Black Sash raises concerns over social grant card swaps
A human rights group said it is concerned about
discrepancies affecting social grant beneficiaries who still need to swap their
gold cards with the Postbank's black cards.
"Post Offices must be adequately resourced with staff, and there must be sufficient cash reserves to handle the surge in demand after the deadline," said Black Sash's Oliver Meth.
Gold cards are being phased out and will stop working on Thursday.
In a briefing on Monday, the Postbank revealed that 46% of beneficiaries had made the swap, with some 1.5 million people yet to make the switch.
Meth said beneficiaries are still experiencing challenges.
READ: Postbank: 46% of SASSA beneficiaries have new black cards
"Many beneficiaries have raised that their grants were not received in full or that some of their grants were not paid out onto the new card despite swapping.
"We've also found that in the field during our monitoring over this period since February, that there have been massive network glitches that always happen on grant payment dates, which have forced post bank to have to turn away many of the client and asked to return when the network is up and running.
"This has caused so much disadvantage to some of our beneficiaries."
Beneficiaries can swap their cards at selected branches of major retailers, such as Shoprite, Checkers, Usave, pick n Pay, Boxer, and Spar.
Dial *120*355# to check your nearest card replacement site.
Social grant beneficiaries must only produce an ID or temporary ID to do a card swap.
The cards are issued at no cost to beneficiaries.
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