New dog up to old tricks

The well-worn adage that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks has returned to bite social grant applicants in KwaZulu-Natal — and sparked a public spat between provincial Social Welfare Minister Meshack Radebe and the South African Social Services Agency (Sassa).

Sassa is the national agency entrusted with improving access to, and the delivery of, social grants and pensions.

Radebe fired two angry broadsides at Sassa this week, threatening to remove and redeploy staff if it did not shape up and stop playing ‘political games”.

This followed sit-ins by about 100 disgruntled grant and pension applicants at his Pietermaritzburg office last week, complaining that their approaches to the city’s regional Sassa office had proved fruitless.

The complaints were familiar: staff arrogance and ill-treatment of members of the public, and the snail’s-pace processing of applications. There were claims that only 20 grant and pension applications were being processed a day.

Addressing Nkandla residents at the launch of a R10-million one-stop social development centre on Tuesday, Radebe warned that ‘we can’t let politics sabotage delivery — Sassa is either toeing the line in KwaZulu-Natal or it will be removed”.

On Monday, he chided staff at Sassa’s Pietermaritzburg office for being ‘arrogant”. He then threatened to remove managers and redeploy problem staff.

Staff responded that they were only answerable to their CEO, Fezile Makiwane.

Radebe told the Mail & Guardian this indicated a ‘misunderstanding among Sassa staff” as ‘the provincial legislature has an oversight role to play to ensure that service delivery happens”.

He said he would meet Makiwane to clarify the issue.

Sassa, a Schedule 3A public entity, was set up in April last year. Its CEO answers directly to national Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya.

According to a Black Sash submission to Parliament’s social development committee, the agency will cost tax­payers R4,1-billion to run this year.

Radebe said he found the slow processing of documents and the language used by staff to address applicants, especially the aged, ‘unacceptable”. Sassa spokesperson Paseka Letsatsi said he could not say whether staff had used unacceptable language, as an investigation was under way.

Letsatsi said that reports that only 20 applications were being processed a day in Pietermaritzburg were erroneous: ‘On the week of March 5 to 9 this year, the office processed 281 applications,” he said. That works out at under 60 a day.

Stressing that the Pietermaritzburg office was severely understaffed with ‘only 26 staff members working and 28 posts vacant” he said Sassa was undertaking a ‘massive [nation-wide] recruitment drive”.

Last year Judge Jan Combrink, frustrated by the burden on the judicial system imposed by thousands of litigation cases against the KwaZulu-Natal social welfare department, issued a special costs order against former provincial minister Nyanga Ngubane.

According to the Sassa strategic plan for 2007 to 2010, the body has inherited 6000 grant administration staff from national and provincial departments, while a further 300 were recruited. Most of the new recruits are based at the Sassa head office in Pretoria or one of its nine regional offices, with low-level staff relatively unchanged.

Letsatsi denied that shifting of human resources problems from the department of social welfare to the new body was proving a stumbling block to the smooth running of Sassa.