Watching the standing committee on public accounts session in Parliament with the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) and the South African Post Office (Sapo) brought a couple of points to mind. First, nothing was done for seven months but progress was made in one day when Sassa was ordered to do so by the committee. This points to one cause for the debacle — a lack of political will. For that we can only look to the responsible minister, Bathabile Dlamini, but let’s focus on solving the problem first. There are only 100 working days left until the Constitutional Court deadline. Sassa will not make the deadline, of that I am certain. The systems may be simple, as Sapo’s Mark Barnes has stated, but the devil lies in the logistics and that is what will take time. Given the high likelihood of failure, the strategic national importance of the project, the devastating consequences that will come with failure and the fact that the same people who failed to succeed in the past are...
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