Is the SA Post Office really ready to handle social grants?
- Frederik Herholdt
- Mar 21, 2018
- 2 min read
The South African Post Office's online presence seems to be "not reachable" from time to time.
Trying to access the SA Post Office website results in a long loading process, only to find that the domain is unreachable. The error message is usually something like: "This site can’t be reached www.postoffice.co.za took too long to respond.", or "server IP address could not be found”
Update 23 March 2018: SA Post Office website finally back.
Want to report the issue? That will also not work since emails to the postoffice.co.za domain are bouncing, and producing a “mail delivery failed” error.
When trying to send an email to SA Post Office staff you will get this error message:
Final-Recipient: rfc822;[Address redacted]@postoffice.co.za Status: 5.0.0 Diagnostic-Code: smtp; Unrouteable address
It seems like this is something normal to experience with the SA Post Office as it follows recent reports that the Post Office website was down for several days. Some customers have aslo reported that calls to the company’s call centre were unanswered.
Why is postoffice.co.za down?
Numerous reports have found that the websites downtime is due to unpaid domain fees. According to these reports an amount of R125.40 was invoiced on 1 February 2018, and was listed as “not paid” at the time of writing. The invoice was sent to domainmaster@postoffice.co.za.
Trying to call IT or Admin at the Post Office results in an automated message stating that the numbers have been changed, and that the new numbers were not available.
SA Post Office to handle Social Grants?
Minister of Telecommunications Siyabonga Cwele believes the SA Post Office “has met its obligations in readiness for its role in the electronic payment option of social grants”.
“These include card productions and plans to swap existing cards with new cards,” stated the department.
Cwele said the Post Office will be able to “play its role in the payment of social grants, even though it does not have a banking licence”.
Post Office CEO Barnes told Parliament that SASSA will instead use its Paymaster General account at the SA Reserve Bank to facilitate transfers into the Special Disbursement Account (SDA) via Bankserv.
“The SDA product has been created in Postbank’s core banking system and is ready. Individual accounts will be opened during on-boarding of new beneficiaries commencing 3 April 2018,” said Barnes.
In theory this may sound good, the only problem is that if the Post Office cannot keep track of admin as small as paying domain fees, how will they keep up with paying Social Grants?
Posted 21 March 2018 | Frederik Herholdt
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