Qacha’s Nek, April.04 — Qacha’s Nek Social Development Elderly Care Officer, Mr. Mphasi Rabolae says the newly introduced mode of pension payment so far is a success in the district.
In an interview with the Agency, he said they started mobilizing in July 2022 until September and registration started in October.
He revealed that they are currently in implementation in urban areas and it was only in February when they paid them through mobile service provider popularly known as M-pesa.
He said when it was first introduced, most of them did not understand it but “we discussed until they did.”
However, he said they started with 200 of the 449 people in February and in March they added 92 more people and even those that were not keen at first begun to show interests and they are coming in huge numbers for registration.
“We are still monitoring the challenges and how to address them before we could include everyone in the system,” he said.
Mr. Rabolae said so far the main challenge is most of the elders when they got paid they had already lost their sim cards while others forgot their M-pesa pin.
“However, we managed to address that one as Vodacom came to the rescue and now even those who were reluctant want it,” he said.
He said after Easter holidays, they will register those from Ha Sekake with the help of their stakeholders.
The Ministry of Social Development introduced digital payments in 2014 when paying child grants in Mazenod council.
And for the elders, the first payments were done late in 2022 in Motimposo and Mabote villages and later made its way to Lithabaneng, Matala, Maputsoe and Qacha’s Nek urban this year.
According to officials back then, the reasons behind digital payments were to cut costs incurred when paying clients using cash in transit as that amount was said to be too much that it could be saved to benefit more people.
The move was also done to reduce the handling of the cash as the world was moving towards technology usage so they did not want to be left behind.
It was further done to cut expensive transportation costs as elders travel long distances to pay points and people took advantage of them by selling expensive things that they do not even need.
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