Watch – Inside Sassa’s grant review: Queues, outages, suspensions

Daily Maverick’s Tamsin Metelerkamp visited Sassa offices across five provinces to look at the agency’s intensified grant review process, launched to detect fraud. The investigation found overburdened, understaffed offices, frequent system outages, and lawful beneficiaries facing suspended payments and repeated office visits to resolve them.

Reporting by: Tamsin Metelerkamp
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Anda Tolibadi
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative input by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Ian Wolstenholme

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Between 27 July and 12 August, photojournalist Leon Sadiki and I visited offices of the South African Social Security Agency across the country in an effort to better understand the challenges facing grant beneficiaries.

In Cape Town, I visited the SASSA offices in Bellville and Wynberg.

At Bellville, a 52-year-old mother said she had arrived at the site at 3.50am with her young daughter to find out why her Child Support Grant had been suspended. She said she had not received a notification from SASSA about the suspension. Reaching the site meant taking three taxis each way, costing her roughly R350 across three frustrating, unsuccessful trips.

At the Wynberg Sassa office, people in the queue reported that the system was still offline in the afternoon, after going down earlier that morning.

In Joburg, a 4am visit to the Eldorado Park SASSA office revealed a queue of people wrapped in blankets, many of whom were returning after failing to get assistance the previous week. Beneficiaries described the difficulty of waiting in queues only to be told to come back on different dates when the numbers were more than the office could manage.

In the Free State, we heard how frequent electricity outages in the Qwa Qwa area affected the Phuthaditjhaba SASSA office, halting services until power was restored.

In Polokwane, an afternoon visit to the Mankweng SASSA office coincided with an all-day system outage that had completely paralysed operations and stalled the line. A 42-year-old mother who had been waiting in the queue since 6.30am said she was there to reinstate three lapsed grants for her children: a Care Dependency Grant for her child living with a mental disability, and Child Support Grants for her 14-year-old and two-year-old.

She was notified that her grants were up for review in April. She travelled to the Sassa office and submitted supporting documentation for verification. However, despite her efforts to comply, all three grants were suspended in July.

Overall, what we saw was that various barriers continue to prevent beneficiaries from easily accessing Sassa’s services, including:

• Digital barriers, particularly in rural areas with poor infrastructure, network coverage and Wi-Fi access, that make it difficult to use online tools such as Sassa’s e-Life Certification Portal;

• Administrative barriers, in the form of long queues and understaffed offices;

• Unreliable Sassa systems, including its website, call centres and biometric system; and

• Geographic barriers, where beneficiaries face long distances and high transport costs to access Sassa sites.

Sassa beneficiaries typically have 30 days to respond to a formal review notice, sent via SMS, though Sassa has said that beneficiaries are given up to 90 days to complete the review before a grant lapses. The agency noted that one of the main challenges in communicating review notices was that beneficiary contact information was not always up to date.

While SASSA acknowledged that some beneficiaries had experienced delays during the review process, it said it continued to implement measures aimed at improving service delivery, including digital initiatives to improve the efficiency of the review and life certification processes, and reduce “unnecessary visits to local offices”.

Asked about the system outages at its offices, Sassa said it relied on multiple integrated systems to process grant applications and reviews, and that intermittent technical disruptions “may occasionally affect service delivery”. It added that it worked closely with its ICT partners and service providers to identify root causes and restore services promptly. DM