The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) will next month begin rolling out a mandatory biometric enrolment system for all social grant beneficiaries, insisting the move will combat fraud. But for many, this announcement rings less like reform and more like déjà vu — yet another chapter in SASSA’s long saga of failed systems, tender scandals, and broken promises.
The Beneficiary Biometric Enrolment programme will demand fingerprints and other biometric data before recipients can access their grants. Officials claim this will flush out ghost beneficiaries, double payments, and organised syndicates stealing billions from the state.
Yet South Africans have heard this song before. In 2012, the controversial Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) contract introduced biometric verification at pay points — a deal later ruled unlawful by the Constitutional Court. CPS went on to rake in billions while beneficiaries were squeezed by illegal deductions for airtime, loans, and funeral policies. When that house of cards collapsed, chaos followed.
The “solution” that replaced it — shifting payments to the Postbank — brought its own disaster. Technical glitches left beneficiaries stranded at ATMs, grant cards were cloned by criminals, and cash shortages in rural areas forced desperate families to borrow money just to survive until payments resumed. Each reform has promised protection for the poor, but each has ended with the same victims — the 19 million South Africans who rely on grants to eat.
Civil society groups warn that the new biometric system risks repeating this cycle. If servers crash or fingerprints fail to scan, the poorest households will bear the brunt. And unlike middle-class South Africans, they cannot afford delays: a missed grant often means an empty plate.
Then there are the dangers of abuse. A centralised biometric database of nearly a third of the country’s population is a goldmine for cybercriminals, corrupt insiders, and even state surveillance. Yet there has been little public debate on how this data will be safeguarded, or whether ordinary citizens have any recourse if their information is stolen or misused.
The pattern is unmistakable: SASSA lurches from crisis to crisis, with new contracts and new systems enriching the politically connected while the poor remain trapped in bureaucratic queues. The real fraud may not be the ghost beneficiaries, but the repeated betrayal of those who depend on this system to survive.
As the Zulu saying goes: Okunempondo akufihlw’esakeni — you cannot hide something with horns under a sack. If biometrics are truly about protecting the vulnerable, that truth will show. But if this is another feeding trough for tenderpreneurs, that too will come to light.