In South Africa, policy reform often arrives like a postmarked letter from the past—late, smudged, and slightly irrelevant by the time it reaches its destination. So it is with the recent call by the DA GNU Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies for public comment on the South African Post Office (SAPO) monopoly—a debate that feels less like forward planning and more like asking for feedback on a shipwreck still disintegrating on the rocks.
One marvels at the premise. Here we are, 30 years into democracy and deep into SAPO’s institutional rot, finally asking whether this failing behemoth should still hold a monopoly over mail delivery. The correct answer is obvious, even to the most indulgent public servant: of course not. The more interesting question is why it has taken us so long to have the courage to say it out loud.
SAPO is not merely broken, it’s rotten. It is broken in a way that demands introspection about the larger dogmas governing our public institutions—our worship of the state as a delivery and job-creation agent, our allergy to reform, and our inability to imagine a public good delivered outside of public hands.
Ghosts in the Sorting Room
There was a time, to be fair, the world over, when a national post office held an almost mythical status. It was the great connector of citizen to citizen, of the state to its people. But that world died quietly, buried under the weight of emails, e-commerce, and institutional neglect. What remains is a relic that neither functions nor disappears.
The SAPO has become the ghost of a digital age—its branches shuttered, its trucks sporadic, its mail unsorted and undelivered. Rural communities, for whom this infrastructure was supposedly preserved, are now the least served in this current model. And yet the myth of “universal service” persists—like a telegram from another century that nobody bothered to open.
SAPO’s defenders cling to this ideal of universality, insisting that the state and the state alone can ensure that a grandmother in Ga-Matlala or a spaza shop in Lusikisiki can receive a letter or a parcel. But we must confront the realistic truth that state ownership has failed to deliver what it promised.
It has delivered bailouts, backlog, failed customer service, and broken trust. It has delivered salaries without service and management without merit. But it has not delivered the post.
A Redistribution Scheme in Reverse
What makes the SAPO story particularly galling is that it doesn’t merely fail on technical grounds—it fails morally. Since 2014, the South African taxpayer has poured over R10.5 billion into SAPO through bailouts, subsidies, and business rescue injections, without any actionable outcomes. These lifelines have not reformed the organisation; they’ve embalmed it.
Bailouts are not neutral budgetary manoeuvres. They are transfers of wealth from working South Africans—many of them poor, battling to stay afloat—to a bloated bureaucracy that cannot justify its own existence. In effect, the state has engineered a redistribution scheme in reverse: taking from the economically vulnerable to subsidise institutional dysfunction, and as a consequence fund the political elite and their agenda.
It’s no coincidence that the Post Office is now reportedly being eyed for inclusion in the government’s proposed SAMSOC initiative—the South African Modernised State-Owned Companies holding company. This is a policy Frankenstein, stitching together a collection of troubled SOEs in the hope that their combined weight in one singular entity will somehow produce lift. It won’t. It is just one more refusal to admit defeat and is a certain recipe for disaster.
The idea is not reform. It is containment—an elegant way of warehousing yet another failure behind a new acronym.
The Idol of Public Ownership
SAPO’s continued monopoly rests not on performance, but on ideology. It is held up as a public good—a sacred utility that must be preserved at all costs because of its theoretical value to democracy and inclusion.
But good intentions cannot excuse bad outcomes. The notion that public ownership is inherently more just, more equitable, or more efficient has worn thin. One need only visit a functioning courier company to feel the difference: a parcel that arrives on time, a tracking number that works, a phone number that someone actually answers. Citizens don’t care about political ideology but they care about customer service, delivery, and efficiency.
The private sector is not flawless, but it is incentivised to deliver, when failure to do so has catastrophic consequences. It must earn trust to survive. SAPO, by contrast, has no such burden. It survives because it is politically inconvenient to let it die. And death, in this case, might be a mercy.
The Market Can Deliver
The way forward is not mysterious. It is being practised, with great success, elsewhere in the world, and can be replicated with equal success here in South Africa.
Germany transformed Deutsche Post into a global logistics leader. The United Kingdom privatised Royal Mail in 2013, dramatically improving efficiency and enhancing customer experience. Even countries like Kenya and Tanzania, facing far greater rural delivery challenges than ours, have introduced Universal Service Funds that require private operators to contribute to rural access without maintaining inefficient monopolies to the detriment of their own citizens. In the case of South Africa, citizens have to continue funding the government’s failed experiment.
South Africa, too, can liberalise. End SAPO’s monopoly over “reserved” postal services. Allow private competition across all levels of mail and parcel delivery. Regulate license operators stringently, and hold them to service standards that SAPO has never met, even if it aspired to. Establish a fund, if needed, to support access in rural areas—but do not conflate access with ownership.
Indeed, the best thing the state can do for the post is to get out of the business of delivering it. Allow the private sector to compete and flourish, and reposition the state to play an oversight and regulatory role and not be the sole service provider.
Beyond Monopoly
Privatisation is often framed as a threat, but in the SAPO context, it may be the only chance for salvation. A phased approach—starting with public-private partnerships and ending with full divestment—could free up billions in public funds, create a vibrant logistics ecosystem, and restore faith in basic service delivery.
SAPO employees need not be abandoned. With proper planning, they can be retrained, absorbed into the new postal economy, or offered incentives to transition. What cannot continue is the current model of patronage and paralysis disguised as compassion.
The public deserves more than a monument to past ideals. It deserves a postal system that works.
Romanticise
It is easy to romanticise the Post Office. It gives us a childhood nostalgia, reminds us of pensions arriving in brown envelopes, of love letters and official stamps. But nostalgia cannot be a substitute for policy.
SAPO is not a failing company, it is a failed one. The question is whether we will summon the political maturity to let it go, or whether we will keep embalming it with taxpayer money in the name of a universality it no longer provides.
The Minister’s call for comment may be a procedural requirement, but it is also pivotal. It is a chance to speak plainly about what works and what doesn’t, and about what government should do, and what it should no longer attempt to do.
Let us, for once, not waste that chance. Let us deliver something better than the Post Office ever could: accountability, clarity, and the courage to reform.
Post note:
The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies is reviewing the SAPO exclusivity over reserved postal services, and has opened the floor for public input. Stakeholders and interested parties are encouraged to submit their written comments by 10 April 2025. Make your voice heard!
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image by Andrew Lloyd Gordon from Pixabay