Not everyone should be expected to be paid today. Applications for this SRD grant opened on August 6 and is set to benefit unemployed citizens. Most of the beneficiaries are those who lost their jobs due to Covid-19. By August 18, SASSA had received 8 931 375 applications from all nine provinces, 41% of whom were from males and 59% being female applicants.
Qualifying applicants will receive their payments through direct deposits into their bank accounts, mobile money transfers through cell phones and through the South African Post Office (SAPO). Sassa said to avoid over-crowding at post offices during payment of approved recipients, a joint strategy was put in place by SASSA and SAPO. They said the last three digits of approved beneficiaries’ identity numbers will be used for payment collection on a specific day of the week.
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“This will help minimize the spread of the Covid-19 infections and allowing for social distancing on paydays. Most importantly, if a person has not received an SMS from SASSA notifying them that the grant is available for collection, it means the grant is not available yet. In other words, every approved applicant must first wait for an SMS confirming that the grant is available before approaching the post office.”
Applicants are advised to avoid going to the post office to just check if by any chance the grant is available. The grant will not be available if it is not the day of the week when SAPO uses the last three digits of their ID number to pay.
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“The function for all applicants to start checking their status on the system will be available later this week. This function has not been available, because SASSA has kept the channels open to cope with the high number of applications being received. Please bear with us for any inconvenience this might have caused.”
SAPO will not pay the R350 grant during public holidays, weekends and when normal monthly social grants payments take place. Applicants are advised to only visit the post office to collect their grant if they have received a payment notification SMS.
