THE South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) says a move to level 3 lockdown, which will commence from 1 June, will enable the agency to accelerate the pace of paying out the Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress grant.

“At the moment SASSA is operating with a third of its staff during level 4 and a move to level 3 will increase human resource capacity drastically so that payments are made quicker than it is the case currently,” said SASSA CEO Totsie Memela.

Memela said that much progress has been made in preparing for the payment of large numbers of the Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress grants.

He said SASSA started using WhatsApp for applications but had to move to other platforms including srd.sassa.gov.za website and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).

In other Covid-19 related news: South Africans allowed to return to countries they are based in

This follows the WhatsApp system which was flooded with unprecedented numbers of applications per hour, which it struggled to cope with.

“The situation was also further challenged by the fact that applicants tried to upload supporting documents through the various platforms, despite this not being necessary. All these application channels have been stabilised and the application process is now significantly smoother,” Memela said.

After increasing capacity of the application channels, Memela said, SASSA moved swiftly to testing the payment side of its system, where a sample of 10 beneficiaries was used to test the efficacy of the payment mechanism and nine were successfully paid.

“One applicant had captured his banking details incorrectly [and] this has since been corrected. This payment test should be seen for what it is,” Memela noted.

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