Gauteng Cracks Down on Taxi Licence Fraud

Gauteng’s Roads and Transport MEC, Kedibone Diale-Tlabela, has defended a review of the province’s taxi operating licence system, framing it as a governance intervention rather than an attack on the industry, after allegations of irregularities and possible corruption surfaced within the licensing process. The department maintains it remains committed to working with organised taxi leadership even as the review proceeds.

The review follows complaints from the Gauteng Taxi Industry over the department’s stakeholder engagement approach and the model used to issue operating licences. According to the department, preliminary findings have already turned up discrepancies requiring further verification, prompting officials to argue that tighter oversight is necessary to protect legitimate operators and rebuild public trust. Licences continue to be processed through Transport Operating Licence Administrative Bodies, but the department insists it retains ultimate accountability for ensuring the system operates lawfully and transparently.

This is not the first time licensing has strained relations between the province and the industry it regulates. In August last year, the South African National Taxi Council disclosed that more than half of Gauteng’s taxi drivers were operating without valid licences, a gap it attributed to processing backlogs and the use of duplicated or fraudulent documents. The disclosure came weeks before a SANTACO-led shutdown of taxi operations in Ekurhuleni, triggered when the department began impounding unlicensed vehicles, leaving commuters stranded across the East Rand.

Tensions resurfaced this week when the Gauteng National Taxi Alliance and SANTACO Gauteng jointly accused Diale-Tlabela of sidelining their elected leadership structures by engaging directly with individual associations and operators, a move they characterised as breaking protocol observed by previous MECs. SANTACO spokesperson Graham Fritz alleged that licence collections were being scheduled at the MEC’s discretion, with operators sometimes given only a day or two’s notice by SMS to collect documents from a limited number of centres, leaving those based far from those sites facing travel costs many cannot afford. The two bodies have threatened protest action, though they were careful to credit the provincial government’s broader cooperation in formalising and modernising the sector over the years, framing their grievance as specific to the current MEC’s approach rather than the relationship as a whole.

The province has been attempting to address the underlying backlog through a technology-driven overhaul of the licensing system, launched in November 2025 under the Gauteng Public Transport Crisis Committee, a body established in January that year and expanded to cover e-hailing, scholar transport, bus and metered taxi operators alongside minibus taxis. Since the reform began, the department has issued 354 new operating licences, approved 5,049 applications and referred 2,247 cases for adjudication, alongside efforts to purge duplicate and fraudulent entries from the provincial database. Officials have described the digital system as a means of strengthening data integrity and cutting the paperwork-driven delays that fed the current dispute.

The immediate flashpoint is a deadline of 14 August, by which operators, particularly minibus taxi and scholar transport licence holders, must collect approved documents or risk cancellation. The department says notifications have gone out by SMS and through taxi associations. With the corruption review still under way and industry leadership publicly airing its grievances, the coming weeks will test whether the province’s digital reforms can outpace an industry relationship that appears to be fraying faster than the backlog is clearing.