It seemed like a good idea at the time.

On various travels on the country’s roads, I have been charmed and beguiled by the different pictures on the number plates of cars.    Cross into Free State, and the number plates have a cheetah running across a grassy landscape behind the plain black digits.  Trundle into the Northern Cape, and the cars sport signs with a gemsbok on a sand dune.  Most provinces have a design of some kind that reflects the character of that region, and every time I see one of these decorated numbers plates I take a mental hat off to whoever had this charming and whimsical idea.  So I decided to investigate further, and bring you a story about the thinking behind those multicoloured plates.  The obvious place to start was my brother, who owns a number plate and signage business.  So I casually gave him a ring. Well!  I had no idea the world of number plates was so fraught with intrigue, back-stabbing, double-crossing and litigation.  As soon as I told my brother about my quest, I got an earful about how disorganised the whole issue of vehicle licensing was.  A tale unfolded of meetings held in bad faith, lies, deceit, procrastination and back-room deals – it was a wild story worthy of an episode of Desperate Housewives. “But all I want to do is write a story about the pictures on the plates,” I protested weakly when I was able to get a word in edgeways.  So he recommended I phone the SABS, who is in charge of these things. It took a long time to get hold of anyone at SABS but eventually I spoke to a pleasant and knowledgeable lady called Verna, who told me that the SABS did, in fact, look after number plates, but only the quality and standards thereof.   She hinted at court cases and street protests, which intrigued me even further.  It seems that South Africans take their number plates very seriously.  The issue of the pictures on the plates was something about which she only had the vaguest inkling, and she suggested I contact the department of transport or the MEC for each province concerned.      This prospect filled me with dismay.  I have had dealings with government departments before in similar quests for innocuous  information, and I still sleep restlessly at night as a result.  But – in the interests of bringing you, dear reader, the story, I persevered. I will not, for the sake of the squeamish amongst you, describe how I had to battle to get the information, but a combination of persistent enquiry and the Internet brings you the following: Number plates are fraught with drama because they are the only way of identifying a car (and therefore its ownership and/or occupants), and as such are bound up with identity, ownership, crime-fighting and misdemeanour-tracking.  This is why various provincial governments keep re-tackling the whole vehicle licensing issue – the better the means of tracking down a vehicle, the better the means of tracking down the users of these vehicles, especially criminals.  (This, by the way, is not just a South African preoccupation, there are vast swathes of crime-fighting units around the world dealing with similar projects). It used to be good enough just to have an old black-and-white letter and number combination – like CA for Cape Town, TJ for Transvaal Johannesburg, OB for Bloemfontein and so on.  Then, when South Africa developed nine provinces, these signs had to change.  It was found simultaneously that the old black-and-whites were not readable at night or reliably by cameras, so reflective plates were introduced at the same time as a computerised number system.  Successive administrations (and the SABS) keep testing different types of number plate materials, numerals and colours in order to find the best way of reading them.  This is what gets industry people so hot under the collar – scarcely have they bought all the machinery to make one kind of sign, when the department of transport changes its mind and they have to start all over again. I got all this information, by the way, from a 500-page doctoral thesis called ‘Multi-modal Verification of Identity for a Realistic Access Control Application’.  The things I do for you sometimes. You might think that I am still no closer to the pretty pictures on the number plates.  But, in the middle of all the scientific research, I did hit on something more relevant to my enquiry.  The idea of pictures first came from Tokyo Sexwale when he was Premier of Gauteng.  He set the wheels in motion (pun intended) to have the Johannesburg coat of arms on the province’s number plates, thereby starting a trend.  Other provinces followed suit.  I have not been able to discover who decided on the final image per province, but whoever they were – good on you!  Neither the Western Cape nor KZN have any decoration, the spoilsports, apart from those dreadful ‘vanity’ plates.  Mpumalanga has a rising sun, the Eastern Cape has an elephant and an aloe, Limpopo has the beautiful baobab and the provincial crest, while the North West has decided to put an entire tourist brochure on their number plate and features a maize cob, an elephant, a sunflower and a mining headgear!  The number plate matter went to court in the North West, because even though they already had their plate full, in a manner of speaking, it also included the slogan ‘The Platinum Province’.  The Pan African Language Group took the Department of Transport to court, saying that it was discriminatory to have the slogan in only one language and not in Afrikaans and Setswana.  So there you are.  I thought it was just a question of a pretty picture and a good idea.  Who would ever have guessed that the humble number plate could evoke such strong feelings and high drama?