Johannesburg - South African Social Development Minister
Bathabile Dlamini bypassed officials at the country’s welfare department and
helped create a crisis that would ensure that Net1 UEPS Technologies would
continue to distribute payments on behalf of the government, her former director-general
said.
The minister created a parallel structure where so-called
work streams headed by officials other than executives at the department
advised her on how to comply with a 2014 Constitutional Court Order that a new
distributor be found after Net1’s contract was declared invalid, former
Director-General Zane Dangor said in a court affidavit. On March 17 the court
ordered Net1’s Cash Paymaster Services unit, whose contract expired at the end
of March, to continue making the payments for another year because the ministry
hadn’t come up with an alternative.
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“The parallel decision-making structures in the form of
the work streams may have been deliberate to ensure a continued relationship
with CPS under conditions favourable to CPS, through a self-created emergency,”
he said. The affidavit was filed in response to a submission by the minister
that she was not liable to personally pay legal costs because the welfare
department and its CEO, Thokozani Magwaza, had been to
blame for the crisis.
The court made its March ruling after human rights group
The Black Sash Trust applied to it with the aim of ensuring grants were paid
legally to more than 17 million people after the end of March and that any
relationship between the welfare department and the Net1 unit would be
supervised by the court.
Dangor included a copy of his March 3 resignation letter
in which he said he had been accused of racism and sexism by the minister by
mobile phone text message and had been belittled by her in front of staff at
the welfare department.
Dlamini has fired her special adviser, the
Johannesburg-based Daily Maverick news website reported on Tuesday.