Sassa takes over disaster relief efforts from City

THE SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) has taken over disaster relief assessment from the City of Cape Town.

Yesterday, the City announced that Disaster Risk Management Centre (DRMC) was no longer responsible for co-ordinating humanitarian relief efforts for disasters.

Mayco member for Safety and Security; and Social Services JP Smith said: “Amid concerns that the payments to service providers could possibly be classified as irregular expenditure in terms of the Public Finance Management Act and Sassa’s supply chain management policies, the agency decided to take over responsibility for activation of humanitarian relief.”

Smith said Cape Town was the only city in the country that had service-level agreements with NGOs, such as the Mustadafin Foundation, the Salvation Army and Historically Disadvantaged Individual.

The City was responsible for facilitating claims for reimbursement from the organisations. ThesE would be verified by the DRMC and submitted to Sassa for payment. To activate social relief to disaster victims, DRMC will notify Sassa, then Sassa will have to notify the NGOs.

“We generally had a four-hour waiting period for humanitarian relief, but since Sassa has taken over, it had slowed down to a day or two.”

Major Carin Holmes, PR secretary of the Salvation Army southern Africa said the organisation had an excellent relationship with the City. “We regret that Sassa has decided to change something that is working well and wonder what the reasons are for doing so.”

A community leader from Imizamo Yethu informal settlement, Markiss Ndude, said: “All we want is immediate relief and assistance. Sassa has a bad history and we hope that they step up. We will give Sassa a chance to prove itself, but they better not relax because it will be a shame on them.”