No money in Sassa cards for this month!

IS Sassa another crisis waiting to happen?

Everybody hopes not.

The question arises because there seems to be no certainty about the switch from the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) gold cards to Postbank black cards. Yet, the deadline is on 20 March.

Despite the Postbank assuring Mzansi that all beneficiaries will continue to receive their grants after the deadline, Social Development Minister Sisisi Tolashe has lashed out at the state-owned bank saying it has no coherent plan for the crisis surrounding the replacement of cards.

Tolashe expressed her frustrations after a recent visit to Postbank offices in Grabouw and Paarl in the Western Cape.

“Even around town, they are so scattered. If not, their tellers have no clue of what they are doing. If they do, their system provides 12 cards in four hours,” the minister said.

She described the issue as nothing short of a crisis.

“It’s a crisis because, as we indicated in our last meeting, there seems to be no plan,” Tolashe said.

The bank had promised to open as many sites as possible to help beneficiaries when the process started to migrate six months ago.

Sassa spokesman Paseka Letsatsi told SAfm on Friday, 28 February that he wasn’t sure if the deadline will be met.

“I’m very anxious, I must confess,” he said.

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Letsatsi, however, assured Mzansi that grant recipients will get their money in March, but they won’t receive it in April if they haven’t changed their cards.

“But the money will be in their accounts. They’ll only be able to get it at the Post Office. We don’t want people to go there because they will be squashed. They (Postbank) have also introduced something called cashless withdrawal that works like cash send or e-wallet,” said Letsatsi.

The chairwoman of the Portfolio Committee on Communication and Digital Technologies, Khusela Sangoni Diko, said Postbank has made an undertaking that they’ll continue to swap gold cards for Postbank black cards until the last person has been assisted.