News that the South African Post Office (SAPO) was planning to retrench 6000 staff members, while sobering and sad, comes as no surprise if one were frank.
The SAPO is delivering almost no services nationwide, and only the brave are willing to put their parcels or letters into their hands. So, in reality, what are the staff members doing?
Indeed, it must be asked, what are the directors and senior management doing on a day-to-day basis?
Clearly very little as the most recent financials delivered a loss of over R2.3-billion.
It is not hard to draw the conclusion that the bulk of this loss must be derived from (unproductive) staff costs
Have you been into a post office recently – any one of the few that remain open?
I have been into the one in the CBD that masquerades as a functioning post office to collect post that was destined for my post boxes in Sea Park and Port Shepstone.
The boxes in Sea Park fell apart about eight years ago and have never been repaired.
The Port Shepstone boxes were made redundant when the forced move was made about two years ago from the lower end of Aiken Street, under threat from the landlord to lock them out.
The current building looks no different than it did when they moved two years ago, if not worse.
Hundreds of offices have been closed across the length and breadth of the country as landlords, tired of chronic rental payment defaults, exercise their rights.
Where do they expect to place the staff from these offices?
Sadly, as former CEO Mark Barnes wrote in an article in Business Day last February, ‘Post Offices are a connection between certain services and people’.
Many, many people have now lost this connection in town and villages across the country.
Now we hear that Sassa is about to levy stringent financial penalties on SAPO for chronic late payment of social grants.
How they hope to recoup these penalties from a bankrupt entity is beyond me.
Amid all this chaos, the government is determined to proceed with the establishment of its Post Bank.
Quite how this will work remains to be seen as the raison d’etre for the creation of the Post Bank was the ready-made ‘branch network’ of post offices across the country, plus the availability of existing staff, which gave them scale and cost efficiencies.
For this reason, Barnes insisted that the mooted bank remain a subsidiary of the Post Office, rather than be hived off into a separate entity. Of course, as with most government decisions in this country, greed trumps common sense, with the largesse that comes with setting up a brand new SOE (boards, head offices, branding) too tempting to pass up.
The SAPO has surely got to be one of the ‘poster children’ for everything that is wrong with state-owned enterprises.
Vijay Naidoo is the CEO of the Port Shepstone Business Forum. He writes in his personal capacity. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.
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