconds, all the relevant data is downloaded for inspection.

This data may include a current photography of the driver, classes of vehicles licensed, conditions for driving (e.g. ‘must wear spectacles’) and restrictions imposed by courts of law, renewal status and so on.

The system may be extended to monitor the actions of traffic officers by requiring them to enter observations made during the inspection and action taken. This would reduce instances of harassment of drivers.

When a driver needs a printed copy of the license, for example, when applying for a job, he/she would log-in on the e-citizen internet portal and print one on normal paper. The same way that we print tax PIN certificates from the Kenya Revenue Authority website.

Since most of the infrastructure for such a system is already in place, I think this is a much easier system to implement than the smart card.

Over to you, NTSA.

***

In June this year, I wrote that there wasn’t enough money allocated in the national budget for rolling out free day secondary education in 2018. I was happy to read in the press that an additional Sh25 billion has been earmarked for this purpose in the proposals put before parliament.

Currently, children in boarding schools are paying Sh21,169 and day scholars Sh9,374 in accordance to government regulations. With approximately 2 million boarders and 500,000 in day schools, the total annual requirement comes to Sh47bn.

Thus the Sh25bn will be just enough to cover the costs up to June next year. My only worry is that delays in disbursement will leave many schools in a serious cash crunch.