Johannesburg - Communications Minister Faith Muthambi has revealed in Parliament that cabinet will today appoint the new board of the SA Post Office (Sapo), nine months after the previous board quit.
Muthambi, who was briefing joint committees of Parliament on digital migration yesterday, also came to the defence of Sapo, saying it has turned the corner.
But MPs were not impressed and said it was losing millions of rands a month and was facing a bleak future.
Muthambi said the situation was better than it was before, with systems in place.
New board
The appointment of the new board by the cabinet comes after Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Siyabonga Cwele extended the contract of Sapo administrator Simo Lushaba.
Recently, Cwele extended Lushaba’s contract until the end of next month when the new board takes over.
DA MPs Cameron MacKenzie and Marian Shinn questioned Sapo’s capacity to deliver on its DTT (digital terrestrial television) commitments. The post office has been tasked to deliver thousands of decoders to millions of households. Mackenzie went further to suggest that Sapo’s finances were so bad that it was in a state of ungovernability.
He said Sapo was losing R100 million a month due to poor financial management, adding that the R1 billion guarantee it obtained from the government would not be able to do what is required as it would be sucked into the company’s vicious cycle of poor financial management.
Sapo’s acting chief executive Mlu Mathonsi said Sapo was a going concern and everything had not come to a standstill. On Saturday he had signed funding papers to raise funds in the capital markets to enable the turnaround of the organisation.
Muthambi reminded MacKenzie that during the State of the Nation address President Jacob Zuma announced intervention measures for Sapo. These included the approval and implementation of the turnaround plan, she said.
In this regard a lot of progress had been made, the minister said. “We are going to finalise the appointment of the South African Post Office board tomorrow (today) as cabinet,” she said.
“There is progress in Sapo, and they will have capacity to deliver on this project.”
Muthambi said that the government was ready to switch to DTT by December after a postponement in June.
South Africa was still within the deadline to complete the switch.
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