EFFORTPOST That time when a Mayo almost saved the South African Post Office (2016 - 2019) - Story of the decline of SAPO

Greetings Dramatards!

I've been talking about a lot about the decay of the Republic of South Africa for the past 9 months here on rdama.net, and I've on and often mentioned the desgraceful decline of the National Post Office. Yet, I've never went into deeper insight into just how fundamentally FUBAR it's become, because it's so ubiquitous to SA life and malfunction.

The SAPO (South African Post Office) is especially a gruesome example of modern ANC corruption and substandard leadership, not just in how far the organization has fallen, but in that the very heights of their descent ads to the very very painful memory and real-time life experience I've had with their decline in my 30 years lifespan.

A lot of dramatards, and a lot of people who had from all corners of the internet, be it the youtube comments, obscure forums, or readdit threads, before they were by jannies, had all spoken and described the drastic decay and decline of the RSA, and how their corrupt leadership had hobbleed the nation, and changed the story from a successful bloodless democratic coup, where colonized black peeps threw off the shackles of their oppressors, and managed to peacefully transition into a democratic ranbow nation - and instead now speak about how modern SA is a failed state who cant even keep the lights on

Many of these internet denizens, some motivated by racism and desiring the collapse of all black nations, others motivated more curious at the shocking and staggering decline, mention all sorts of factors which irrifutably proves that modern RSA had declined in many categories of life quality in extraordinary levels: the rotten infrastructure, the extreme crime levels and r*pe statistics - SA has been tied with india as the r*pe capital of the world - and wokescolds cant deny this reality.

Other discussions revolve around the impressive past milltary achievements, like the Union of South Africa having constructed formidable war engines on their own, despite grueling sanctions during High Apartheid. They reverse engineered the French Mirage into the Cheetah Jet fighters, built the Elephant tank, or the Ratel troop carriers. Most sighted are the fact that the Union developed atomic weaponry, which had still not been replicated by the modern ANC gov.

Yet all of these mean absolutely nothing in my opinion, as it's my belief that of all of the actual institution kept in great function by the NP regime during the Union of SA days, was the National Post Office. No, I'm completely serious. All the military hardware are merely toys in comparison. The russian Migs could dominate the Mirage, our land vehicles only made us a local superpower in southern africa, and even our nuklear warheads were but WW2 era dropped bombs from bombers, not like the ICBM the yanks by the end of the fricking 1960s. We were really only the big fish in the small pond.

No where we really shone, was our civil and bureaucratic institutions - among them noting more so exemplified this than our National Post Office. It was truly genuinely impressive just how unbelievably efficient it was, from the 1920s all the way up to the 1990s. It was incredible how fricking fast mail would reliably arrive within very short timespans.

It's so incredibly difficult to research the exact timeframes, and to avoid hearsay, and nostalgia by afrikaans boomers , but I've pieced together some standards from periods up to 60 years ago.

Mail would regularly be delivered between Cape Town and Pretoria, in just 3 days. A week if it was to any town in Limpopo. Mail within any city would be posted through the post box at 6am, and be delivered to the recipient by 12 noon. Mil could and would be delivered anywhere, no matter how remote, and in South Africa that was extremely fricking remote, much more so than any european nation. Mailmen who traverse between rural isolated farmlands and local towns often did so on fricking horseback, as cars/vehicles were middleclass and expensive. And even then, mail would not be expected to be later than 2 weeks. It was absolutely incredible.

I know these are unimpressive stats compared to places like Bongland - the king of efficient Post and Mail institutions of their time, but SA operated under a fraction of a fraction of the cost. Where England and Europe was small and compact, and developed. Where railroads had to coved tiny lengths between towns, and there was a well developed town scarred all the way between capitals, SA was much larger and rural and underdeveloped.

Like the excellent Mailing system we inherited as a Commonwealth Dominions area under Bongland, so too did the Union of SA inherit a spectacular railway and locomotive system. The railways were few and covered only between capitals and large cities in SA, like bloemfontein to Pretoria to Cape Town to Joburg, but they ran with intense efficiency. They were the reason mail would take only 3 days upon posting, to cross the distance between Pretoria and Cape Town.

