Post Office eager to finalise deal

THE SOUTH African Post Office could as soon as next week finalise a contract with the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) that will see it take over welfare grant payments for the next few years, chief executive Mark Barnes said.

“We are writing a contract. We are working on it now, every day,” Barnes said after briefing Parliament’s select committee on communications and public enterprises.

“We are hoping to have it finalised by mid-June, so that is next Friday,” he added, but stressed that he did not want to create the impression that it was a done deal because it still needed the approval of Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini.

Barnes had told MPs that the minister had yet to give the go-ahead for the post office to replace Net1 subsidiary Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) as the distributor of 17 million grants. He said he was confident it could perform the service with relative ease.

“The job is not as difficult as the incumbent made out to be,” he said of CPS. Barnes added CPS’s technology was not as advanced and hard to match as claimed, and the use of biometric data was not an obstacle to switching service providers.

Barnes said the post office would need a commitment this month to ensure a smooth roll-out, saying October would be “too late”.

The post office would need an estimated three months to produce 12 million cards with embedded data for welfare beneficiaries to access their grants.

Dlamini in February rejected a proposal for the post office to step into the breach when the CPS contract was about to expire with no alternative in sight. – ANA