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Social Development postpones media briefing on grants plan

Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini. Picture: VATHISWA REUSELO
Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini. Picture: VATHISWA REUSELO

The Department of Social Development has postponed a media briefing into the social grant payments to South Africans from April as pressure grows for it to reveal a workable plan.

It was postponed until further notice and comes after the Social Development minister Bathabile Dlamini announced during a social cluster media briefing on Tuesday that the briefing was due to be held on Wednesday.

The department is reassuring social grant beneficiaries that their grants will be paid as usual from April 1 this year after their contract with Cash Paymaster Services CPS expires at the end of March.

The cancellation of the press conferences also followed the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) withdrawing an application to the Constitutional Court on Wednesday in which it intended asking the cout to extend a social grants distribution contract with CPS which it declared invalid in 2014.

Sassa had lodged an urgent application on Tuesday.

In its now-withdrawn papers‚ Sassa admitted it did not have the capacity to distribute the social grants and said grant payments would be in jeopardy come April 1 if the court turned down its application. The agency also conceded that its efforts to petition the Treasury for a condonation had fallen flat.

Sassa has also ruled out all other options presented to it as alternatives to distribute the social grants‚ including using ithe country’s major banks‚ and insists that only a CPS contract extension will suffice.

On Tuesday  Sassa representatives admitted before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in Parliament that they had no plan to distribute almost 18-million social grants to over 11-million beneficiaries other than to extend CPS’s contract.

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