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‘Sassa must stick to its current service provider’

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Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg, Tessa Hochfeld says she believes the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) will have no choice but to stick to its current service provider, Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), for now.

Sassa is to go on an open tender process to find suitable service providers to take over the distribution of social grants.

This follows a progress report by the Minister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini, on the payments of social grants in future, where she indicated that the Post Office does not meet the requirements to fully take over the distribution of social grants.

Hochfeld explains, “In the future we do need to be delivering grants through our own services and not through the contracted
private parties. But six months between contracting and delivery is an extremely short time. Paying 17 million people across the country is not a small job, and currently the Post Office has about 2 700 pay points, whereas we need about 10 thousand pay points for the delivery of grants. It is likely that CPS is the only organisation with the capacity to do this by April 1, and that is concerning because CPS has been an irregular payment partner. It is concerning but I don’t see is able to do this in six months.”

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