In the Post Office we trust

In South Africa the institution of the Post Office serves a far broader goal than just channeling mail and parcels. Functioning as a bank in remote areas of the country it has achieved a position of trust in the hearts and minds of people who are in many cases standing on their first threshold of a functioning economic system. Given the fact that a huge percentage of our population receives state support in the form of grants, the Post Office is the intermediate repository of such funds and its employees are respected and especially trusted by millions of South Africans.

In terms of special legislation the Post Office also handles massive government money transfers running into billions of rands. Recently it was reported that the security of that system was breached by cyber-criminals in the first week of the new year when they systematically, over a three-day period, withdrew some R42-million of such funding. This after a R15-million security upgrade, paid for by the taxpayer. It is especially heinous when such trust is willfully violated by employees of the Post Office, in this case by an especially senior civil servant in Melmoth who ran a convenient instant cash system to suit herself.

She simply abused the access codes of clients to shift their assets and when they came in to draw money she topped up the accounts depleted by her to supply their needs from cash at hand, putting a unique twist on the old concept of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The folk she defrauded were in the nature of things ‘the poorest of the poor’, heavily dependent on the state’s systems of both obtaining means and subsequently protecting them within the banking division of the postal system. Her crimes, for which she was sentenced to three years imprisonment, effectively went beyond mere self-enrichment but impacted on the very being of the Post Office as a trusted institution serving the needs of especially the neediest of South Africans.

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