The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) has confirmed the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grants for this month will be released from June 22.

The agency began addressing payment challenges around the reconsideration of applicants after the grant had not been paid to millions of beneficiaries for the past two months.

Sassa said it will continue clearing outstanding payments from the previous cycle as and when the bank details are confirmed.

The April backlog payments will be made in July 2022. The May backlog payments will be made in August 2022. From August onwards, monthly payments should resume as per usual.

While the agency had been dealing with the reconsideration of the Covid-19 SRD grant applications for a while, it caused a lot of dissatisfaction to the public at large.

After months of dealing with appeals and verification and reconsideration processes, about R750 000 has been paid and payments are expected to increase to over a million by the end of the week.

“We appeal to clients to please provide Sassa with their bank account details to enable us to pay them into their own accounts.

“Notifications to update details have also been sent to clients whose reconsideration appeal has been approved, but their bank account details were outstanding,” Sassa said in a statement.

The extension of the grant for a further period of 12 months was announced in February 2022. However, before the extension could be implemented, the legislative framework had to be changed, given the lifting of the Covid-19 National State of Disaster.

The payment process has now commenced and having cleared the first four months of backlogs for the reconsideration appeals between August and November, the assessments for the new applications has begun.

Clients are advised not to go to the Post Office to access the funds. Recipients of the Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant of R350 who had selected to receive their funds at SAPO branches, are requested to visit www.srd.sassa.gov.za and select an option to collect the grant from any retail outlets such as Checkers, Usave, Shoprite, Pick ‘n Pay and Boxer.

Clients must have their Identity Document and the cell phone they registered when applying for the grant because the OTP number will be sent to that registered number.