Underlings will take the fall while the overlords walk free

Thanks to the Constitutional Court, the pieces of the South African Social Security Agency grants puzzle are being pieced together, giving us an idea of who ultimately will be the fall guys.

Monday night's late filings by the agency, in response to a directive by the court demanding answers to 17 questions on how the grants project was handled, tell a story of ineptitude on a grand scale.

But even as answers are provided they spark more questions.

What is now incontrovertible is that Sassa knew as early as April last year that there was no way it could meet the deadline to have a new payments system in place by the end of this month - but only alerted the court to this nearly a year later.

The agency's court documents tell the sorry story of a disaster unfolding in slow motion with no one capable of stopping it. The agency's own legal opinion rather mildly labelled it as having been "remiss".

Thanks to the court's demands for answers, we have some idea of who will shoulder the blame.

Among them are the agency's special projects head, a string of former agency CEOs, and the current CEO Thokozani Magwaza, whom Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini threw under the bus in her own affidavit on Monday night.

Dlamini pointed to a meeting at the end of last month with agency officials at which she said she instructed Magwaza to urgently arrest the unfolding debacle. "I know he did not heed my advice in that he did not take any urgent steps to redress the situation shortly after the meeting," she said.

But what is conspicuously absent from the voluminous filings by the agency is Dlamini accepting any direct blame.

And so we return to a story with a familiar ending. As with the Nkandla scandal, it will conclude with a bevy of state officials taking the fall, while their political master walks away unscathed.