Acting Sassa CEO, Abraham Mahlangu, has assured social grant beneficiaries that SASSA is dealing with social grant payment glitches in the country.
The Department of Social Development, the South African Post Office and SASSA embarked on a massive new social grant cards transition at Matyengqina village outside Mthatha in the Eastern Cape.
The rural areas were the hardest hit in last month’s social grant payments technical glitches. This forced many to queue from the early hours to withdraw their money. SASSA says the problems are over.
“We are fighting day and night to make sure that systems are in place, logistics are in place, to make sure that systems go smooth come the end of September that is why now we are doing dry runs, we are doing assimilations with our service provider SAPO with the units that they are going to be using,” said Mahlangu.
Pay-points are crucial in rural areas and a pilot project of mobile money dispensing units will be rolled out in mid-August for remote villages.
“What we also want to do is to encourage people with our teller assistance to access their money using other channels like ATM and merchants so that they do not have to spend long time cueing at the post office ,” said SAPO Eastern Cape Manager, Nombulelo Ngubane.
Social grant beneficiaries are hopeful the new system will benefit them.
“We are hoping that we will get our money without any problems, but we will just wait and see how far this process will go otherwise we do not expect the unexpected,” said one social grant beneficiary.
“I am still going to use it that is where I will be able to determine whether it’s genuine or not because sometime we might be just thrown out of the cue, because of the officials asking the validity of the card we have just been given, but of course we will wait and see,” added another one.
More than three million of the 17 million beneficiaries have already migrated to the gold cards. The process is on-going.
