EDITORIAL: Forget diamonds, would you trust the Post Office with a stamp?

It’s one of the great stories of the golden years of South African mining. In January 1905, the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found was discovered at the Premier Mine in Cullinan, near Pretoria. It weighed 3,106 carats. 

If you’d watched King Charles’s coronation at Westminster Abbey at the weekend, you’d have seen it, because more than a century ago it was sliced up and big parts of it inserted into the sovereign’s sceptre and into the imperial crown, respectively carried and worn by Charles on his big day. 

Yet the process of getting it to London in the first place was full of intrigue. Back in 1905, detectives were assigned to guard a box on board a steamship to the UK, which was supposedly carrying the diamond. Only, it was a decoy — and the mining company had simply posted the diamond to the UK in a plain box, as registered mail from the Joburg post office.

Two years later, in 1907, the Transvaal Colony under the leadership of Louis Botha paid £150,000 to Premier Mining for the diamond, so that it could present it to King Edward VII as an expression of “loyalty and appreciation”.

It’s a tale which the Post Office cites proudly, lauding the fact that the diamond “made it safely”, and adding: “Surely this was one of the biggest risks ever taken by the Post Office.”

It’s certainly not a risk anyone would dare take today. The truth is, with just 68% of post actually arriving at its destination, according to the Post Office’s annual report, South Africans ought to think twice before posting anything more meaningful than junk mail.

Last week, communications minister Mondli Gungubele told parliament that a new “approach” will be tabled in the next few days to save the Post Office from liquidation and ensure “business continuity”.

“We are working on the best possible solution and the primary purpose is to make sure the Post Office doesn’t disappear. So the … option we are going to take will be of such a nature that creditors remain confident of the future of the entity,” he said. Liquidation, he added, is “not an attractive option”.

So where is this plan? As the FM’s cover story last week reported, the Post Office is such a wreck that keeping it on life support without a sound revival plan will only suck up funds needed elsewhere, and do little to lubricate the economy. If its sole purpose is to exist as an office from which to hand out social grants, there are better — and more dignified — options available. 

Until now, the solutions touted appear dismal. Options such as forcing government departments to use the Post Office, or preventing private companies from carrying parcels smaller than 1kg, will only make the delivery of post that much less reliable.

As the DA’s Tsholofelo Bodlani said in parliament last week, a partial privatisation of the Post Office “could have brought in investment and better management processes”, but at this point, keeping it open is “just irresponsible”.

Bodlani’s DA colleague, Natasha Mazzone, says the Post Office should be “urgently looking at ways to outsource or privatise” parts of the service, while realigning itself for the digital age.

In the absence of such a plan, the R2.4bn bailout of the Post Office is akin to burning that money. Needless to say, it’s a cost South Africa can’t afford — we have no more diamonds to lose.