Clive Simpkins
PALLO JORDAN is emphatic about not privatising Telkom, yet the Post Office — its sister megalith in our communications industry — is an example of monopolistic and bureaucratic business at its worst.
I wrote recently that the mail service was degenerating into a non-service. It’s actually got worse. I received no mail in my Sandton City post box for a week. When I asked why, some naive official was dumb enough to lead me backstage into the post box section to see if there was bundled mail above my post box. Letters were piled a metre-deep on the floor. Seeing my astonished expression he hastily said there had been “problems with sorters” and they had called in Johannesburg post office people to help.
The terrifying thought was that my business cash-flow for the month was lying somewhere in that tidal wave of mail. As it turned out, there was no bundle of mail for me; it had simply not yet been sorted. The mail has continued to trickle through, and a letter we mailed in Cape Town a week-and-a-half ago as an experiment has still not arrived in my box. It is nothing short of a disgrace that a public service — a not inexpensive one at that — should be so close to total collapse.
The Post Office has a neat marketing trick. Whenever a service fails, it starts a new one in competition to the old and charges a relative fortune for the privilege of using it. For example, to get a standard letter delivered in a day or two — it will seldom be delivered the next day — you will pay R10,60.
Want something delivered by the Speed Services courier service? The chances of it arriving on time are pretty remote. There are numerous instances where a letter handed over the Speed Services counter has failed to make a one-day delivery. Most post offices don’t even have dedicated, Speed-Services-only counters.
Now the vanishing-parcel rate has got out of hand. The Post Office has implemented a new bar-coded tagging system which will theoretically make parcel post safer, but you’re going to pay private service rates.
The whole set-up is a sham and a disgrace. Someone from the private sector should be brought in to shake up the system. The Post Office must be contributing more to business inefficiency and lack of productivity than any service, other than Telkom, in South Africa.
Telkom, at least, has the marvellous benefit of youthful, former Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) president Dr Brian Clarke as its new chief executive. He will no doubt get that ocean liner of an organisation to turn around, come hell or high water. So will another Brian Clarke please stand up and get the Post Office sorted out?
Coincidentally, the Post Office now uses Speed Services to deliver its own courier invoices! That should tell us something about the “regular” service.