Last-minute rush for new providers beggars reason

The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) is on the brink of reneging on its long-held promise to insource the payment of social grants when the current contract expires in 11 weeks’ time.

Social grants provide a lifeline to almost 17-million South Africans.

The fast-approaching deadline will not, in itself, mean that the tap of social grants will be closed. But it does raise some vitally important questions, none of which Sassa can answer.

As far back as February 2014, Sassa told the Constitutional Court that it intended to take over the social grant payment system from the current holder of the tender, Net1, by April this year.

That commitment has wavered at times but as recently as November last year, both Sassa and the person ultimately responsible for it, Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini, assured Parliament that work on the mammoth task was well underway. In fact, they said, it was being finalised.

But, last Friday, speaking to potential suppliers, Sassa’s assessment was very different. It had only an “architectural framework”, a wish list of sorts, for how it would like payments to be handled, it told possible bidders during a requestfor-information briefing.

And much of that wish list is not set in stone.

“We really need you to tell us what you can provide,” consultant Manie van Wyk said on behalf of Sassa, reiterating what he had been saying in different ways for the previous 40 minutes.

“They’re crazy if they think we can get this thing done in a month,” said a potential bidder for related tenders. “They’re on drugs. Hard drugs.”

His identity is being withheld in case it might prejudice his company’s chances.

The briefing on Friday was compulsory for those who wish to influence how upcoming, related tenders are constructed — tenders for the many services that Sassa would require to meet the April deadline.

But the request-for-information window closes on February 10 — 50 days before the deadline for implementation, an almost certainly impossible task.

The last time Sassa put out a similar tender, it took nine months to adjudicate and was later found to have been adjudicated unlawfully.

Compulsory briefings for information requests tend to be poorly attended but this one drew more than 80 people — a collection of bankers, lawyers and technology service providers, their amount of experience unprecedented.

“You have to keep in mind that this is the biggest public-sector contract ever on this continent, from Cape to Cairo,” said the potential bidder.

The attendees, some of whom had travelled from other parts of the country for the day, were treated to a 40-minute presentation during which Van Wyk, the only person to speak, other than to make introductions, read almost exclusively verbatim what appeared on slides marked “confidential”.

No questions were entertained, and no discussion was allowed.

Van Wyk never mentioned an April deadline, or that it was a matter of urgency. Instead, he explained that Sassa intended to move from having a single provider for the whole process of paying social grants to an ecosystem in which one company would manufacture special Sassa cards, another company would issue them, a third would manage the accounts linked to those cards, and so on.

In total there would be at least six different service providers involved. For each of these service areas, Sassa has asked potential providers “to submit information on how they can support” the agency.

Some attendees took furious notes and took cellphone photographs of the slides, others sat back and occasionally shook their heads.

“I don’t know if we should get involved in this thing,” one muttered to a colleague as they walked out after the presentation.

“Who knows if we’ll still be in business by the time it gets off the ground?”

“You have to keep in mind that this is the biggest public-sector contract ever on this continent, from Cape to Cairo”