The South African Social Services Agency (SASSA) is the agency that is given the mandate to provide grants services by the South African government. The agency has a lot of offices around the country and has been doing a good job before the outbreak of the coronavirus.
In the beginning of May, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that all unemployed people in South Africa who are unemployed including foreign nationals will receive a social distress grant for the next six months which will come to an end in October with an exception of renewal for some of the unemployed people.
The SASSA agency has been given the role to provide the grant payment to all unemployed people in the country by government as they have been offering similar services. All other government provided grants are provided to South Africans by the SASSA agency and now they are facing a difficult time of their office in the presidency.
The Social Distress Grant was supposed to have started being paid to the people on the 15th of May 2020 but that did not happen as the agency is encountering a number of problems before they could make payments to the public. The agency has failed the poor people of South Africa during lockdown as a lot of people are not getting any source of employment during this difficult time of their lives.
South Africans are still waiting for the explanation from the government and SASSA as to why they are still not yet paid or responded to regarding the grant as they were promised less than 3 days payment after completing application process as now they have gone more than 9 days without any response from SASSA and the government.
It seems there are a number of problems as SASSA are unable to check if all applicants are not receiving any form of grant or payment from government. It has been reported that the government systems are not linked so that it can be done automatically. There are a number of problem with regard to linking government systems.
