’Looby loo’ Sassa’s roulette with poor

THOKOZANI Magwaza was appointed to his post at the South African Social Security Agency in June last year, your report “Beneficiaries in ‘disaster’ countdown” (February 12) says, to sort out the mess the agency is in.

Yet, we read with astonishment that he has yet to meet Net 1’s Cash Paymaster Services head, Serge Belamant, mere weeks before the April 1 “cliffhanger deadline”, and that he operates on the blind faith he shares with the minister that social grants on and after that date will be paid.

Is this not the gravest example of naivety ever to be demonstrated by a senior civil servant — surpassing even the gross incompetence of his minister — while an entire ministry and state agency go “Here we go looby loo” without even realising they are hanging on to a cliff edge, by their fingernails — which Net 1 owns lock, stock and barrel?

Has no one woken up to the fact that 17 million of the nation’s most vulnerable people are, well, now dangerously vulnerable?

CPS earns just over R13 for each payment it makes to each beneficiary each month. If I were Belamant, in the position in which Sassa has placed him, I’d turn around and say: “OK, we’ll continue, but times are tough, guys, let’s call it 23 bucks a payment — or how about 53? Or 103? Who’s the daddy?” And who’d blame him?

If I were Magwaza or Bathabile Dlamini, I’d google “schadenfreude” and brace myself for the roller-coaster ride set to be unleashed on Sassa in just over a month. This is going to leave a mark. — Rod McGregor Mann, Kleinemonde (Fair disclosure: I worked as an independent contractor for Net 1 CPS in 2013)