The South African Post Office is finally in a position to attract the partners it needs to survive, acting CEO Fathima Gany has told TechCentral in an interview – provided government delivers the R3.8-billion it promised but has never paid.
Gany, who leads the “high care” leadership team assembled to steer the Post Office out of business rescue, said the entity is awaiting a high court ruling on the business rescue practitioners’ application for substantial implementation. If it succeeds, the newly appointed board takes over. “In the meantime, protecting value and liquidity while seeking partnerships and rolling out our Aarto partnership will be key,” she said.
The court process has, however, hit a snag. The practitioners’ application, which would ordinarily secure a hearing date within six weeks, has drawn opposition over the outstanding payment of 18c in the rand owed to statutory creditors.
Gany said the aim is to settle the 18c dispute through a commercial arrangement outside court, but warned that a contested application could drag on. “I understand from my conversation that it could be as long as six months,” she said, adding that about a month has already been lost.
Asked the question the organisation hears most – why South Africa still needs a Post Office in 2026, when consumers have long since migrated to private couriers like Postnet and e-mail – Gany said the answer looks different outside the cities.
“Looking at it from an urbanised perspective, it’s a very easy conclusion to say we don’t need it anymore,” she said. “But South Africa’s urban-rural spread puts it in the company of emerging markets such as Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil and India, where physical mail and over-the-counter transactions remain essential because the luxury of connectivity simply doesn’t exist everywhere.”
Most valuable asset
That reach, she argued, is the Post Office’s most valuable asset. “What the Post Office has is an intangible that no other SOE (state-owned enterprise) has, which is reach… Ninety-eight percent of the population can be touched.”
On the question of privatisation, Gany said it is not an either/or choice. “It can be a hybrid,” she said. “Certain social obligations – universal service, international mail, delivery regardless of profitability – are constitutional and “never go away”, she said. “A lot of times people look at a business that is not making money, but a certain part of the business is not designed to make money.”
Read: Cabinet hands the Post Office a board, but not a bailout
Gany declined to relitigate government’s decision to spurn former CEO Mark Barnes, who offered R5.2-billion to buy the Post Office and recently claimed in an interview with Business Day columnist Peter Bruce that he had tabled a bid involving China’s Alibaba to buy the company. It would have left the state with 40% and veto rights over social obligations – only to be “ghosted” – according to Barnes.
“I wouldn’t know; it was before my time,” she said. “I can’t say that the deal was a mistake. I think we could structure deals going forward.”
She argued that business rescue itself was the obstacle to landing a deal of that kind. “As long as you’re in business rescue … the sentiment of distress is still there. I don’t think we’re really attracting the best partners [yet].”
An e-commerce player drawn to the Post Office’s last-mile reach is a plausible suitor. “I would think there’s still an attractiveness should a suitable partner come along.”
The Aarto contract, under which the Post Office serves – electronically and physically – traffic infringement notices, is a different animal, she said, particularly now that Aarto has gone live nationally. “Aarto is not a partner; it is a government business, so it’s a customer.”
Mail still pays the bills – for now
Stripped of Postbank, which was hived off against Barnes’s advice, the Post Office still earns about 67% of its revenue from traditional mail – proof of relevance, in Gany’s telling, but also a warning. “It’s not a business that you can say, ‘I’m going to be here 10 years from now,’ because your revenue year on year will decrease as modernisation happens.”
Diversification rests on becoming an “omnichannel” transaction platform for the state – motor vehicle licence renewals and similar services executed at post office counters – alongside a first-/last-mile courier business and a property portfolio she describes as an overlooked quick win. The Post Office is also developing a commercialisation strategy to monetise, sell or repurpose properties, pending Public Finance Management exemptions being issued by government.
The rescue plan adopted by creditors in December 2023 was built on a R6.2-billion government commitment, of which only R2.4-billion ever arrived. Asked whether the Post Office can be sustainable without the balance, Gany is blunt: “That’s the stress point, because it has to come.”
She said the Post Office has submitted an application to national treasury for the next medium-term expenditure funding cycle, covering the 18c-in-the-rand creditor payments, working capital – “you’re not going to break even for at least a year or maybe two years” – and investment to restore dilapidated branches and mail centres. She rejects the word bailout: “It’s not a bailout; it’s an investment in the organisation.”
What she rules out is further shrinkage. Branches are down to 657 and headcount has halved to under 6 000 through the rescue. “I don’t think you can cut a business into growth,” she said, and no further retrenchments are planned. “You cannot claim the 98% touch point to the population” with anything less than the current footprint, though branches may be reinvented rather than preserved as is.
Given the Post Office’s record of governance failures, Gany said rebuilding trust is itself a formal workstream – and offered her operating philosophy: “Financial distress is a symptom of governance distress.”
The high-care team, assembled for the first time in collaboration with the department of communications & digital technologies, exists to prevent a management vacuum when the rescue practitioners and their contracted-in layer of legal, HR and administrative managers exit on the day the court grants the order. It is deliberately temporary. “A high-care leadership team is not designed to be here indefinitely,” she said. A new memorandum of incorporation, new delegations of authority and a chief operating officer appointment – the post is vacant – are on the to-do list.
Read: Solly Malatsi’s Post Office gamble
And success, two years from now? A mature board and permanent executive committee with no high-care team in sight; debts paid in the ordinary course of business; solvency and liquidity resolved; state funding confined to the social mandate; and a revenue mix no longer 67% mail. “If you just target those areas,” she said, “I think you’re pretty good.” — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
