The post office is as useful as a fax

Remember when we used to send each other faxes? Cover pages and all. That was a wild time. You know what we don’t do anymore? Send faxes. Maybe one day, as somebody was bragging to their kid about how tech-savvy they are by sending a fax to email, their kid just asked, “Why not just send an email?”. It was probably at about that time that the penny dropped and we realised we probably don’t need fax anymore.

In much the same way we need less asbestos because we’ve stopped making fire suits out of the stuff and need fewer parking lots because everybody is ride-sharing. If something is too antiquated for purpose, why keep funding it?

Another bailout for the post office?

A couple of billions to bail out the SA Post Office (Sapo)… again? Why? So that I can send post slower than a courier and spend the next three Sundays in church praying that it will get there? So that I can find out that there’s no paper to print my car’s registration disk and may as well get it on my banking app and have it delivered? So that I can wait in a queue to pay fines, when the system is finally up, because I don’t like to use the internet?

Go through the services of the post office and other than manufacturing stamps, you won’t find another service that you can’t get elsewhere…and better. Maybe it’s more expensive but you know what it won’t be? In need of billions in bailout money. Seriously, whoever is going to lead the charge of Sapo for the next while must start by making a case for why the country needs it.

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Private sector does it better

There’s a reason why all these alternatives exist, and at premium pricing; even with the state’s backing, Sapo couldn’t deliver. That tells you one of two things. Either Sapo got too big to be effective or it’s just too terribly run and left the door open for the private sector to do it better. Whatever narrative you take, you’ve got to ask why it’s worth keeping.

If it’s for the jobs, it hasn’t done a great job on that front either. From a workforce of 23 000 to 10 000 and dropping, it’s not like the remaining jobs are that secure. Even if they were, it seems cheaper to just give them money than keep bailing out the post office. I know that the state loves it some government works programmes that create jobs. Wouldn’t it be marvellous though if they realised how many more jobs they could create if their works programmes actually worked?

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Where something isn’t working and we can access most services at our local grocery store and the rest at the courier next door, do we really need to keep funding it?

It’s not even an embarrassing admission of failure. Countries around the world have been reviewing their postal services, with the UK also in serious trouble. What would be embarrassing is attempting to keep it going. Yet that’s what we seem to be insistent on doing.

Even desperately creative attempts to float the post office and give it legitimacy couldn’t make an impact. Remember when the post office would issue social grants? Remember how that only lasted some six years before they realised what a mistake it was?

Perhaps now would be an ideal time to realise what a mistake it would be to keep the post office on life support, in ICU, on a diesel generator that’s broken down, with a mistaken shipment of petrol coming to run it.

It isn’t often that one looks at a state entity and thinks, “meh, we don’t really need this thing”. With the post office, however, it’s almost impossible not to think that.

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