Zinara lost it on the new licensing format

vehicle licences once a year. This is simpler, requires a lot less queuing and trying to remember when to renew all the paper work, and considering the modest sums involved has little impact on cash flows. Zinara have now decreed that everyone must stand in long, unpleasant queues three times a year, as the special concession that was put in place decades ago to allow people to split their licence payments has now been made compulsory.
The reason shows that Zinara has not the faintest idea of what is going on. Zinara knows that licence fees were paid for 478 000 vehicles last year. They know that the Central Vehicle Registry has around 800 000 vehicles registered. So immediately Zinara assumes that 322 000 vehicles are carrying fake discs on their windscreens.
This assumption is palpably false. No one can rule out that some wide boys are faking Zinara discs, and the authority has quite sensibly decided to upgrade security features including, we assume from the desire to issue ultra-violet readers to police, features not visible in ordinary light and impossible to print on an ordinary laser printer.
But the main reason for the difference, as almost everyone outside Zinara and the CVR is aware, is that almost all the unaccounted for vehicles have no licence discs. Indeed many of them no longer exist.
There is an assumption, within the Transport Ministry and its agencies, that all registered vehicles are on the road. It is also assumed that anyone taking a vehicle off the road, to scrap it or to just let it rust in a corner of the garden, will go through the long and involved process of deregistering the car.
Very few do. Almost all those shells minus every saleable part seen abandoned in the bush, almost all those rusty heaps of metal seen in so many back gardens, are still technically registered with CVR but have not been licenced in recent years. As they do not go on the road no one ever finds out.
It is easy to verify this. The “new” plates with their three letters and four digits are found now on almost every vehicle. The old six digit plates are very rare for cars on the road since it is now impossible to go through a road block with such plates.
Yet only around 600 000 sets of the new plates have been issued and since no car can be sold without a change of plates we would guess that at least 100 000 of those new plates have now been handed back to the CVR.
So a fair estimate of the number of vehicles actually on the road is around 500 000, a figure that is very little more than the number of vehicles for which the Zinara tax has been paid. If we changed the rules for deregistering a car, to say just handing in the plates and sending in a form on the back of the registration book, we might well have a better record of the number of vehicles actually in the national fleet. As it is few bother to go through that process.
So for a start it is clear that Zinara are working on an estimated fleet that is far larger than the real number of cars on the road.
Secondly, faking the old licence discs was not expensive. We would guess that around six or eight could be fitted onto an A4 sheet, and that would cost well under US$1 to print on a decent printer. So anyone with a scanner, a computer loaded with a decent graphic or picture manipulation program, and a colour printer could churn them out almost for free, a fact that Zinara recognises.
The trouble is, if it possible to very cheaply fake a one-year disc it is possible to very cheaply fake a four-month disc. Zinara is not winning. The upgrade in security features, and presumably Zinara sought advice when doing this, should make it impossible for the home printer to fake a disc. Zinara could also use a few members of its staff with an hour or two on their hands to do some simple investigations by pretending to be members of the public seeking a “cheap” disc, and then testing what is brought in and having the vendor arrested.
But as we have said, the main problem is the continued registration of cars that no longer exist as a functional or even repairable vehicle, rather than the wide-scale faking of discs.
We applaud Zinara for making fakes harder, but totally fail to understand its reasons for making large numbers of law-abiding residents queue for hours three times a year.