Only 2.6% of Post Offices are up to service standard

Dear Editor

The DA can today reveal that only 2.6% of South Africa Post Offices are in line with the State Owned Entities Service standards.

The Department of Social development alongside the South African State Security Agency presented to the Social Development Portfolio Committee on the 15th of February.

In their presentation, it was emphasised that Post Office/SASSA branches need to be equipped with backup power supply in the case of ANC-sponsored blackouts. Alongside this, the downtime of these systems and equipment may not exceed one hour.

Recently, the DA submitted a parliamentary question wherein we asked the SAPO how many branches currently had a backup power supply. It was revealed that only a disappointing 32 branches had backup generators.

The number of Post Office branches varies dramatically from report to report, but according to Johan Kruger who is in charge of Corporate Communications, “there are 1200 branches countrywide that are open and trading.”

This means that only 32 out of these 1200 branches are up to service standard.

When a branch doesn’t have backup power supply, they receive a penalty of 5% for all their invoices. This happens every month that branches don’t comply with the set out service standards.

There are, however, a dozen other standards that branches need to comply with and they will receive a penalty for each and every offence that takes place, which could lead to massive amounts of money being lost.

The DA has submitted a raft of questions to the Minister regarding this matter to try and find out exactly how much money is being wasted at SAPO branches, due to non-compliance.

This comes after it was reported that the SAPO will be cutting salaries by 40% and potentially retrench 6000 workers in an attempt to better its finances.

We suggest that they plug the flood of financial fines, as just one positive move, before they chop staff.

Many would argue that the best way to better an entities finances, is to eradicate wasteful and irregular expenditure, stop paying the CEO of a crumbling SOE R4 million per year and to provide actual good service to the general public, to boost public confidence.

Private enterprises are doing this business successfully all over the country. But then again, the ANC government haven’t been able to turn a single failing SOE around, so why would they start now after 29 years of disgracefully bad governance?

Regards

Dianne Kohler Barnard MP
DA Shadow Minister of Communications