Mailing letters and valuables were also secure. You could mail and post virtually anything, including jewelry and coins, and have them not be stolen! Parcels would never be opened, and all hands involved in the transfer were extremely well documented. There was such high confidence that people would mail fricking gold to loved ones.

I know zoomers don't have a reference to how integral letters and mail had been to lives and function of people prior to 1990, but it was immense. Top millitary secrets were delivered by man between generals and politicians under the NP regime. Bussinesses were reliant on mailing documents and bills between clients and partners for commerce to function.

While South Africa had telegrams, radios and booth phones with landlines in this era, they were very expensive, and could only be used for short usually urgent messages. For the everyman mail and letters were the primary means of longform unrestricted communication between people. In South Africa even up till the late 1980s, many school children boarding far away from home would primarily communicate with their parents for example, via weekly mail, and would MAYBE receive a monthly phonecall from their parents because it was so fricking expensive - and became even MORE expensive the further away physically you tried to communicate in terms of physical distance the landlines were laid. You even had to talk to operators on that land line 1st and specify the address you were calling if you were calling on landline phones between towns!!!

For many south africans, black or white or coloured, the only cost involved was the buying of stamps for each posted letter The Post Office was the lifeline for the average South African during the Union era.

And it was also a critical communication infrastructure. The physical post offices, the mail train carriages, the few special Post Lorries, even rural stables of postment who scattered into the winds to deliver mail to the most rural corners of SA. It was so critical to communication that the Aprtheid government ruled that it was one of the priviledged positions, like policemen, and could only be done by Blankes - only by whites.

When the ANC carried out bombing campaigns between 1960-1980s (to try and coerce the Apartheid gov to end its racial segregation policies), they would actually also target Post offices, because they knew how vital they were as infrastructure to the NP regime in terms of hobbling the nation's mass communication capacity. When trains were targeted for bombs by the ANC, the mail and post carriages were targeted just as often.

Like all institutions in the nation, the afrikaners and other whites had to run the Post Office with extraordinary efficiency and competence, anything less would let the draconian nation crumble, and let the white minorty of 4 millions whites be overrun by their 40 million black 2ndary citizens, in a manner similar to Haiti as the NP regime perpetually feared.

Thus I hope with this long I've expressed to you dramatards the extraordinary levels of efficiency and competence the South African Post Office run on during the Union era.

DEGRADATION AND DECAY OF SAPO DURING MY LIFESPAN:

What's funny about the SAPO is that it's my earliest memory as a toddler of witnessing rot and decay of an organization due to corruption, back when I was too young to comprehend concepts like corruption or political malpractice. Baby me could still realize that something was very wrong as he witnessed the disintegration and rot of the Post Office 1st hand.

Now I don't know how it worked or still works in other countries, but in RSA, young children from up to 2nd graders and up would have a yearly school project where they had to write a letter to their grandparents or other relatives, to teach them this valuable life skill of writing in Postal format, and had to learn this the moment they gained the capacity to start writing sentences. This yearly post to family project would upgrade by grade 6/7 to mailing format to a business or professional environment, with the added points given or subtracted if your letter had its stamp on correctly, if the address and addressee were correct and so on.

I distinctly recall in a vivid memory when I was by 6/7 years old, where I had to mail my grandparents a mail, and how much my parents and all the adults complained that it was a disgrace that it took two weeks for mail to return, and how back in their days, it would have been a matter of days instead.

As I grew up and went through the grades, the annual mail writing project would extend their completion date by a month by the teachers, because the timeframe of mail being successfully mailed mailed had now become a month instead ,and it wasn't fair to punish kids or detract marks from their score if the Post Office itself took longer than the kids!! Eventually that completion timeframe got increased to TWO effing months!!!

I also remembered from the period to when I was 6 to when I became 16, that my uncles and grandparents would have the habit of sending kids money through the mail with their Birthday cards, which was a tradition for many. One of my favorite uncles was very generous with all of his nephews and nieces and their children. He would send as much as R100 for each kid when they became 10 years old, every year on their birthday until they became 18, when he would give each R1000, which was truly generous.

