By Majd Othman

KUWAIT: Interior Minister Sheikh Talal Al-Khaled Al-Sabah has ordered that driving licenses of expats issued in the “past years” must be reviewed to ensure they were issued in a legal manner, the interior ministry said on Monday. The ministry said in a statement that if driving licenses were found to have been obtained illegally, holders will be summoned to the traffic department and the licenses will be canceled. The statement did not mention the scope of the examination and the period it will cover.

However, Director of the Public Relations and Security Media Department at the Interior Ministry Maj Gen Tawheed Al-Kandari told Kuwait Times licenses issued to expatriates from 2013 - when new driving license laws were put in place - will be examined. But he affirmed that an expat can still own a car without having a driving license.

Under the traffic department’s regulations, to be able to apply for a driving license, expats must be university graduates, draw a monthly salary of at least KD 600 and must have at least two years of legal residency in the country. The conditions for obtaining a driving license have been repeatedly toughened in order to reduce the number of expats - who make up some 70 percent of Kuwait’s population of 4.5 million population - who are allowed to obtain a license to drive.

The country has been experiencing menacing traffic jams, especially in the mornings as employees head to offices and students go to schools, and in the afternoons when they return home. Kuwait has seen only a few major road projects in the past several decades, which is blamed for the traffic jams. But some officials and citizens on social networks place the blame squarely on the large number of expat motorists.

The interior ministry has in the past carried out similar revisions and canceled thousands of licenses of expats on the basis that they had either obtained them through illegal channels or changed their jobs and were drawing salaries below the required KD 600 per month. According to media reports citing unnamed interior ministry officials, as many as 8,000 driving licenses held by expats have been cancelled in the first half of the year.