SA's pension day guardians - at R50-million a month

R600-million a year. And R50-million a month. This is how much it costs to keep pension paypoints safe from armed robbers.

And that's not to mention the R700-million spent setting up security and related infrastructure and assets.

NET1 UEPS Technologies - which owns Cash Paymaster Services, which is responsible for paying 22 million grants to 10.6 million recipients across the country - revealed these figures during a trip to one of the benefit paypoints in the Eastern Cape.

Newly appointed Net1 CEO Herman Kotze said in Bizana last week that security at paypoints was the "single biggest expense" of CPS's operating costs.

The company has outsourced its security function to Fidelity, which has specialised vehicles to carry cash to pension pay outlets.

"We have put a lot into security. It's probably our single biggest expense," said Kotze.

Net1 chief operations officer Nanda Pillay said there was a monthly assessment in consultation with the police to determine the security requirements of each paypoint.

"We engage with the SAPS and we build the security plan around that. In some instances, there are four or five armed guards. Where we think the risk is high we increase it. Where we think the risk is even higher we have helicopters circling," he said.

But Pillay said Net1 was concerned about creating a tit-for-tat situation, where additional security was met by armed robbers who beefed up in response.

That would "put people's lives at risk", he said. "It's something we really don't want to do. So, the only way to do it is to manage the cash on the paypoint at a point in time. But I can't go into details on that.

"What we really do is that we schedule the money and its delivery at different times, so that there is not that much money on the site, and so it does not make it attractive," said Pillay.

He said armed robberies had decreased dramatically over the last two years at pension pay points because of increased security.

"We are probably talking in the vicinity of R700-million in security, vehicles, firearms, depot infrastructure. So it's quite capital-intensive," he said.

Pension recipients have often become victims of paypoint robberies that have even left some injured.

Last week Net1 flew 20 journalists from Lanseria to Kokstad in KwaZulu-Natal in a bid to clean up its image after months of controversy relating to the 2012 tender for grant payments that was ruled invalid by the Constitutional Court.

Despite the court ordering the government to take over the grant payments by April, Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini supported Net1 to continue paying benefit recipients.

Fearing that grants might not be paid in May, the Constitutional Court allowed Net1 to continue with the invalid contract for another year at the last minute.