NGO Black Sash has asked the Constitutional Court to ensure Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) is used to pay social grants from April 1 after its contract expires‚ but with strict conditions attached to any new deal.
This was revealed in papers it filed at the Constitutional Court on Wednesday‚ just hours before the Social Security Agency (Sassa) went to the same court to ask that the CPS contract be extended by a year.
The CPS contract finishes in a month and there is no company to take over paying grants to just over 17 million people who rely on them to survive.
Sassa was advised by a lawyer in October to get the court's permission to extend the CPS contract‚ but waited until meetings with the company on Tuesday morning before filing papers.
In 2014‚ the Constitutional Court ruled that Sassa's contract with CPS was invalid because of a flawed tender process. But the court said CPS must complete its contract to ensure pay-outs to the poor were not interrupted. The court ordered that Sassa start its tender process by October 2015 in order to find a new company to pay grants from April 2017. Sassa ignored the court ruling.
Black Sash wants the Constitutional Court to rule on the fact Sassa ignored its 2014 orders and it has other demands.
It asks that CPS act "reasonably" when extending the contract and determining its price.
There have been reports that the company could charge Sassa another R1.3‚billion to extend the contract at the last minute.
The Black Sash court papers ask that any contract that Sassa and CPS enter into is supervised by the court. This is to ensure it doesn’t cost too much‚ but also that beneficiaries are not used by the company as a database of potential customers.
CPS has come under fire for using millions beneficiaries of grants as a database to sell funeral policies‚ airtime and other products to‚ deducting premiums before paying out grants. Black Sash says the court must order that child support grants cannot be used for funeral policies. It wants all the details of all beneficiaries wiped from the CPS database when its interim contract ends.
The NGO also wants Minister Bathabile Dlamini to report to the court quarterly on her progress on finding a new agency to pay out grants after the interim contract with CPS ends.
Black Sash has harsh words for Sassa's conduct in refusing to find a new company to pay grants and says the agency "breached its constitutional obligations of transparency and accountability to the public‚ to Parliament and to the court".
- TMG Digital
Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package. 
