On 29 November, the SA Post Office (SAPO) announced it had cleared the backlog in its depots that affected the delivery of items to customers.

“Domestic deliveries have been normalised to fall within regulated standards in the past week and these services are back to predictable daily conveyances to their destinations,” it said.

SA Post Office CEO Mark Barnes praised the tireless work done to resolve the factors causing the backlog.

“It is pleasing to report that these issues have now been addressed and the backlog is resolved,” Barnes said.

What MyBroadband’s real-world test says

Over the last 4 months MyBroadband ran an experiment to test the SA Post Office’s delivery times.

For the test, MyBroadband members sent letters from across South Africa to the Lyttelton Post Office, and we tracked how long these letters took to arrive.

The results showed that the SA Post Office failed to deliver any of the “ordinary mail” letters within five days, as required by its licence conditions.

In fact, many of the letters took weeks to deliver instead of the days which the Post Office claims on its website.

The SA Post Office’s claim to have cleared its backlog also needs further scrutiny, as two of the letters which were sent to MyBroadband have still not been delivered.

This means that either the backlog has not been cleared, or that the two letters were lost

The graphic below provides an overview of the results of MyBroadband’s Post Office Test.

Post Office’s email claims

MyBroadband asked the SA Post Office for comment on its poor service levels, but it failed to respond to any of the queries – some from months ago.

Barnes recently told Radio 702 that “every email that gets sent to me or the business gets followed up on. Every single email”.

This claim by Barnes is also questionable, as MyBroadband sent multiple emails to his address over the last few months without any response.

Here are the emails which were sent to Barnes and the SA Post Office media team, and the results from these emails.

22 March 2018 – No response

21 May 2018 – No response

1 August 2018 – No response

14 August 2018 – No response

29 November 2018 – No response

MyBroadband asked the SA Post Office for comment regarding its latest statements and the delivery tests, but there was no feedback by the time of publication.