There have been growing concerns from vehicle owners and various stakeholders about the delays in issuing Certificates of Fitness (CoFs) by the Directorate of Road Traffic and Safety Services (DRTSS), which they said is negatively impacting on their operations.<\/p>\n
In its Lilongwe and Blantyre offices, the directorate is supposed to issue around 120 CoFs per day while at its offices in Mzuzu and Zomba, DRTSS is supposed to issue around 60 CoFs per day.<\/p>\n
However, this has not been the case. For Instance, at its offices in Blantyre, DRTSS issues an average of 20 CoFs per day.<\/p>\n
When The Daily Times <\/em>visited the DRTSS Office in Blantyre on Tuesday, it found a long queue stretching beyond the office corridors as vehicle owners waited for their turn to be served.<\/p>\n One minibus owner said he was frustrated as he had been coming to the office several times, only to stand for hours and be told to come back the following day.<\/p>\n Minibus Owners Association of Malawi (Moam) General Secretary, Coxley Kamange suggested that the services should be extended in other districts where the directorate does not have offices yet.<\/p>\n \u201cLimiting the number of vehicles to be checked per day is denying us business as we cannot get the service on time and it takes days. Another setback is that the contractor they assigned to be doing the work, Motor Vehicle Spares<\/p>\n and Accessories (Movesa) refuses to test trucks,\u201d said Kamange.<\/p>\n Movesa is one of the companies that was contracted by government to upgrade the Malawi Traffic Information System (Maltis) about two years ago.<\/p>\n Some players in the transport sector trashed government\u2019s choice of Movesa, saying the system needs physical presence of its operator.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the directorate has justified the long queues and low service at its offices across the country particularly in issuing the CoFs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe system has been upgraded. An examiner will not be able to examine more than 30 vehicles a day. In the past, the time for checking the cars varied. Others could be checked under two minutes but now the cars have to be checked between a minimum of eight and a maximum of 15 minutes. This is to ensure that the cars have been thoroughly checked\u201d, Chisomo Chibwana, DRTSS Spokesperson said.<\/p>\n Chibwana added that the system is currently being done in the four offices only because the directorate wants to ensure that it sets \u2018high\u2019 checking standards before it lets private companies to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There have been growing concerns from vehicle owners and various stakeholders about the delays in issuing Certificates of Fitness (CoFs) by the Directorate of Road Traffic and Safety Services (DRTSS), which they said is negatively impacting on their operations. In its Lilongwe and Blantyre offices, the directorate is supposed to issue around 120 CoFs per […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26818,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26816\/revisions\/26818"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}