SASSA APPLICATIONS: Online status check is live

South African Social Security Agency: those who qualify for the R350 relief grant will be paid by the end of the month.

5 million people applied for the grant, and so far 75,000 applications have been processed and of these, 39,000 have qualified. “We are a 100% sure that by Friday beneficiaries would have been paid because it is the last working day.

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Let me just clarify and ally people’s fears that on Friday we would have processed that category of beneficiaries,” said Sassa spokesperson Paseka Letsatsi.

The R350 monthly grant is meant to help the jobless who don’t get any other form of government relief to cope with the lockdown.

Sassa acknowledges that the WhatsApp system for applications was flooded with unprecedented numbers of applications per hour, which it struggled to cope with but had to move to other platforms like their website and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD).

We received just under 5 million applications for this new grant and we had to compare information provided by applicants with other government and private databases to ensure that people with an income and recipients of other social grants are not included in these applications. In addition, we had to remove duplicated and incomplete applications which account for nearly 50% of all applications received.

Up to now, we have eliminated a number of undeserving applicants and this has saved the fiscus close to R14 million which could have sky-rocketed to over R81 million by October. As soon as the vetting of applications is completed, the payments will start rolling in at an even faster pace.

The mammoth task of ensuring that the correct and deserving individuals are paid has started in earnest. This process involved intense negotiations with institutions in the value chain and this, unfortunately, accounted for the delays that were encountered.