A POSTAL NON-SERVICE
The SA Post Office cannot be trusted to deliver packages — yet wants protection from courier services. It’s a bankrupt mess
Here we go again. What are the chances of the SA Post Office delivering a package to you safely and quickly? They are slim. My experience of the post office is that your parcel will be ripped open, the contents stolen, the empty package delivered to the wrong address — and you will spend months at one of its branches paging through a tattered logbook trying to “identify your package”.
Followers of economist Thabi Leoka on Twitter have for months shared her anguish as she has waited for a package. In February, faced with the tattered logbooks again, she tweeted: “‘The system’ has been down since … well … Adam! Found so many familiar names [in the logbook] including the Sars [SA Revenue Service] commissioner’”.
So what do you do when this sort of thing happens? You go to a private courier service. With these services, wherever you may be in the world, the package arrives safely, quickly and affordably. After years of waiting for parcels that never arrived — or arrived pilfered — I gave up on the post office. It’s broken.
So imagine my shock when I heard that the post office wants to sideline private courier companies and monopolise the delivery of parcels weighing up to 1kg.
News site Business Insider reported that the post office laid a complaint in 2018, arguing that PostNet was in contravention of the Postal Services Act by delivering items under 1kg. In terms of this law, the post office is the only licensed operator of such services. The post office argues that it should have exclusive rights to deliver such items.
Ridiculous does not begin to describe this. Here is an entity that cannot do its job, applying to the courts to prevent others from helping the consumer, doing that job for it. The consequences will be devastating — apparently average delivery times will double (assuming the package ever arrives). But, even worse, the R20bn small parcel courier industry will be destroyed.
We know that the post office is bankrupt. According to the Business Insider article, it incurred losses of almost R1.8bn last year and owes the same amount in rental arrears.
No amount of protectionist action will save the post office. Earlier this year, it lost its CFO. Before that, it lost two acting CEOs in the space of a year — and its board chair, Colleen Makhubele, was removed after clashes with her minister, Stella NdabeniAbrahams. Last year, it could not pay employee medical aid and pension fund contributions.
It’s a mess. These people cannot be trusted to deliver a letter reliably. We shouldn’t reward mediocrity.
So here’s the thing. If you look out of a window anywhere in affluent SA, you will be met by the sight of private security guards. Why? The police, paid for by the taxpayer, just cannot handle the job.
Right now the national police commissioner and the police minister are involved in a very public and unseemly fight. Fighting crime is the last thing on their minds.
Eskom can’t deliver electricity reliably, so most businesses have their own generators.
SAA isn’t flying, though we keep pouring billions down its maw.
By all accounts municipalities seem to be failing to provide enough clean water, so boreholes will soon be the norm where they aren’t already installed.
It is time for the powers that be to acknowledge that there are pockets of excellence in SA but, unfortunately, most of those are not in the government.
The key is to allow those pockets of excellence to thrive, and the best way to do that is to allow them the space to operate.
It is a philosophical shift. It will be difficult to handle for the ANC, a political party suckled on the notion that it would ride in on a white horse, nationalise everything and save the masses.
Yet this is where we are now: in most spheres the government has failed and has no plan for recovery.
Of course, the government is not all bad. There are, to be sure, areas where it is delivering to the people.
The post office isn’t an area where it has excelled. It should just walk away. Please.
The government has failed in most areas of delivery. It should allow private sector pockets of excellence to get on with it