And for some one in 2000, R100 was lot of pocket change for the tuckshop. Eventually people began to notice that letters not only came later, but were being more and more missing or undelivered. Confidence in the security of the SAPO was to such an extent during the Union era, that businesses accepted clients paying them via mail - sometimes a bristling letter, clearly bristling with cash, like some fricking drug dealer stack of cash almost bursting the letter open, would still be safely delivered unopened to its destination!!

Post-1994 this would change, by 2000 people were noticing money going missing from their letters. At 1st the Post Office workers were sneaky. And a letter containing coins or paper money would have only one or two pieces stolen, and the letter carefully resealed As more years went by, the entire money stack would be stolen out of the parcel or letter. At 1t people tried to mitigate this rampant theft by only mailing money in dark brown letter casings, so you could not hold the letter up to the light and see coins or paper money trough. Eventually however the Post Office worker thieves realized any brown paper letter casing was probably housing money.

Eventually by mid 2005, it was ecppected that sending money via the SAPO was asking for it to be stolen, and the frequent and blatant disregard to parcels and letters grew and grew, as even further eventually evry single letter could be expected to be opened, and people didn't even trust their private lives and personal secrets to the Post Office anymore.

By the time I entered 8th grade and Highschool, the SAPO was considered an absolute shell of what it once was, and a singular monument to corruption rot and nepotism.

The worst part is that people were dependent on SAPO. Private countrywide post office businesses like PostNet would not reach viability until 2010, so for almost a full decade between 2000 - 2010, it was considered an absolute nightmare to interact with SAPO, whether it be forced to use their parcel delivering service to post a legal document for the court, or whether a shcool kid would attempt to mail their application to universities or whatever.

The annual mail project for middle-schoolers was instead changed to having to write an E-mail towards your grandparents or other famaily members., until teaching teenagers how to write letters and how to post stamps firmly became a thing of the past

Like most of the decay of SA institutions, the cause was the rapid replacement of previously trained white office workers and top leaders, with their untrained black peers, all within the span of a very very short period. Often nepotism was taking place large scale, and even the fabled Mandela Administration was giving away posts, based ANC loyalty, or members who had contributed the most on their freedom fighting struggle.

It turns out being charismatic freedom fighters do not translate skillwise well to being office bureaucrats. The worst part was that their was in fact a great many intelligent and qualified black men and women, but they never came near the positions of needed influence and power, and the same applied to the SAPO, there were too many tribal loyalties within Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho.

My previous Surveyor employer in Limpopo told me he met a Cuban who had worked with the ANC (when they were rebelling during Apartheid), and had come back to RSA to help train black peeps into becomming doctors, and he had instant disdain for the modern ANC, and many black peeps who followed the ANC like sheep.

He said that they had the worst combination of arrogance and stupidy, and the mentality of people who wanted to show they were in charge.

It reminded me of that one scene in the Chernobyl HBO series - where the woman Nuclear Physicist amalgamation character Ulana. She confronts the one fatass who used to be a very low level factory worker, but now was in charge of a large district. The man enjoys lording his previous past and how far he has risen in stature and ignores Ulana's warning about the nuclear disaster, as he's a party man. "Now I'M in charge"

Comments on the scene:

A lot of these black peeps genuinely genuinely genuinely didn't fricking realize just how incompetent they were, and how every system they touched would turn to ashes. Worst still was when many of the previous retiring aged white office bureaucrats offered to help train their black replacements, they were always rebuked by their new black replacements. There was an arrogance and frustration the black peeps had - many had been subservient to white men their whole lives, and now that they had power and stature, it was understandable that these men who had been so cruelly discriminated against, now wanted nothing to do with their white predecessors.

Yet it was always to their own detriment and the detriment of their constituents. Like the Cuban guys said - the perfect storm of arrogance and stupidity

It would only be years later, as I grew older and began to understand complex subjectmatter like corruption, that I could piece together the events of my toddlerhood, where I could sense something was very very wrong as the writing of letters to my grandparents became more and more difficult, and I received less mail in turn, and my uncles would eventually stop sending me birthday money, that I could research and realize in retrospect how the corruption of the Post Office let to the effects which I and my close ones experienced personally.

