Postbank Mess: Minister Zulu late to the party

PLEASE ATTRIBUTE THE BELOW TO MINISTER SHARNA FERNANDEZ:

It seems national government is finally waking up to the desperate need to provide feedback to the millions of SASSA grant beneficiaries dependent on these grants. But it is way too little way too late.

On 14 September, national Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu, and Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Mondli Gungubele, will give a briefing on what they inexcusably term “the technical glitch that resulted in delayed payments to thousands of social grants recipients across the country.”

This is a Minister who at best offers meaningless platitudes but shows absolutely no regard for the millions of the most vulnerable in our society who depend on these grants to meet their most basic daily needs.

During Thursday’s briefing the ministers will share the cause of the system failure and measures by SASSA and Postbank to prevent this from happening again. But I am not optimistic – we have been here before but nothing changes. We hope this is not just another opportunity for national government to pay lip service, as the most vulnerable deserve to be treated with dignity.

My office has been inundated with complaints from SASSA beneficiaries who either could not access their grants at all, or only received some of the funds. We always emphasise that, SASSA, Postbank, and the Post Office are national competencies, and the Western Cape Government is thus limited in its powers to intervene, but we do whatever we can to assist.

We have worked hard to build a good working relationship with SASSA’s regional management in the province. Thanks to this relationship, we are able to escalate the myriad of complaints we receive to SASSA and follow up to ensure the matters are resolved. We also monitor problems, as have done recently, to put pressure on the powers that be to find speedy resolutions.

Even after Postbank issued a communique saying it had resolved the “glitch”, we still received complaints from frustrated and desperate beneficiaries who looked to us to assist. One woman’s desperate plea on behalf of her pensioner mother read: “This is causing lots of stress for the pensioners that are already having to wait so long for this money. What of households where husband and wife are pensioners and no one got paid?”

These are the kind of questions we are asked by beneficiaries. This is not the first time Postbank’s system failures have caused distress. Every time we are told it has been resolved, yet here we are, nearly a year after Postbank took over the disbursement of grants for SASSA and we are still sitting with a disaster.

I plead with Ministers Zulu and Gungubele to do justice by the most vulnerable residents in the country, for whom any delay in accessing their grant could be the difference between life and death.