From Paymaster Through Postmaster to Pandemic: South Africa’s Social Assistance Payment System’s Technological Private/Public Entanglements

Abstract

In this article, I consider the persistent embrace of biometrics and digitalisation in the South African welfare system from 2012 into the present. Necessary to this consideration is a chronological outline of the key actors involved in, and major events surrounding, social assistance provision. In 2018, the South African government instituted a social assistance payment and registration system that it would administer through a public entity: the South African Post Office (SAPO). The shift to SAPO from the six-year-long private contract with Net1 surfaced questions around the failures of privatisation and the challenges of state-run social services. A new wave of private involvement in public service provision was ushered in during the Covid-19 pandemic, where once again public–private partnerships provided digital registration and identification platforms to tens of millions of people. I argue that even with changes in institutional oversight, and despite the disaster of the Net1 contract, the state remains committed to biometric technologies, outsourced personal data collection, fintech and the logics of neoliberalism. The technologies of social grant administration and payment, like all actors, create and are implicated in value production and epistemic processes.