Slow progress in migrating grant beneficiaries from Sassa gold to Postbank black cards

The rural parts of the Western Cape are among the areas most delayed in the Postbank and the South African Social Security Agency’s (Sassa) card replacement process. This was revealed during a joint press briefing by the Postbank and Sassa on Monday. Postbank processes social grants for over 12-million beneficiaries, but only the 2.6-million who actually bank with Postbank are expected to replace their Sassa ‘gold’ cards with new ‘black’ cards by the 20 March 2025 deadline. The migration to new cards is part of the move by Postbank to modernise and secure the grant payment system, following past disruptions caused by fraud, card cloning, and system failures.

Addressing the media in Tshwane earlier today, the Postbank CEO, Nikki Mbengashe told reporters that beneficiaries who miss the deadline won’t lose access to their grants. They will still be able to collect their grants using their ID documents through the South African Post Office, which has more than 500 branches nationwide. Over 1.1-million social grant beneficiaries were successfully migrated from the Sassa gold card to the “new improved and more compliant Postbank black cards”, Mbengashe said.

In February, Elitsha reported concerns of long queues, inadequate card replacement sites and a lack of capacity to assist beneficiaries at the replacement sites. “We have committed to increase sites and we have increased sites but there are regions where there are challenges with sites, one of them being the Western Cape. The challenge with the Western Cape is that we are struggling to get resources to man the sites. But, we do have the sites,” said Mbengashe.

Postbank’s chief operating officer, Eurekha Singh said that they have deployed resources from other regions to the Western Cape and have asked for additional funds from the provincial department of social development to assist. The Western Cape MEC for social development, Jaco Londt confirmed that earlier this month they made a commitment to assist with communication but that the information was not forthcoming from Postbank. “Since that meeting it became a difficult task to get the necessary information from Postbank so we could assist in the manner we had agreed to in the 3 March meeting.”

Postbank, according to Singh, has 297,000 beneficiaries registered in the Western Cape and they have processed over 37% of that number.

The gold Sassa cards will stop working on Friday this week and grant beneficiaries are urged to replace theirs with Postbank’s black card.

Despite the claims by Postbank about the steady progress that they have made, Black Sash said that the replacement process continues to be “plagued by several challenges which Black Sash and [its] partners have witnessed first hand on the ground”. The lobby group states that communication on replacement sites, non-payment on the Sassa gold cards and massive network glitches on grant paydays continue to cause problems.

Grant beneficiaries who were in the process of replacing their gold cards in Khayelitsha told the Minister of Social Development, Nokuzola Tolashe that the card renewal system has proven to be a costly exercise marred by long queues because of poor planning. Tolashe visited Shoprite stores in Grabouw, Bellville and Khayelitsha to ensure that there were enough people to help the beneficiaries to change their cards.

With the deadline for the adoption of the black card a few days away, Postbank will continue to assist grant beneficiaries to replace their cards until the end of June. “20 March 2025 is not a cut-off date for when Postbank stops replacing Sassa gold cards. Postbank will continue replacing Sassa gold cards with new Postbank black cards in all its card replacement sites even after this date,” said Mbengashe.