Make no mistake, the Sassa saga is far from over, despite rumours that a deal has been reached… It’s a political football, or if you are a food lover, the proverbial hot potato of this month’s Zuma Games, with corruption once again rearing its ugly head.
Let’s look at the facts… I know this could be a long and laborious topic, but I promise I will keep it simple.
The Constitutional Court, in its wisdom, ruled that the contract between CPS and Sassa in 2014 was invalid.
The South African Social Security Agency, better known as Sassa – who reports to the Ministry of Social Development and its leadership, namely Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini – had two years to fix the issue.
Now Sassa is set to sign a new contract with CPS to continue with their services, despite the 2014 Constitutional Court finding that its appointment had been invalid. “Why?” you may ask.
Also read: Sassa pension and disability grant crisis hits Ladysmith pensioners hard
The answer to that would take up volumes, but basically amounts to a whole host of corrupt practices from loaning money to grant recipients and other less-than-scrupulous acts all involving millions of rands of taxpayers’ money.
Who do Sassa help?
The types of grants under the control of Sassa include all social assistance provided in the form of:
- grants for older persons;
- disability grants;
- war veterans’ grants;
- care dependency grants;
- foster child grants;
- child support grants;
- grants-in-aid;
- Social Relief of Distress.
Obviously, that is a lot of people – 17 million, more or less. Now when the highest court in the land tells you to do something, well, you would assume people and especially government officials would jump to it…
As we have seen in many cases even loosely linked to the Zuma Games, a name I like to give to the current ANC succession battle, ignoring the Constitutional Court these days is de jure.
So everyone holds their collective breath waiting for March 31 and CPS (who can only be described as Dlamini’s minions) to come to the rescue of pensioners after the government failed to remove them timeously, thus creating the need to actually have CPS save us… Oh, the irony!
Which begs the question: If Parliament is not in charge and Zuma is not in charge, who is the de facto government?
Do we even have one? It clearly is not Luthuli House. So if one hazards a guess, it must be a Kingdom of Ministers each governing their own fiefdoms as they see fit. Reports of impending state capture have therefore been greatly exaggerated as, frankly, there is nothing left to capture!
