If you've been trying to renew your driver's license at any of the Transport Offices countrywide, you'll only be issued a receipt. That's because the Belize Motor Vehicle Registration and License System - which was a project with the Taiwanese Embassy - is currently down. But it's not a system failure - it's because the Ministry of Transport wasn't paying its fees for use of the program - so the service was discontinued.
And, until it's restored, well, no new licenses.
Today, the new CEO, Chester Williams, explained that he's trying to rectify the situation.
Chester Williams, CEO, Ministry of Transport
"The system you spoke about is a system that is needed to input data and print driver's license for the national transport. I was notified about a week and a half ago by the Chief Transport Officer that the system has gone down. The reason being that there seems to have been some fees that were supposed to be paid to the developers of the program who are from Taiwan and that fee was not paid. The non-payment of the fee is not attributed to the government, the money is in a special bank account for the fee to have been paid but somehow, the ministry dropped the ball and the fee was not paid so what we will be doing now to rectify that 
issue, tomorrow morning I'll be meeting with the Taiwanese Embassy in Belize City to see if they'll be able to assist us in getting in contact with the developers of the program and the reason for that is because we want to begin to make payment of the outstanding fee and two to see if we can get them to bring the system back on stream. The system is important and while some might say why not go and develop a new system, the importance of this system is that it will not only work for the national transport but what we want to do is to create a system where the national transport and the municipal traffic will be able to communicate with each other. Whatever license would have been issued by the local traffic, we want the national traffic to be able to see that and vice versa so having that connectivity between the different traffic departments and the national transport is important for us as we navigate the whole issue of road safety in this country."
"In the time being, we're only issuing the receipts for the driver's licenses, which is not good. So people who are now renewing their driver's license do not get physical license, they only get a receipt and whenever they arrive at any checkpoint, they will have to produce the receipt to show that they have paid for the renewal. Again, we are asking the police as well as our traffic personnel and the municipal traffic to be able to honor the receipt for now until we can get the system back up and running to provide the physical driver's license to those persons."
The system was launched in 2018.
Email
Print