High-tech licence plates are being developed for Johannesburg and Pretoria

The Gauteng Provincial Government intends to reform the province’s number plate system as part of its attempts to address the region’s endemic crime.

Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi stated at his State of the Province address on Monday, 20 February 2023, that vehicles are a frequent denominator in violent crimes.

“In order to strengthen our fight against crime, we need to revamp our legislation on three crucial areas,” Lesufi said.

“The first one is the registration of cars because cars are a common denominator in violent crimes. Either as stolen cars or getaway vehicles.”

He added that the existing system is about out of letters and numbers for identifying certain automobiles.

“We want to take advantage of this situation to introduce a new, very difficult to copy and tamper-proof number plate so that those who are using wrong or duplicate number plates will have no time to drive through our roads,” the Premier said.

“As we speak, we’ve issued the Government Gazette on 17 February 2023 for consultation and comments on the new security features.

He also stated that the new approach will aid in the management of temporary licence plate misuse.

The province’s decision to publish draught rules linked to the new system is announced in the Government Gazette, which is issued by executive council member Kedibone Diale-Tlabela.

Diale-Tlabela is the Gauteng Provincial Government’s MEC in charge of road traffic in the province. She stated that the new regulations will include the following provisions:

• The registration of suppliers of number plates and pay fees for applications;
• The introduction of new security features to improve the credibility of number plates and to enable licence plate tracking within the value chain from manufacturer to end user; and,
• The enhancement of existing security features and alignment to national and African standards.

The Gazette allows anybody who is interested or impacted by the plan to comment on it until March 31, 2023.

During his speech, Lesufi urged members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to establish a shared verification database.

“We call upon our SADC countries to create a new database of all vehicles within the region so that we can all have a common verification database of all cars that are coming in and out of our country,” he said.

“We have also issued a strict instruction to our law enforcement agencies to pull off those who continue to drive cars without number plates or [with] fraudulent temporary permits.”

Other critical areas that need to be addressed, according to the Premier, are gun legislation and limiting the usage of cash in commercial transactions.

“We need to start the process to eliminate illegal guns in our province. These guns are killing our people left, right, and centre,” Lesufi said.

“We also need to migrate our province to use less cash in business transactions.”