The SA Post Office has promised improvements in its services from this week as more Covid-19 grant funds have now been made available to their branches.
The improvements come at the time when the payments of Covid-19 R350 grants are being wrapped up as the last date for taking in new applications was April 30 as per announcements by the government.
Post Office spokesperson Johan Kruger said they were "well aware of the shortages experienced at some of our branches".
"Funds provided for grant payments have already been adjusted and customers will see an improvement during this week," Kruger said.
He said the use of the last three digits of the ID number to allocate dates for the recipients had been very successful in helping to manage the number of people coming to a branch.
Kruger said there was a back in the processing of the Covid-19 grant payments due to the finalisations of appeals that were "lodged by the prospective grant beneficiaries, dating back to much earlier than March and April this year."
Kruger said they have cleared much of the backlog and that had led to the demand for payments being much higher than what they expected.
"The post office understands the inconvenience this causes and would like to apologise to beneficiaries," Kruger said.
Meanwhile, several NGOs and human rights groups, including the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, Albert Luthuli Human Rights Advice Centre and Black Sash among others, have called for the extension of the social relief distress grants arguing that supporting households through this grant income was important and has been proven to benefit the poorest of the poor.
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