Chess with 16.9 million Pawns

Fight or flight. These two behaviors represent the options humans have to choose from when facing a crisis. The luxury of settling on flight is wholly removed when the crisis involves the protection or interests of others who cannot defend or represent themselves. Human nature is then to stand toe to toe with whatever adversity bears down on us and fight to our very last breath. A lioness never leaves her cubs to the mercy of the hyenas. 

SASSA and the South African minister of social development seem to disagree.

South Africa is for all intents and purposes a welfare state. There are approximately 5 million taxpayers supporting 16.9 million grant recipients. And many more people who are not grant recipients rely on someone who does qualify for one to survive.

Now let me add that without the grant recipient, many people in South Africa would simply not be able to live. They would very literally die. The old, the indigent, the sick and the defenseless would suffer untold misery and meet a very grisly end.

If you believe that I am a dramatizing the issue, take as proof of concept the recent Esidimeni tragedy, a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The actions, or perhaps relative inaction of a government department in their response to a not too dissimilar impending calamity that looms large in the social grants debacle led to the deaths of over 100 mentally ill patients. Being that practically every life lost was avoidable and can be traced back to negligence (no matter what any future white-washed government investigation might find), it may be more pertinent to equate the incident to negligent mass murder.

Now multiply the numbers by one hundred and sixty nine thousand to truly appreciate the scale of the potential disaster that faces our beautiful people should they not receive their grants.

Let’s rewind quickly to 2012. An overseas based company, NET1, thinly veiled as a BEE compliant South African business called Cash Paymaster Services with black shareholders fronting the effort, won the lucrative SASSA tender to supply social grants to South Africa’s poor and aged.

Other firms competing for the contract appealed the decision in the constitutional court and won. The contract was illegal, the tender process had been flawed.

The Constitutional Court in its wisdom (I mean that sincerely), allowed CPS to continue servicing the contract, knowing full well the cancellation of the contract would mean the terrible suffering of South African citizens.

The Court was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Allowing an illegal contract to continue sets an unenviable precedent for future judgements, but the alternative is simply to ghastly to imagine. A compromise is a deal where nobody gets what they really want but both parties choose to accept a lesser outcome in lieu of losing it all.

Except CPS/NET1 came out on top. They  continued to reap large profits off of the illegally awarded contract. Some compromises still seem to have big winners and big losers.

There was a caveat to the courts’ ruling. The service provider CPS/NET1 was to stop providing the grant system on 1 April 2017. The constitutional court provided plenty of time for SASSA and the department of social development to right their wrongs, fix their mistakes and legitimize the situation.

Reverting back to the fight or flight mechanism to deal with the ongoing crisis, which would inevitably lead to either the department legally remedying the situation or breaking a constitutional court order, they chose to do – NOTHING. They walked away.

In the face of impending doom of their protectorate, where the full force of annihilation would surely smite down upon the recipients when grants were not paid on 1 April 2017, the minister and her department took to flight, leaving the weakest to fend for themselves.

Time will tell how manufactured the crisis has been. The poorest and most vulnerable 16.9 million citizens are now the pawns in a very lucrative game of chess.

The stakes are the highest they can be: a win for those trying to fight the corruption may mean that the grants don’t get paid when CPS get a bloody nose walk away, guts full and bank accounts bursting. It would be pyrrhic victory at very best, or tantamount to genocide when looking at the games’ future consequences.

A win for CPS/NET1 on the other hand as they ignore the courts ruling will result in a massive blow to the Constitution of South Africa and its ability to enforce its orders. Future judgements dealing with corruption will be ignored with impunity.

Joseph Heller wrote a book called Catch 22. The premise is that sometimes you are damned if you do, and you’re also damned if you don’t. So unless the Constitutional Court has the most incredible King Solomon moment and saves us from this impasse, we can all be assured that South Africa will have lost a little bit more of its post-apartheid constitutional soul. Catch 22.

South Africans are fighters. We know this, there is plenty of proof everywhere you look. They fight for justice and what’s right. Whether it’s the Afrikaners fighting the British 120 years ago for independence, or the people rising up to fight apartheid 40 years ago. Its emblazoned all over the faces of the poor in their daily struggles just to live, and on the sports fields when we take on the worlds very best, and win.

Which is in stark contrast to how SASSA and the minister have chosen to deal with those who needed them the most. A little backbone would have been nice.