The man with all the cards
The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) has less than two months left to negotiate terms with the provider of social grant payments or up to four million people who receive cash payments stand to lose access to their monthly cash, the agency said on Wednesday.
The man it has to negotiate with is the chief executive of Net1 UEPS Technologies, Serge Belamant, who has been described in Parliament as a crook and by Sassa as unsavoury. And Belamant holds all the cards.
On Wednesday, Sassa told a parliamentary committee that the biometric cards used to identify social grant recipients at pay points will no longer work come April.
It said three to four million people make use of this system, and won’t be able to use it if they don’t have the alternative PIN (personal identification number) activated on their card.
“These encryption keys can be extended automatically over the next few months when beneficiaries draw their cash; however, an agreement needs to be reached with CPS as their proprietary system is used for these payments,” the agency said.
CPS, or Cash Paymaster Services, is owned by Net1. So are several other companies that have made deductions from social grant recipients for supposed benefits, such as funeral policies, that they say they never authorised.
Only CPS has the infrastructure needed to make cash payments, as was made clear in response to questions about potential service providers that Sassa published last week.
Sassa owns no part of the platform being used to pay social grants, those answers showed. “All software, hardware and related IP [intellectual property] used to provide the service belongs to the service provider.”
Though Sassa is supposed to be bringing grant payments in-house, it has instead sought information that would help it to put together tenders for the individual components of the contract CPS currently holds, giving it an ecosystem of providers that it manages rather than a single outsourced provider.
To replace the entire CPS system, Sassa said, its new ecosystem of providers would need to manufacture and distribute 12-million payment cards and be ready to issue about 150000 more every month as new beneficiaries were enrolled or cards were lost. Sassa data also shows that the 9 917 pay points it operates require a staff complement of 59 502, based on the six people it needs at each point.
Net1 chief executive Belamant has hinted to the shareholders of his listed company that CPS would only continue with grant payments after March 31 on profitable terms. In an interview with Bloomberg this week, he said he would be happy to sell CPS to the government.