A syndicate of corrupt officials at the Traffic Department’s Vehicle Fitness Testing Centre in Ha Foso is issuing roadworthiness certificates for cars they have not tested. So brazen is the syndicate’s corruption that it can issue a roadworthiness certificate to a car that has not been presented to the testing centre.
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One just has to send their registration documents via a runner who pays the department’s official to get the certificate within minutes.
For M650 the officials will not ask to see the vehicle. For M400 they will ask to see the car but will not test it. For M200 they will issue a certificate even when the vehicle has defective lights and brakes.
A car has worn out tyres?
No problem, just give another M200 to the officials and your car is declared fit for the road. Garages that sell imported cars have perfected this sleaze to the point that they “pre-order” their certificates in the morning and collect them by the end of the day.
Some have almost permanent arrangements with the department’s officials.
When you buy a car they offer to register it for you for a fee. They too have a premium for registering a vehicle without presenting it to the fitness testing centre.
This means thousands of vehicles on Lesotho’s roads got roadworthy certificates without being physically tested. Many were never presented to the centre while others made it to the centre but were allowed to pass the test despite serious defects.
No secondhand vehicle can be registered without a roadworthy certificate.
The Road Traffic Act says a registering authority shall register a secondhand motor vehicle or trailer “only upon presentation of a valid certificate of road worthiness”.
It is also a legal requirement to obtain the certificate when an application for registration is made in the third year after the manufacture of the vehicle.
The corruption at the centre appears to have escalated in recent years because the digital system used to test vehicle fitness has been consistently broken. Repairs take months and when they are done the system doesn’t work long before breaking down again.
Ideally, this should not be a crisis because the officials can still use the manual testing system.
But the officials don’t seem to like to use the manual system.
Instead, they demand bribes to issue roadworthiness certificates without testing the vehicles.
The Ministry of Transport’s spokesperson, Ntumeleng Ntšekhe, said “it is not a secret that the machines have been malfunctioning for quite a long time now”.
Ntšekhe said they are probing thepost’s allegation that there is a syndicate of officials corruptly issuing dubious certificates and also taking advantage of the broken machines to line their pockets.
Critical to the graft are the young men who accost you when you get to the centre.
They don’t hide the fact that they can jump the notoriously long queues at the centre and also get the roadworthiness certificate without a physical test of the car.
But there is a catch, they want an additional M300 on top of the M320 required for the test.
They openly explain that M200 is for the officials who test and M100 is theirs.
The bribe can vary depending on the demand.
If the queue is long they can demand as much as M500.
The fee also depends on the state of the car to be tested.
Battered vehicles that are obviously not roadworthy pay more.
This corruption happens right next to the police post at the centre. Yet the police spokesperson, Inspector ’Mareabetsoe Mofoka, says she was unaware of it.
“We will look into it,” Mofoka said this week.
One of the men runners told thepost that “until the government creates jobs for us, the masses of voters, we will continue creating jobs for ourselves”.
“We never tell these people not to bring their cars,” he said.
“All we do is assist them to get services quickly and smoothly.”
“I am not aware that they are not bringing their cars for inspection,” said another, adding: “We help them register their cars without any problem and they thank us afterwards.”
Chairman of the Maseru Route Taxi Operators (MRTO), Mokete Jonas, said “many cars will not pass roadworthy tests in this country because of the bad state of our roads”.
“It is common knowledge that many no longer take their cars there,” Jonas said.
“It is because of the recklessness of the government that cars are not roadworthy,” he said.
“How can anyone expect these cars to be roadworthy? Bribing them to get roadworthiness certificates will not end.”
Jonas said if one does not pay a bribe “they will not get any service”.
The digitalised vehicle registration that the ministry launched in 2010 was connected with the fitness testing centre so that it would be easy for the authorities to immediately access the vehicle’s fitness status.
The system, called eNatis, was also meant to help the ministry’s authorities to know who gave the fitness test and the date on which the test was done.
eNatis is a computerised vehicle registration database which bears all the road traffic information ranging from individual vehicles, their owners, the number of cars countrywide, and the type of vehicles that are prone to road accidents.
Vehicles are tested for roadworthiness in Maseru, Leribe and Mohale’s Hoek.
With the installed equipment out of order, the vehicle examiners perform tests manually, which leaves room for corruption.
Caswell Tlali
