The cheque is not, by a long shot, in the post

DON’T be too surprised if you pitch up at your local Post Office branch sometime soon and there’s a big red sheriff’s ribbon around the doors that says “attached”.

The Post Office, already beaten up by a strike that led to mountains of post piling up in its sorting offices, just can’t seem to get it together to pay even the debts it admits it owes.

Throw in the threats from those who have had their businesses wrecked by the utility’s inability to deliver post — such as specialist magazines — and it looks grim.

Consider just this one particularly awe-inspiring case of nondelivery.

Back in 2004, a company run by the National Association of Stokvels (Nasasa) and GloCell struck a deal with the Post Office, then headed by Maanda Manyatshe, to sell cellphones and airtime through the 1 250 Post Office branches.

Headlines at the time proclaimed that this deal would make fat profits for everyone involved (including R493-million for the Post Office) and benefit the country’s eight million stokvels and burial associations.

For Nasasa Cellular chairman Soto Ndukwana, a former MK soldier who served 10 years on Robben Island (getting two degrees while there), it was part of a broader vision to start marketing cheap cellphones to all corners of the country.

With the Post Office, however, nothing is ever that simple.

Inexplicably, the project stuttered to a halt. At the time, Ndukwana said the Post Office had failed to “cooperate”, and his efforts to speak to top managers about this roadblock “proved fruitless”.

So, in 2007, Nasasa Cellular went to court, demanding damages of a rather epic R1.32-billion.

It was a long, fraught battle that ultimately caused the Post Office's reputation to be lacerated.

In mid-2007, Judge Stanley Sapire declared the deal binding, saying the Post Office’s “refusal to carry out its obligations is conduct lacking in commercial morality”.

A few months later (and almost predictably), the Post Office missed the window to appeal against that ruling, and begged Sapire for permission to do so belatedly. But he refused, lambasting the utility for its “lamentable absence of administrative coherence . . . and astonishing ineptitude at the highest level”.

This had little effect. The case dragged on for eight years — of no value to the stokvels.

Finally, in September, more than a decade after the deal was first struck, Nasasa cut its losses. The lawyers for both sides sat down and thrashed out a settlement to draw a curtain over this long battle — a settlement in which the Post Office would pay R50-million to Nasasa Cellular to bury the case.

Ndukwana didn’t live to see this victory. In 2010, the 54-year-old was tragically killed along with his daughter when his car collided with a truck near Bloemfontein.

But at least, it seemed, the Post Office would be forced to make good on its promises.

In theory. Instead, the day the first R20-million payment was due, October 31, flew past without any payment. So too did the dates for the next three payments.

Nasasa dragged itself back to court, getting the High Court in Pretoria to make the settlement an “order of court” in January.

On March 24, Nasasa’s lawyers, Werksmans, sent another letter to the Post Office and National Treasury, saying that even though the utility had repeatedly broken its word, “Nasasa hereby affords [you] a further 14 days” to pay — otherwise it would start attaching assets. That deadline was this week.

On Friday, Werksmans lawyer Bernard Hotz confirmed he had now got a warrant to begin attaching the Post Office’s assets.

If the sheriff can’t find enough chairs, tables and other moveables floating around the Post Office’s Pretoria headquarters, he can start attaching Post Office vans or anything else to satisfy the debt.

Hotz is furious that it has taken eight years to get here. “It shows an absolute disregard for the rule of law. The Post Office expects others to abide by this, yet they seem to think themselves immune,” he says.

It’s far-fetched, but the prospect of a stokvel owner screaming past you in his or her own Post Office van might seem like a funny story — but this is just part of a bigger problem.

The Post Office is not the only government-owned company that blithely ignores its obligations, shrugs off court judgments and acts as if it is accountable to nobody.

The Nasasa case is an eloquent illustration of how that delinquency harms everyone in the economy.