Transport and Infrastructure Development Minister Felix Mhona has announced that Zimbabwe will replace metal driver’s licenses with a plastic one that complies with the requirements of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
The new license, which will be introduced on June 19, 2023, is fully compliant with SADC, COMESA, and East African Community standards, and will allow Zimbabwean drivers to drive in 25 African countries.
The new plastic license will also help develop an electronic database of all licensed drivers in the country, which will be linked to relevant stakeholders and enforcement agencies.
The license has 13 categories that conform to the United Nations Conventions on Road Traffic International Organization for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission requirements. The government will gradually phase out the metal driver’s license disks, and existing ones will be replaced by the new plastic license.
The ministry will prioritize those with manual certificates of competency issued between January 2019 and June 2019 to clear the backlog of 600,000 driver’s license disks.
— ZimLive
