{"id":215651,"date":"2017-12-11T07:40:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T05:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=215651"},"modified":"2017-12-11T07:40:28","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T05:40:28","slug":"sa-post-office-to-take-over-the-distribution-of-welfare-grants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/banking\/215651\/sa-post-office-to-take-over-the-distribution-of-welfare-grants\/","title":{"rendered":"SA Post Office to take over the distribution of welfare grants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The South African Post Office will take over the distribution of welfare grants from current service provider Net 1 UEPS Technologies Inc, complying with a Constitutional Court ruling,\u00a0Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe said.<\/p>\n

The agreement between the South Africa Social Security Agency, known as SASSA, and the state-owned\u00a0national postal service will take effect from April 1, Radebe\u00a0told reporters in Pretoria Sunday.<\/p>\n

The Constitutional Court ruled in\u00a02014 that the contract with Net 1\u00a0unit Cash Paymaster Services was invalid, but the deal was this year extended until 2018 to ensure grant payments didn\u2019t stop after the welfare department failed to comply with its ruling.<\/p>\n

About 17 million South Africans receive various forms of social grants costing the government more than 150 billion rand ($11 billion) annually in what is the single biggest program instituted by the post-apartheid government to alleviate poverty in one of the world\u2019s most unequal nations. Most of the recipients are less than 18 years old, according to the Department of Social Development.<\/p>\n

\u201cSASSA considered various options for the replacement of service providers and preferred the option of the South African Post Office as the most suitable one,\u201d Radebe, who heads an inter-ministerial committee tasked with ending the crisis, said.<\/p>\n

Net 1 in May agreed to pay its founder Serge Belamant $8 million and about a 14% premium on his shares after he agreed to step down as chief executive officer amid a storm of controversy concerning the South African contract. Net 1 has been accused by civil rights groups of using data gathered on welfare recipients to markets services ranging from the provision of loans to funeral insurance. The company has denied wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini, whose conduct around the Net 1 contract was criticized by the court, didn\u2019t attend the Sunday announcement.<\/p>\n

A handover period from Cash Paymaster Services to the Post Office would take about six months and end in August next year, according to Mpumi Mpofu, director general of the Department of Monitoring and Evaluation and chairwoman of the technical committee overseeing the transfer.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbout 1.8 million recipients will still receive their payments in cash and SASSA will seek for an alternative service provider to take this over,\u201d she said at the same event.<\/p>\n

The cost of distributing the grants would remain the same to government and might even fall in the future, the Post Office\u2019s chief executive officer Mark Barnes told reporters. \u201cThe Post Office network has already been paid for and so the costs may even come down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radebe said the new system will also allow for the participation of other partners such as enterprises and commercial banks in the payment of welfare grants to beneficiaries.<\/p>\n

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Read: Plans to make SA Post Office an operating bank before April 2018: report<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The South African Post Office will take over the distribution of welfare grants from current service provider Net 1 UEPS Technologies Inc., complying with a Constitutional Court ruling, Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":55856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215655,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215651\/revisions\/215655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}