A banana as the one and only meal of the day. For another, a piece of avocado donated by a sympathetic street vendor. A R4 shortfall to get the bus home. No medicine. These are the gritty details, shared by penniless Sassa beneficiaries, we need to confront politicians with.
For the elderly and the disabled, who battled for days to get their grant money, Thursday’s “profuse apology” by communications and digital technologies minister Mondli Gungubele does not change their last few days of hell. No grant money means hunger, illness, immobility. It affects the most vulnerable, for whom a few hundred rand per month is a game-changer; it’s the difference between eating and not eating.
Gungubele addressed the media on Thursday in an attempt to explain what had gone wrong. He ended up dancing around questions as to why the entire Postbank board had resigned with immediate effect earlier this week. In a letter dated September 12, addressed to Gungubele, Postbank board chair Thabile Wonci and its non-executive directors said they had no choice but to quit after being subjected to “recurring bad and negative treatment and hostility” that sought to undermine the foundation of the Postbank and the board members’ individual responsibilities.
The letter read: “There is absolutely no self-respecting board that can perform any meaningful work with the level of external interference, undue pressure and influence that our board has endured over the past couple of months. This was particularly painful as we did everything in our power to manage and ameliorate consequent risk to the bank and hardship that would ultimately be suffered by the most vulnerable stakeholders of the bank, especially grant recipients.” Reading this, it seems the board was the only entity genuinely concerned about the man in the street.
According to a GroundUp report, the glitch this past week, which mainly affected Sassa and Postbank card holders (more than a third of all beneficiaries), was the fourth system failure since the Postbank took over grant payments in October last year. But Gungubele insisted there had been a “tremendous improvement” in the banking IT systems programme. Tell that to the elderly queuing unsuccessfully for hours to get their grants.
Gungubele said the fault lay with a system of migration causing withdrawals being declined at ATMs and retail shops. Last week, Postbank spokesperson Bongani Diako said the glitch happened in the process of migrating to a new and more compliant banking system. The problem persisted for days. At least now authorities are insisting it has been fixed — after many days of wasted travel for beneficiaries who have zero spendable income for transport.
Gungunbele dismissed the board’s walkout as a manoeuvre pre-empting its dissolution. He said the glitch, or in his words, the “normal transition from one system to another” would have happened either way, regardless of whether he was “in a good relationship or a bad relationship with the board”.
But media reports revealed this “normal transition” was way more complicated than he let on, involving the nonpayment of a software service provider and desperate court action by the Postbank to get permission to pay, despite National Treasury not approving the agreement with the service provider. This, because it did not comply with public procurement protocols. The court granted the application and ordered the service provider to continue its operations. Since then, a new service provider has been appointed, apparently causing the latest delays.
This sounds chaotic and very far removed from “normal”. It leaves us with many questions, most importantly: can we get a guarantee that there will be no repeat of this past week’s woes?
Gungubele was confident the majority of grant beneficiaries had been paid their money by Thursday afternoon and only a few hundred people were yet to be paid. Until then, their fate lies in begging and bananas.
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