UPDATE ON THIS VIDEO RECEIVED TODAY:
I hope that you are ok. Well here I am once again sitting at the Goodwood post office. I got here at 4.30am and stood in the cold and rain until they finally opened at 8am. I am now 6th in the queue. Then people that had to go to the sassa offices yesterday because their fingerprints did not work arrived…10 of them and they got preference. Ñow I am 16th in the queue. It is taking about 1 hour to process each of them. So although I got here early I don't stand a chance of being seen today…and to make things worse 2 hour load shedding started at 8am. Then the sassa link is extremely slow due to so many computers country wide doing the same transactions. I just don't have the strength to come here every day. This is now day 3. But I will have to wait here until 4pm in case I will be seen. I have not slept for 3 nights. How can elderly and sick people be treated like this. I am cold, I am wet and I am very very angry. Wow amazing at 12.30 the postmistress calls 6 of us in. My turn comes and like 60 or more percent of the people my fingerprints cannot be verified….now I must travel 12 kilometers to the nearest sassa office to get a letter so that the post office can bypass the fingerprints when issuing the new card. I must then return to the Goodwood post office on Monday at 8am and we will be allowed in first. I went to the sassa office in Bellville only to find a queue of about 200 people applying for grants. Thankfully on telling them that I was sent by the post office to get a letter to bypass the fingerprints we were seen to immediately…took about 15 minutes. I had a long discussion with one of the sassa managers and he told me that the reason our fingerprints are being rejected is that the post office has to link up with the sassa network which in turn links up to the department of home affairs…and that is where the screw up takes place. I then asked him what would happen if we don't get our new sassa card in time for the May payout. He told me that I would have to go to a post office and they would pay me out using my fingerprints. I then said that my fingerprints cannot be verified by the post office for getting a new card so how will it verify for getting the sassa grant. He looked at me and said…shit that is going to be a huge problem and that he never thought of that. If this was not so tragic it would be a circus….more like a comedy of errors. I can see chaos taking place at month end..so it will be back to the post office on Monday at 8am.