Beneficiaries up in arms over Sassa

PROTECTION: RECIPIENTS WANT COURT ORDER

Unauthorised deductions are being made on pensioners’ grant payments.

Patricia Saptoe, a 63-year-old pensioner, had R90 deducted from her South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) grant of R1 270 in March 2015 without her consent.

The deductions were in 18 tranches of R5 each for prepaid airtime. A month later, 10 more deductions of a similar amount for airtime were processed from her account.

Sipho Bani, an 89-year-old pensioner, faced a similar fate. A total of R4 391 was wrongly deducted from his account without his consent between May 2015 and February 2016. He spent over R400 in an attempt to stop the deductions.

Although Saptoe and Bani have queried the deductions with Sassa and incumbent social grant distributor Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), they have not been reimbursed for the full amounts.

The deducted money may be a pittance for many, but for social grant beneficiaries, who are SA’s most vulnerable citizens, it’s a substantial amount.

Saptoe and Bani are among six beneficiaries who have taken their fight against Sassa and the Department of Social Development all the way to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein.

JSE-listed Net1 UEPS, its financial services subsidiaries CPS, Smart Life Insurance and EasyPay, and its banking partner Grindrod have been blamed for the unlawful deductions.

Everness Nkosi, a 67-year-old pensioner, was allegedly told at a Sassa pay point that she would not receive her social grant if she didn’t open an EasyPay Everywhere (EPE) card to replace the official Sassa card.

Nkosi then incurred deductions of R10 every month on the EPE card, operated and underwritten by Net1 and Grindrod.

Start of court case

Civil rights group Black Sash and the six social grant beneficiaries, represented by the Centre for Legal Applied Studies (Cals), argued at the SCA on Thursday that the Social Development Department has a duty to protect beneficiaries from unauthorised and unlawful deductions.

The matter will be heard until Friday.

Cals has appealed a North Gauteng High Court judgment delivered by acting judge Corrie van der Westhuizen in May 2017.

Van der Westhuizen ruled that regulations 21 and 26A of the Social Assistance Act do not operate to restrict how beneficiaries use their bank accounts. In other words, the regulations should not prohibit deductions made on beneficiaries’ accounts, which are operated by Net1 and Grindrod.

The regulations were introduced by former social development minister Bathabile Dlamini in 2016 to regulate deductions.

The regulations allowed one deduction per month not exceeding 10% of the social grant amount, only if the beneficiary consented to the deduction in writing.

Net1 and other companies successfully fought Sassa about the regulations as per the Van der Westhuizen judgment. The Black Sash and the six beneficiaries applied to intervene in Net1’s battle with Sassa. Van der Westhuizen rejected the application, saying it was not “relevant” to the main application (the battle between Net1 and others with Sassa).