JOHANNESBURG - The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) on Wednesday welcomed the instruction from Scopa that forced Sassa and Sapo to finalise a deal for the distribution of grants to over 17 million South Africans.
Portfolio Manager of Social Services and Special Projects at Outa Dominique Msibi said: “Outa believes that Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini continuously threaten the most vulnerable people in the country’s ability to put food on the table in her continued efforts to derail the process by enabling Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to be the only viable option to distribute the social grants”.
“This process should not include companies like CPS and Net1 who have been milking the South African economy of millions of rand in unwarranted service charges,” Msibi said.
Msibi said the intergovernmental partnership between Sassa and Sapo would save the state significant amounts of money which have so far been spent wastefully to maintain a contract with CPS.
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“This contract was ruled by the Constitutional Court to be irregular last year already. SCOPA ensured that this matter moved forward swiftly and that Minister Bathabile Dlamini could no longer hide behind her department’s officials or evade her oversight responsibility. We now want to see the Minister be held accountable for her misconduct.”
Msibi said that there was still a lot of wrongs in the management of the Department and that there is still the reality of grant recipients who lose money they can ill afford, due to unauthorized deductions.
“We hope that Sapo, together with Sassa, will clean up the grant recipient data base and block whatever mechanism has so far been used to access recipients’ accounts,” Msibi added.