Social grants: Minister missing, agency silent
With 66 days left on the clock until it is due to take over the payment of all government grants, the South Africa Social Security Agency (Sassa) this week missed a crucial self-imposed deadline in that process.
Sassa said it must now inevitably break its promise to the nation to provide information about its progress, extending what has been a determined and absolute silence.
Furthermore, this week the parliamentary committee responsible for oversight of Sassa did not know where the minister responsible for it was, deepening the impression of a process in unrelenting chaos.
Sassa has until the end of March to take over the payment to about 17-million beneficiaries, payments that provide a lifeline to as much as half the population of the country by conservative estimates. That is when the contract held by the current distributor, Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), is due to expire.
In 2014 the Constitutional Court found CPS’s contract to be invalid, but gave Sassa a series of deadlines to correct the matter instead of demanding immediate action. The last of those deadlines will expire on March 31.
Sassa and Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini had been expected in Parliament on Wednesday to brief the portfolio committee on social development on its readiness — or lack thereof — to meet the deadline.
On Monday that meeting was postponed. Dlamini and others “will be attending the ANC lekgotla scheduled for 25 to 27 January 2017”, the committee members were told.
Speaking from Addis Ababa on Wednesday, Dlamini’s spokesperson Lumka Oliphant said the minister had long been scheduled to be in that city for a high-level conference on gender equality. And Dlamini’s participation was definitely in her position as social development minister, not as president of the ANC Women’s League.
Oliphant confirmed that, while at the African Union, Dlamini had received an award on behalf of ANC stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She could not confirm whether Dlamini had participated in the launch, on the same day, of a women’s league desk for South Africans abroad.
Both the Democratic Alliance and the Inkatha Freedom Party accused Dlamini of being on ANC business instead of dealing with what the IFP said could now only be an assessment of the scale of disaster to come.
“The stark reality now is that on 1 April 2017, many South Africans who rely on a grant for their survival face a very real possibility that they will not receive their grant payments,” the IFP said in a statement.
Just as Sassa did not appear before Parliament to answer increasingly strident questions on what will happen on April 1, it also failed to answer the questions of the hopeful suppliers that are supposed to be helping it chart out the future.
Sassa had been due on Tuesday to publish answers to questions put to it by the dozens of companies that hope to bid to handle part of its “insourced” grant payments. Under a strictly formal process, those companies have until February 10 to respond to a request for information, which Sassa has explicitly warned could form “the basis for an ‘invite only’ ” tender at a later date.
The answers were not published. By Wednesday afternoon the Sassa technical team in charge of the process could not be reached, and potential suppliers had received no communication from Sassa.
Sassa spokesperson Kgomoco Diseko eventually told the Mail & Guardian that the answers would be forthcoming, and that “the delay was caused by the unusually high volumes of technical questions received”.
“Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this might have caused,” he said.
Potential suppliers described the delay as a calamity. “We are supposed to present pricing for this massively complex operation within days, and they can’t give us the information we need to do it,” one said. Another sug- gested that such delays could come to feature in “inevitable” legal challenges after tenders are awarded.
On Thursday afternoon, Sassa issued a media statement saying it was “understandable” that it had been receiving questions on what would happen in April, but that it would not yet provide answers.
“Social grant beneficiaries will continue to be paid as usual and on time even beyond April 2017 and there will be no disruptions in the system. There is therefore no need to panic from the side of beneficiaries.”
The statement provided no hint as to how that would be accomplished, but said all would be revealed before Parliament on February 1.
“We have to explain to our principles first,” Sassa’s Diseko had told the
M&G before that statement had been issued, explaining that Sassa could not answer any questions before it had appeared in Parliament.
Sassa had previously promised to call a press conference before the end of January to address mounting questions.