Point-scoring in grant case is out of line

Allpay was not ’winner’ in tender challenge

THE recent Constitutional Court decision about the awarding of the social grants contract to Net1’s subsidiary, Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), makes for interesting reading.

To set the context, the South African Social Services Agency (Sassa), which falls under the Department of Social Development, awarded the contract to handle social grant payments for more than 10 million South Africans to CPS in 2012.

One of the losing bidders, Allpay, a company owned by banking group Absa, believed Sassa had messed up and took the agency to court, alleging all sorts of wrongdoing.

A few months ago, the Constitutional Court ruled that Sassa’s decision to award the contract to CPS was “constitutionally invalid”, but it suspended the invalidity declaration. There were two grounds for this: first, CPS’s empowerment credentials had not been confirmed by Sassa; and the bidders’ notice it put out was not sufficiently clear in what it wanted in terms of biometric verification.

But what boggles the mind is that if you’d read the newspaper reports about it, you’d think it was declared invalid because of corruption. This is a consistent theme that we at Sassa have found particularly worrying because it is so far from the truth.

The truth is that the court did not make any finding about corruption. Neither did any of the lower courts, even if they did raise question marks about the process.

The court decided to suspend its declaration of invalidity based on the assumption that the remedy should not disrupt the payments of social grants to beneficiaries — a huge victory for the people who actually matter in this process.

Sassa was ordered to initiate a new tender process within 30 days of the court order and provide quarterly reports to the court.

The agency has complied with this and has shared documents with the court to ensure transparency and maintain the integrity of the social grants process.

All along, Sassa has said that by 2017 it wants to be paying out grants directly, without a third-party contractor such as CPS. Some media commentators have suggested that we won’t be ready to do this when that date rolls around.

Well, the good news for us and the bad news for those naysayers is that we are still committed to meeting that deadline.

But what has been more worrying is that, throughout the process,

As the minister said, the victory is for nobody but the social grant beneficiaries

these critics have run a vicious trial by media, creating a distorted impression of the capability of the agency to distribute grants to the more than 15 million South Africans who rely on them.

It seems to us that it’s part of a bigger campaign, which takes different forms and sometimes even targets individuals in Sassa, trying to discredit them.

After the Constitutional Court judgment, for example, these critics were quick to dub Sassa the “loser” and Allpay the “winner”.

This is also wrong. As Minister of Social Development Bathabile Dlamini pointed out, the victory is for nobody but the social grant beneficiaries.

The dust has now settled on the case and hopefully this means the agency can get back to doing what it was mandated to do: get the grant money to the people who need it.

Diseko is Sassa’s spokesman