The rollout of smart driving licenses (smart DLs) for Kenyan drivers seems to have been a promising move by the country’s road transport since its inception in 2018, courtesy of the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA).
However, the process has become a concern as over 500,000 smart cards still remain unprinted or untouched, almost rendering them useless.
This was confirmed in a new audit revealing a backlog of over 572,000 smart DLs from the NTSA. This accounts for KES 176 million worth of tech, paid for by Kenyan taxpayers, collecting dust.
As revealed by Auditor-General Nancy Gathugu, the rollout by the regulator has been painfully slow, with NTSA showing very little effort to solve the situation.
“The uptake for the cards is still slow, and the management did not demonstrate efforts to improve the situation. In the circumstances, the value for money could not be confirmed,” the report states.
As of June 2024, NTSA had only printed 1.63 million smart licenses, showing a very slow pace even as the number of registrations kept coming in at a much faster rate.
Long story short, the tech was paid for and acquired, but NTSA has just not been using it at all without any explanation.
The situation is quite sad as the program was kicked off by the Kenyan government with a goal of digitizing identification of Kenyan drivers alongside digital IDs and land records. This was through the smart chips embedded to act like bank cards.
READ: NTSA Currently Offering Smart Driving License Enrollment Services at KICC
As many cards remain unprinted or undelivered, they often expire before reaching their owners, forcing Kenyans to spend more money replacing licenses they’ve never even used – or in some cases, never seen.
Consequently, over 60% of drivers across the country are still relying on the outdated book-style licenses, putting them at risk of trouble with traffic authorities. For now, it’s difficult to see how or when NTSA will solve this very avoidable issue.
