Another grants crisis looms
More anxiety up ahead on the Sassa debacle
TWELVE months and four CEOs ago – including two acting – the public looked on in disbelief as the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) seemed incapable of realising the implications of the March 31 2017 deadline.
Here we are again, looking on with even more disbelief as it becomes more apparent that there is no detailed plan for April 1 2018.
The only thing that saved the country from the inevitable chaos that would have resulted from the failure to distribute social grants effectively in 2017 was intervention by the top court in the land.
The self-imposed crisis resulted in the Constitutional Court micromanaging a 12-month extension, during which Sassa was to extricate itself from Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) and put in place an alternative failsafe distribution system.
Not only was Sassa required to submit monthly progress reports to the court, an expert panel was also appointed to oversee the transition and required to submit quarterly reports. It was an unprecedented level of hand holding. And last week it became evident that it had achieved little.
While Sassa has applied to the court for a six-month extension of the suspension of invalidity of the CPS contract to allow the company to continue to distribute cash to about 2.5-million recipients, this appears to be only part of the picture.
Even as Sassa chief executive Pearl Bhengu was telling the court it had “made arrangements” for the remaining 8.3-million recipients, she was discussing the continued provision of critical back-end banking systems for the social grant distribution system with CPS.
In an early February letter to CPS, Bhengu refers to the need for “system support for the existing SassaGrindrod cards for as long as ... [they] are still in circulation. CPS has extended the lifespan of those cards to end-December 2018.
“In addition, until such time as Sapo [the SA Post Office] is ready to start rolling out the new Sassabranded card, CPS will be expected to continue issuing the current Sassa card to new beneficiaries, as well as to those existing beneficiaries who require replacement cards,” said Bhengu in her letter to CPS.
Sassa seems little closer to a solution to its CPS challenge than it was 12 months ago. In response to the pressure from the court and its expert panel, it has gone through the motions of engaging with a variety of parties, principally the Post Office and, to a lesser extent, the banks.
Last week, Post Office chief operating officer Lindiwe Kwele told parliament the Post Office would take control of the grant system “in principle” in April. She raised concern about the lack of details on the “phase-in-phase-out process”.