MODERN SOUTH AFRICAN POST OFFICE CORRUPTION PRE-2016:

By 2016 the modern SAPO was an unholy shitshow. It was one of the most defunct, one of the most dysfunctional public organizations under the control of the government. By this point PostNet and other postal private businesses had stolen a market beneath SAPO, and the ANC's political opponents were drilling them in parliament over the dysfunction, and the fact that SAPO was bleeding money yearly with billions in fricking debt.

The post office was completely black controlled by 2016 and was corrupt to the core. Citizens going to the PO had to wait in long lines, and often were met with bad attitude and bad service, as the postal workers knew they would never be fired, and were indispensable.

Every semester a new scandal about a Postal master being arrested for fraud or corruption was on the front page of whatever local newspaper was sold in that local district. SAPO was a massiveley corrupt nepostism ingrained shitshow.

https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/23433

"The presentation stressed that financial year 2016 was a very challenging one for the Post Office, with the organisation experiencing considerable losses. Much of the net losses were a direct result of interest on loans that Post Office had taken out during the previous years."

"Mr Mackenzie stated that an additional concern was the Johannesburg International Mail Centre (JIMC), in which all of the parcels were processed by hand, as the machinery was not running."

"Referring to page 12 of the 2016 Annual Report, he questioned if the fact that 98% of Post Offices were reporting a waiting time of 7 minutes or less was accurate. In his personal experience visiting post offices in Limpopo, in every major post office the wait was much longer than 7 mins.

Referring to page 70 of the 2016 Annual Report, Mr Mackenzie's was concerned that 42% of SAPO targets were “not measurable”, and 45% of indicators were “not well defined“. Many of the SAPO 2016 Annual Report targets were either not measurable, or verifiable. What was the Post Office doing this year to make sure that it met SMART?"

Basically this long looooong report is an unholy shitshow dressed up in colourful euphenisms

"Ms M Shinn (DA), noted that there were systems failures, staff failures, etc. She asked for clarification on what was being done to rectify these issues, noting that SAPO lost a lot of qualified staff (ALL THE WHITOIDS FRICKED OFF ). In addition, she asked for clarification on the internal crime statistics, noting that there was an increase in the amount of money lost through armed robberies. Of the 498 cases referred to the SAPS for investigation, and asked how many went to court?"

It goes on and on and on

MAYO CEO ARRIVES TO SAVE THE DAY:

https://www.702.co.za/articles/10793/meet-mark-barnes-the-outspoken-maverick-tasked-with-saving-the-post-office

Mark Barnes was born in Mpumalanga in 1956 and was educated at the University of Cape Town and Harvard. Mark Barnes is a large shareholder and Executive Chairperson in investing and trading solutions company Purple Group. Mark Barnes was an investment banker at Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank and former head of private equity firm Brait. He was a very good businessman and apparantly famous in the SA business world.

https://www.702.co.za/articles/9749/sa-post-office-appoints-purple-capital-s-mark-barnes-as-new-ceo

Lmoa, what a quote!

https://www.biznews.com/leadership/2016/06/24/sapo-ceo-toughest-job-sa-mark-barnes-adapt-die

"Mark Barnes is now in what some believe to be the hardest job in South Africa. He's been in the CEO role at the South African Post Office for over four months now, so how does he plan to overturn the odds that are so heavily against him? It's an uphill task Barnes faces, and maybe the real test will be if overseas Christmas mail reaches its South African recipients before the 25th of December. – Stuart Lowman"

"Mark Barnes, CEO of SAPO, was introduced to a full house at a GIBS Forum as the one appointed to the toughest job in SA, although since relegated a place by Nenegate. He is well known as blunt, never one to mince his words. He said that once the plea for finance requested to pay for years of corruption and incompetence at the top level of management were approved, hopefully in the near future, signs of improved customer service should appear within even six weeks of that."

"Perhaps most of us have just assumed that militant strikers, plus thieving employees videoed on Carte Blanche, blocked deliveries to a level of suffocation for customers. The detailed case study is a bit more complex. The strategy for procurement, or supply chain management as some term it, involved outsourcing the selection of suppliers to third parties."

