The South African Post Office board has resigned following months of strikes and deliverydisruptions at the state-owned postal services company.
Telecommunications and Postal Minister Siyabonga Cwele announced on Friday that the board hadvolunteered to resign to allow him to implement a series of interventions aimed at resolving anumber of major issues at the South African Post Office (Sapo).
He said the past few months had been characterised by “a deepening state of instability, leadingto poor delivery of services. The SA Post Office has been plagued by prolonged strikes and poorfinancial and internal controls. The State has resolved to intervene to rescue this critical assetthat is very important to the economy of South Africa and the lives of the marginalisedcommunities, especially those in rural areas.”
Sapo has plagued by strikes since July when it brought in casual workers to resolve staffshortages that were affecting deliveries in the country’s Guateng province, the country’s mostpopulous province that contains the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, its administrativecapital, Pretoria, and other large industrial areas.
A series of strikes have led to closures of post offices across the country as a result ofintimidation and vandalism by striking workers, although the most severe and long-lasting problemshave been in Guateng province. Earlier this month the strike turned violent when vehicles belongingto the SA Post Office were set alight outside the South African Post Office (Sapo) building inChiawelo, Soweto.
In Orange Grove, Johannesburg, a group of striking Post Office workers allegedly petrol-bombed aPost Office building. And last week, striking employees are said to have vandalised the Krugersdorpsorting centre.
In the mean time, large numbers of customers that rely on postal deliveries have reportedlyswitched to courier services to have their mail and parcels delivered. Private courier serviceshave reported a boom in business as ordinary South Africans and companies attempt to ensuredelivery of parcels and documents.
Postal workers are demanding immediate permanent employment for casual workers and a 15% salaryincrease. A new wage offer of 6% was rejected two weeks ago.
Minister Cwele commented: “The unprotected and violent strike at the post office has caused alot of harm to many citizens, long-distance students, businesses – especially the small andmedium-sized ones, the diplomatic community and most of all the workers of the post office and thecompany itself.” He said the post office had to work very hard to regain the confidence of thepublic “and for it to become the centre of access to government services that it can become”.
Cwele said he would work closely with national Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene to solve thecompany’s problems. He said the Ministers had appointed former Rand Water CEO Simo Lushaba to leada technical team that “will move to assure financiers and other stakeholders of the rescue plan andgovernment’s commitment to it”.
He said the technical team had three months to achieve a list of nine tasks he believed werenecessary to turn the organisation around. These included: stabilise the organisation by employingmeasures to resolve the strike; assess capacity at management level and fill vacant positions;employ urgent strategies for short-term gains to reduce further financial bleeding; and develop abusiness case that would underpin Treasury support.
Other tasks included facilitating the process of resolving the organisation’s current leadershipinstability; finalise the annual report of SAPO and report it in Parliament; urgently finalise thecases against the suspended CEO and other executives; meet clients to discuss their future needs;and restore public and business confidence in the post office.
Cwele thanked all workers who had returned to work and continued to call upon “all workersparticipating in the current unprotected strike to return to work immediately in order to allowthis process an opportunity to effectively assist SAPO”, adding: “Stabilising the SA Post Office isa matter of national interest and it is critical that all stakeholders must work together to solvethe challenges that currently plague SAPO.”
He said further details on the SAPO intervention would be announced in due course.
