In April next year, the Department of Social Development is due to take over the distribution of crucial social grants to around 17-million of South Africa’s poorest citizens, with payouts totalling R10-billion per month. But there are warnings that the department is unprepared and does not have the infrastructure in place to oversee this vital lifeline to the poor. And if you think the #FeesMustFall violence is bad, a much greater catastrophe looms if Minister Bathabile Dlamini does not pull finger soon. By MARIANNE THAMM.

The country is so consumed at present by what appears to be President Jacob Zuma’s desperate last-ditch effort at cornering his political enemies while he himself slithers out of a legal quagmire, that a warning issued by the Democratic Alliance’s Bridget Masango, the party’s Shadow Minister of Social Development, that Minister Bathabile Dlamini’s department is unprepared for the distribution of R10-billion in social grants next year, went unnoticed.

In a press statement issued on Monday 10 October, Masango said that the DA “has reliably established that, despite the repeated assurances from Social Development Minister, Bathabile Dlamini, that her department and the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) will take over the distribution of social grants to millions of South Africans from April next year, they are in fact completely unprepared to take on this massive task when that day arrives, owing to the department not having the infrastructure to discharge this mandate itself.”

Masango challenged Dlamini as well as acting CEO of Sassa, Raphaahle Ramokgopa, to appear before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Social Development “as a matter of great urgency to explain in detail what the real state of play is, to own up that they are unable to take on this mammoth undertaking and to tell us what contingency plans they have made in order to avoid a national social crisis.”

Dlamini has also been challenged to table a detailed project plan including time lines and costs to satisfy Parliament that her department would be able to meet the April 1 deadline.

The DA, said Masango, had received information from “well-placed sources” who have warned that there would be far-reaching ramifications for millions of South Africans who rely on the efficient distribution of social grants for their survival.

A further question, she said, was whether Sassa intended to extend the existing contract with Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) which had been ruled invalid by the Constitutional court in 2014. A division of CPS, Net1, had won the Sassa tender to distribute grant payments in 2012. The ConCourt ordered Sassa to reissue the tender by October 2015 as it had been “irregular”.

Sassa called for tenders but opted instead to extend the CPS contract until March 2017, offering that other tender bids “were non-responsive in mandatory administrative functionality”.

In November 2015 Sassa reported to the Constitutional Court that the department would be ready to take over the payment of grants from CPS from April 1, 2017.

This means that millions of cards and distribution points for payouts will have to be issued, verified and checked, a mammoth task.

April is seven months away.

“In a somewhat obfuscatory manner, the Minister has referred to ‘work streams’ allocated to the takeover task, insisting, that ‘we will take all necessary measures to ensure the non-disruption of social grants payments’. However, the DA has learnt that, far from these assurances, Sassa is hopelessly unprepared for the task,” said Masango.

She added that she did not feel that the fate of 17-million poor people should be left in the minister’s hands.

“We also believe the government has been lying consistently about one of the most serious issues in the country and that there has possibly been a cover-up of corrupt dealings. At worst, what we are witnessing is a dangerous incompetence and a looming social crisis, or, at best, a strategy to create an emergency to keep CPS.”

Questions by Daily Maverick to the minister’s office with regard to the department’s preparations to take over the distribution of grants went unacknowledged and unanswered over a period of 48 hours. DM

Photo: Retired Noluzile Mbeki poses in the tiny coastal town of Coffee Bay, South Africa, 05 November 2014. EPA/KIM LUDBROOK