"At head office, employees had to bring their own potty paper. The entire supply chain was broken by stockouts of items like ink and paper, and other suppliers such as the logistics sector, anyone from Avis to SAA, who were not being paid."

Comments on article: "Who still uses SAPO?"

The point is this, SAPO was in such dire condition, that the normally affirmative action prone ANC, was willing to let a white CEO take the job, as may of the previous SAPO heads also quit in frustration at the untamable behemoth that was the SAPO shitshow.

This was just as an extraordinary event as when a white man was allowed to become the CEO of ESKOM back in 2019

https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/355471/eskoms-white-ceo-appointment-angers-unions

MARK BARN QUITS IN 2019:

The worst part of this travesty was that CEO Barns showed that in his short stint as head of SAPO, for just 3 years, he significantly fricking improved the profitability and running of the Post Office!

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/investing/512278-post-office-collapse.html

"He resigned as CEO on 1 August 2019, citing differences in the strategy concerning the structure of the South African Post Office group, especially the Postbank. The Post Office thanked Barnes for his “enormous service”, saying he has led the stabilisation of the organisation."

"Despite these significant asset disposals from 2019, the Post Office has not been able to lower its liabilities in any way. In fact, its total liabilities have increased in the past five years, reaching a six-year high of R12.4 billion this year."

It was incredible, in just 3 years Barns turned the Post Office around, from bleeding money, to actually being competetive again!

WHY MARK BARNS QUIT:

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/government/315263-the-real-reason-behind-mark-barnes-sudden-resignation-as-sa-post-office-ceo.html

But of course There was always the corruption mafia

Just like Andre de Ruyter from ESKOM, whom had tried to change the energy supplier around, and weed out the corruption, so too was Mark Barns accosted at every turn from belligerent corrupt officials used to their lazy stations, whom he could not dislodge or fire. The corruption was too deeply entrenched, and the main ANC would continiously ignore his requests for more power, or to remove usesless fatcat bureaucrats obfuscating his efforts to overhaul the Post Office.

"Many people speculated that there is more to the story, and Business Day has now revealed the true reason for his resignation. According to the publication Barnes had a “sharp difference of opinion with the government and the board” over how the Post Office and Postbank will work together."

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/investing/512278-post-office-collapse.html

The Post Office's growing debt burden, declining revenue, and the need for constant government bailouts show it is unsustainable. Many argue that it is completely insolvent and should be liquidated and closed to prevent it sucking up more taxpayer money.

If the Post Office is not saved, all its current services and revenue will go into the private sector.

Yet even Mark Barned himself still believes that SAPO still serves a purpose, compared to the private sector Post office companies like PostNet, who exists to attain a profit.

Even though SAPO is morbidly dysfunctional, many of its services a free, barring stamps, and serve the very poorest communities of SA, like blacks in townships, who cant even afford the relatively cheap fees of private enterprizes like PostNet.

BARNS OFFERS TO BUY THE SOUTH AFRICAN OST OFFICE IN 2022:

“The private sector has a very simple motivation — make a profit. I don't believe that if the private sector took over all the functions, it would serve more than 5% of the population.” - Barns

Basically he wanted to buy SAPO, so that he had full control, and could fire all the parasites and corrupt officials whom had been festering in their key posts like Nurgle for decades leeching all resources in their reach.

https://dailyinvestor.com/business/14463/mark-barnes-plan-to-save-bankrupt-sa-post-office

AND GUESSS WHAT, HE WAS DENIEEEEEEEED BECAUSE OF FOKKEN COURSE HE WAS

"Barnes told The Money Show's Bruce Whitfield that this offer is now worth R2.4 billion less than when he made it because the government bailout would not have been needed if his proposal was accepted. He also told Whitfield that, despite SAPO's current state of insolvency, his original offer to take over the enterprise still stands."

The above is our ANC wingcuck c$nt who blocked his proposal

And right now his offer still sits in limbo, and we'll find out this year if something will ever happen.

Anyways that's all I got, have a good day!