EDITOR – Whether this SASSA pension crisis could be one of the triggers that begins this era’s financial reboot in South Africa, remains to be seen.
It may help however, to put things into an academic perspective: the Konrad Adenauer Institute published a Manual of Investigative journalism between 2006 and 2009 now in use throughout Southern Africa and to which I contributed Chapter Six, a case study devoted to an in-depth analysis of the SA Postal System’s Mzansi Credit Transfer system which allows South Africa’s poorest of the poor to safely transfer funds from urban areas to families in rural areas.
I say ‘safely’ in view of the Carte Blanche video exposé in 2012 of four Post Office employees rifling mail and distributing any valuables among themselves.
Mzansi is supported by most SA banks and promises ‘no bank charges’.
The Adenauer study contradicted this claim by pointing out the fact that the banks call their Mzansi bank charges ‘transfer charges’, and make them so expensive they take over six billion Rand a year from SA’s lowest wage earners.
Several members of the SA banking system have now been charged convicted and ‘fined’ for collusion in the manipulation of currency exchange rates.
I would like to see what part of those banks’ income will actually be fined, if at all.
Hopefully the three hundred years of Capitalism have reached their end, and we will no longer have to pay banks to lend them our money in ‘deposit charges’.
Tom Dennen
Durban
