Zimpapers Logo

must take its share of blame, but motorists and others need to recognise that Zinara is not alone in creating the unnecessary and unpleasant mess.
Zinara decided to introduce a new system of licensing. In effect it is creating its own database of all licensed vehicles. This is needed.
The Central Vehicle Registry simply records details of all outstanding registrations of vehicles and, as we have pointed out before, the CVR list is not equivalent to a list of vehicles on the road. Too few owners of scrapped vehicles bother to cancel the registrations and there is a large fleet of vehicles rotting at the bottom of gardens that will never go back on the road.
So we see the need for Zinara to have its own database of what is actually on the roads, ensuring that all these vehicles at least carry compulsory third party insurance and contribute to the costs of maintaining a road system. As a bonus, the new system makes it almost impossible to forge a licence disc, although we feel that Zinara was grossly over-estimating the number of vehicles with such discs.
Once it is apparent, from checks in car parks and from data provided by police checking licences at roadblocks, that almost all vehicles on the road are validly licensed, we hope that Zinara will be able to compare its database with the one maintained by CVR and start the process of hunting down the missing vehicles. Many will no longer exist, but owners of many should be paying that modest charge Zinara levies on vehicles no longer on the road but still existing and registered.
So we have no objections in principle to the new Zinara system, although many motorists find it hard to use standard licence disc holders with the new A6 square Zinara licences; Zinara could easily have designed a licence incorporating all their new data and checks that was the same size as the international standard round disc.
Where Zinara erred was in miscalculating the   man hours required to enter all data into its new database. It takes the average clerk in a post office around four to five minutes to type in all the data on the required form. The new system was introduced three weeks before the last batch of licences expired on May 31.
Quick calculations show that at five minutes a vehicle, almost 67 000 man hours are needed to licence 800 000 vehicles. Further calculations show that with a 40-hour week and three weeks that would require 555 clerks at post offices and at Zinara itself. Even if there are only 450 000 vehicles actually on the road (a more realistic estimate based on registration plate numbers) and the clerks speed up to three minutes a data entry, that would still require almost 200 clerks to clear all vehicles in three weeks.
Zinara used to use all, or almost all, post offices to sell licences. This time only a minority are in use; in Harare, where over half the national fleet is kept, around a quarter of post offices were assigned for the new licences. So the 220 000 vehicles licensed by May 31 represent a sterling effort by those clerks, especially as so many post offices faced power cuts.
Zinara recognised this, so wanted to extend the deadline by 30 days. Three problems arose.
First, Zinara does have the legal authority to do that; it has now done what it can, by renouncing its own late charges, but it cannot legally change the law that requires all vehicles to be licensed.
Second, there is the problem of insurance. For very good reasons all vehicles on the road should at least carry third party insurance so victims of bad drivers are guaranteed some compensation when they are hit. There is no certainty that an owner of a car who has not fought his way through the queues to licence his car has, in fact, insured his car already.
Indeed as the third problem shows, he probably has delayed doing that, too. For this third problem brings up the propensity of at least half of Zimbabwe’s vehicle owners to leave insurance and licensing to the last possible moment. Owners of 220 000 vehicles stood in long dreary queues from the very first day to make the deadline. The rest, and whether these own half (as we believe) or three quarters (as Zinara suspects) of vehicles that need road licences we will find out soon, decided to delay to the last moment. In fact, many said Zinara would have to extend the deadline, so why bother.
So the first few days of June saw hardly anyone queueing. No doubt they were planning to throng post offices at the end of June. Most of those who delayed must be owners of small private cars and pick-ups, required to pay a minimum of US$20 so their delay is inexcusable; the fee is low and third party insurance is cheap, around US$35 for four months. We presume operators of fleets of heavy trucks and buses made arrangements in time. Another 50 000 cars could have been licensed in the six days, but were not.
We hope Zinara has learned from this experience. Licences have to be available at more post offices earlier. Certainly since Zinara is now moving to continuous licence issuing, the problem of late delivery of discs can easily be solved; but more post offices still need to be equipped to handle licensing. With the new database Zinara and Zimpost should be able to make better estimates of staff and equipment requirements and Zimpost staff will obviously be far more experienced after issuing a few hundred thousand licences.
Third, with all data in, Zinara are going to have to work far more closely with the CVR to find out how many cars have been scrapped without being deregistered, and that might mean a return to a simple deregistration process, at least for older cars. Zinara will also need to figure out how to make owners of wrecks at the bottom of gardens pay their off-road fees. To be blunt, there are probably far more sets of registration plates around than there are working vehicles and that should make those responsible for suppressing car theft nervous.