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South African Social Security Agency (Sassa).
The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) says it would have saved about R500 million from the 70 000 people recently suspended from its grant payment system. The suspensions followed a grant review process aimed at improving the system’s reliability and integrity.
For the current financial year, SASSA planned to conduct 420 000 reviews. By the third quarter, it had notified just under 400 000 beneficiaries to present themselves. So far, about 240 000 of those have completed the review. Around 70 000 were suspended after failing to come forward.
SASSA says it undertakes the review process as part of its responsibility to enforce regulations and to ensure that every person receiving a social grant remains eligible based on their current circumstances. The process guarantees that the grants are paid only to those who deserve them.
“The only thing we want to request of the beneficiaries is that if you receive our message, you must present yourself to the SASSA offices. Please make sure that you do because what we normally do is send the message for the first time, and we do what we all have a delayed payment. We do it for the second time, we do what we call a delayed payment again. For the third time, we do, but for the fourth time, unfortunately, we suspend your grant, and if you still don’t want to come forward, we’ll be left with no option but to permanently stop it. So, there are two things as well that we’re requesting from the beneficiaries, one, just make sure that if you change your phone number, you let us know, just make sure that if your address changes, we’re also aware, because we’ll continue to communicate with a person who left the area a year ago,” says Paseka Letsatsi is the agency’s spokesperson.
Khayalam Nomzanga is one of the SASSA beneficiaries, whose grant was suspended this month. The 43-year-old received messages from the agency last year to come for a review. The delay caused the grant payment of the father of three to be suspended. Once the review process has been done, he will once again receive his children’s grants.
“I’m here to make a review for my three children, who are a boy and two girls. The first child was born in 2012, the second was born in 2015, and the third one was born in 2022. I decided to come and do the review because the grant payment stopped, and it needed me to come and do the review.”
HAPPENING NOW| SASSA Western Cape Region officials are on site at the JCPS Cluster Integrated Service Delivery Imbizo & Government Exhibition Day at Dulcie September Hall, Athlone, assisting community members with enquiries and providing access to social assistance services.… pic.twitter.com/zmdCdlnQqo
— SASSA (@OfficialSASSA) February 10, 2026
However, Letsatsi says not all beneficiaries are being reviewed.
“When you make an application, we would want you to give us the banking details where we would be able to pay the grant and in most cases a person will bring the details of bank x, which has got zero balance account only to find that they’ve got another bank account where the money goes and how do we find out, we find out because we’ve got a memorandum of agreement with the credit bureau. We also have a memorandum of agreement with the banks. So by just giving me your ID number, I’ll be able to punch it, and it will tell me that you’ve got three bank accounts. So I’ll be able to trace that there’s money flowing in in that particular account,” says Letsatsi.
Some public servants were also discovered on the grant payment system, amid the review process.
“In some instances we have some relationship with other sister departments, so if you work for a department x, we would take the file to the department and we have to have an arrangement, you must sign an acknowledgement of debt, so that you pay back the money. But in some instances we have a pure fraud taking place, we take the file to the South African police services. there are many people that we’ve arrested all over the country. Recently, others were arrested in Mpumalanga, others were arrested in Gauteng and all over the country, people who were trying to defraud SASSA in terms of identity theft and so forth. When we calculated this thing per financial year in terms of the 70 000 individuals which were identified, you’d find that we’d calculated we would have saved about R500 million,” says Letsatsi.
SASSA is urging all beneficiaries not to hide any information or defraud the government, as they need to make sure each amount is spent on the right beneficiaries.
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